Herochu Sheet Metal Forklift – Where the Last Meter Becomes the Fastest Meter
The distance between your storage rack and the laser shuttle looks trivial on CAD, yet it swallows more spindle hours than any tooling issue you’ve chased this year. Overhead cranes run out of travel, reach trucks need three traffic lanes, and the apprentice with suction cups just went on sick leave—again. Herochu’s Sheet Metal Forklift parks itself inside that impossible gap, slides its deck level with the machine bed, and hands the sheet over like a relay baton. No waiting, no second operator, no hernia story for HR to file.
Built from 5 mm laser-cut S355 and stress-relieved at 600 °C, the chassis keeps a 2 000 kg blank flat to half a millimetre for a decade. A ball-scissor pair driven by a 24 V servo gives you 380 mm of silent elevation, repeatable to ±1 mm, controlled by either a pendant or the optional foot pod that leaves both hands free to guide the material. Polyurethane 180 mm casters spin on sealed bearings so smooth that a 65 kg operator can push a full 4 m × 2 m aluminium skin across expansion joints without waking the forklift fleet. Lock one pedal and the cart becomes a rigid extension of the machine frame; release it and you’re mobile in the breath it takes to glance at the nest drawing.
We don’t do “standard.” Upload your drawer profile and we water-jet a deck that drops into the cavity like a gauge block. Need side-tilt for a press-brake? Specify 15°, 20°, or any incremental angle and we integrate a sealed cam follower that tilts under load yet locks vibration-free during punching. Want the deck to talk to your MES? We embed an RFID reader that logs sheet ID, timestamp and tare weight the instant the drawer lands. Paint it Toyota blue, RAL 9006 aluminium, or the same mango orange your safety team chose for the robot fences—powder is VOC-free and cured with 82 % renewable current, so the sustainability report writes itself.
The numbers from a recent beta site read like a lean consultant’s daydream. A 4 kW fiber laser in rural Netherlands gained 1.5 extra beam hours per shift after swapping manual lifts for Herochu carts. Overtime dropped 42 h a month, scratch-related rework fell from 2.1 % to 0.4 %, and the safety auditor closed three open musculoskeletal claims in the same quarter. Pay-back arrived on day 78, well before the operator training posters left the printer.
Integration is embarrassingly simple: measure floor-to-table height, pick power source—manual pump, 24 V lithium or 400 V three-phase—and decide whether you want open-floor agility or a recessed rail that turns the cart into a linear shuttle for lights-out nights. The air-float option adds a 0.5 bar membrane that lets a 10 mm plate glide sideways with two fingers, yet collapses flush when vacuum is vented so the deck remains rigid for stacking. Every unit ships with a CE file, TÜV-reviewed FEA report and a QR code that pulls up a three-minute assembly video; unbox, bolt four casters, charge, go.
We stock drawer-matched decks for every major tower brand—KASTO, STOPA, Hänel, Ferretto—and keep consumables in Cologne and Chicago for 48 h delivery. Lease the cart through our 0 % equipment plan and the monthly payment is usually smaller than the overtime you will no longer incur. When the frame finally retires after fifteen years, 95 % of its steel goes back into an EAF furnace to begin life as someone else’s robot arm, closing the loop your CSR report keeps asking about.
Stop measuring productivity in metres per minute and start measuring it in metres per second—because once the Herochu Sheet Metal Forklift takes over the last metre, that is exactly the speed your machines will finally see.
