When you’re looking to buy a hand pallet truck, you are faced with many choices - maybe too many. Here are a few tips that will help you select the correct pallet truck for your warehouse.

First job is to recognise what size pallet truck you are looking for, match it to the pallet you need to lift, move and handle.

When sizing a pallet truck, the forks will be different to the forks on the forklift.  Forklift forks hang on a carriage and are designed to cover 75% of the length of the load.  But on a pallet truck, the forks are different. The forks on a pallet truck are designed to work with a pallet and should be closely matched.  The reason for this: the wheels on the fork tips must fall inside the pallet's wheel box.  On every pallet there is an opening for the fork wheels to fall through and a 48" long pallet truck fork is designed to work with a 48" long (deep) pallet. Click here to see our range of special length pallet trucks.

‘’Common practice is always referring to the depth of the pallet first when giving a pallet dimension.  Therefore, the pallet with a centre stringer length of 48" and a width of 40" is called a 48x40 pallet’’.

The width of a pallet truck is designed for the forks to fit inside of the width of the pallet.  The overall width of the forks should be wide enough to support the pallet evenly while still fitting inside the fork pockets.  A standard dimension of the overall width of the forks is 27" to fit a 40" wide pallet. Click here to see our range of special width pallet trucks.

Look to see that the pallet you are looking to pick up has an inside dimension between the outside stringers (the long 2x4s that run the length of the pallet) of less than the overall width of the pallet truck's forks. 
Your pallet truck purchase should depend on all of these factors.

If you need someone to talk your specification through with please get in touch with our team of advisors. They are happy to help to ensure you buy the correct pallet truck for use.