Loading docks are vital areas for companies that do a good deal of shipping and receiving of goods. It thus is very important that dock areas have the proper equipment to enable visiting trucks to be loaded or unloaded as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Delays in truck servicing can often lead directly to lost revenue. If a loading dock area is not properly equipped, two common occurrences that can cause delays are very heavy cargo items and significant height discrepancies between truck beds and loading dock platforms. Additionally, there are many businesses that do not have loading docks, which can significantly increase the time it takes for its employees to unload a visiting truck. What’s necessary for these occurrences is a heavy-duty platform that can compensate for unevenness between truck beds and dock platforms, and, in addition, can raise and lower significant amounts of heavy materials.

A highly efficient piece of dock-area equipment that’s designed to accomplish these tasks is the scissor dock lift. Also known hydraulic scissor tables and hydraulic dock levelers, scissor dock lifts are high-capacity scissor lifts made for the loading and unloading of trucks. A scissor lift, often also called a scissor table, is material handling equipment designed with interlocking legs to raise an attached platform on which loads are placed. With scissor dock lifts, these loads are truck cargoes, frequently very heavy ones. Scissor dock lifts are raised and lowered with a push of a button by a single worker. They are available in a wide variety of platform sizes and have capacities of up to 15 tons. With these features, they can handle virtually any item that can be placed on a truck for shipping.

Very often, the cargo that scissor dock lifts handle is organized onto pallets. For this reason, these lifts are built to accommodate pallet trucks. Palletized products are simply loaded onto a pallet truck, which then is rolled onto a scissor dock lift. The scissor dock lift then is raised to the truck bed’s level, and the pallet truck is simply rolled onto the truck bed. Scissor dock lifts also are excellent for handling other types of wheeled, product-carrying equipment such as portable product lifts, fork trucks, and various types of carts. Their ability to do this helps to speed up truck loading and unloading, which is important because many trucking companies charge for extra time spent in loading dock areas.

Another key aspect of scissor dock lifts is that top-quality models are built with safety keenly in mind. Safety aspects are especially important with dock-area equipment, because loading dock areas, chiefly due to the size and frequency of the vehicles moving in and out, are inherently potentially hazardous places. Top scissor dock lifts feature hand and safety rails for workers to grasp as well as to prevent loads from sliding off the lift. Additionally, a key function of scissor dock lifts – raising heavy items so that workers don’t have to do so manually – helps to prevent many worker strains and injuries. It is the customer’s responsibility to verify correctness of fit for applications.



Beacon Technology is a world-class provider of Scissor Dock Lifts. Since 1949, the Beacon Brand has been serving dealers, architects, specifiers, designers, builders and buyers for commercial, industrial and government material handling equipment projects.