making a 3 point carryall/fork, need help

[jyoutz]

I'm going to fire up my welder this weekend and build a 3 point hitch mount carryall. I'd like to design it to also serve as a light duty forklift to lift pallets and such occasionally. I measured a King Kutter brand carryall and the forks are made out of angle iron and set 26" apart. I am thinking that 1/4" thick-walled tubing would work better for the fork use. I'm planning to make the hitch portion the standard 26" between pins, but for forklift use that seems too narrow to me. Would 36" between forks work okay for wood pallets? Does anyone have one of these who can measure it? I would greatly appreciate this.

 

[Bird]

jyoutz, I could go measure pallets all right, except that I have about 20 of them in a wide variety of sizes./w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif I think 4' x 4' is probably a common size. So, if your forks are 26" apart, that leaves less than one foot on either side of the forks. I have regular 4' forklift forks that I put on my bucket and can adjust the width (I guess each fork is 4" wide), and the last time I used them was moving 4' x 4' pallets with bricks on them and I set the forks 24" apart (inside to inside). In other words, that's a long winded way of saying that I think your 26" spacing will work just fine for most wooden pallets, and I think 36" spacing will put them too far out near the edges.

Bird

 

[jyoutz]

Thanks for the info Bird. Now I'm also thinking about how to design a carryall with adjustable forks. That would really be ideal. Just can't figure out how to do this. Hmmm.

 

[whippoorwill]

Hi, Jyoutz:
How did your 3-point pallet fork turn out? I was thinking the same thing. All I need is something to lift pallets from the ground up to the height of my 16' flatbed (~15"). I've been surfing the net and all I find is heavy-duty monsters costing $700 or more.
Thanks,
Whip

 

[Knight9]

Whip,

Can't for the life of me remember where I saw it (think it might have been a Yahoo club on building your own tractor implements) but I saw a "homegrown" carryall/lift that made use of a carryall with a moving platform and a very small electric winch on a few pulleys. Apparently would allow the platform (or forks if you desired) to raise and lower via the winch. Way over my head as far as building it...but an interesting concept. /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

Kevin

 

[SteveV]

Sounds like a good excuse for a trip to a junkyard to me. Not only can a lot of ideas be had but sometimes people junk forklifts which have those nifty detachable, adjustable forks and carriage that just need some pins and a toplink bracket welded on. There's nothing like real fork steel. SteveV

 

[jyoutz]

Whip, My forks turned out really well-for their purpose. I made them from 2" heavy-walled tubing. First thing I did was to move a 600# bolder. What the 3 point forks are good for is picking up loaded pallets from the ground and moving them around. Or picking up anything heavy and moving stuff around. They are not good for lifting anything very high, for obvious reasons you are limited by the lift height of the 3 point hitch. If I needed to lift very high, I would go for a set of forks on my loader instead.