The Crown RC 5500 won a gold International Design Excellence Award

Crown Equipment Corp's design centre and Design Central Inc of Columbus, Ohio have won a gold International Design Excellence Award (IDEA) for Crown's RC 5500 rider counterbalance forklift.

In ergonomically designing the stand-up forklift, New Bremen-based Crown engineers visited more than 50 customer locations and carefully studied the behaviour of operators getting on and off the truck and manoeuvring the vehicle around a warehouse while managing loads. To accommodate ingress and egress requirements in a loading dock environment, the RC 5500 has a flexible side-stance operator compartment.

"Fresh thinking and new technology were applied to the development of the RC 5500," says Mike Gallagher, Crown vice president, design centre.

"The RC 5500 shows Crown's dedicated commitment to building lift trucks with the user in the centre of the development process," says Sudhir Bhatia, award juror and a partner of Mosaic Co of Plymouth, Minnesota, a maker of phosphate and potash crop nutrients.

"There isn't a detail overlooked," says another IDEA juror, Andrew Valentine, a student at Virginia Polytechnic University and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia.

The RC 5500 is capable of transporting palletised loads weighing up to 4,000 pounds (1,800 kg). The truck can unload trailers, transport goods internally and externally and handle stacking up to 20 feet (6 metres) with a Triplex mast or up to 22 feet (6.6 metres) with a Quad mast.

The design reduced part count by 20% versus a comparable earlier forklift model, and several RC 5500 components easily separate for reuse or recycling. These include the steel, plastics, hydraulic fluids and lead-acid batteries. Steel accounts for about 90% of the RC 5500's weight.

The Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), based in Dulles, Virginia, and BusinessWeek magazine co-sponsor the IDEA competition, which drew 1,517 entries from 33 countries. Organisers will present 35 gold, 77 silver and 93 bronze awards at a 13 September ceremony during the IDSA Polar Opposites national conference in Phoenix, Arizona. The winners were announced 18 July.

Crown has won nine IDEAs. In recent IDEA competitions, Crown received a 2007 gold for the ST 3000, SX 3000 and WF 3000 family of electric walk-behind forklifts , a 2006 silver for its TSP 6000 turret stockpicker, a 2004 silver for its PE 4000 series end-control pallet truck, a 2003 gold for its FC 4000 four-wheel sit-down counterbalanced electric truck and a 1999 gold for its Wave Work assist vehicle.

Separately, in December, the RC 5500 was recognized with a Good Design Award in a 2007 global competition organized by the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design and the European Centre for Architecture, Art, Design and Urban Studies.

Crown introduced the forklift in March 2007 with pricing of USD24,870-32,770.