There are many businesses that do not have loading docks and yet nonetheless send and receive frequent, sizable shipments via truck. Manually loading and unloading these large cargoes by having employees spend considerable amounts of time passing boxes down to each other is a poor use of company man-hours. Additionally, many trucking companies will charge for excessive time that a truck spends parked at a facility while workers unload it. If this occurs with any degree of frequency, it can be a profit-draining cost – and one that companies need not incur if they invest in a few important pieces of truck loading and unloading equipment. One vital piece of such equipment, especially for businesses that ship or receive heavy materials, is the scissor dock lift.

A scissor dock lift is a scissor lift platform that is specifically designed for truck and semi trailer loading and unloading. Also known as a scissor lift dock leveler, the scissor dock lift is material handling equipment that enables a single worker to load very heavy items onto a truck. Often, these heavy materials would be impossible, or, at the very least, time consuming for several employees working together to load. The scissor dock lift can lift up to 30,000 lbs of materials with the heavy duty model to a level position with the truck bed for loading. These materials often are organized on pallets, which are moved onto lowered scissor dock levelers by a single worker with a pallet truck. With a single push of an electric button, one of these hydraulic scissor dock lifts raises the palleted load into position where the worker can use the pallet truck to roll the load onto the truck or trailer bed.

In addition to enabling the loading and unloading of heavy cargo from trucks and semi trailers, the scissor dock lift is often used to raise small groups of workers. Scissor dock lift models have hand and safety rails for workers to hold onto as well as to prevent loads from sliding off the lift. Along with raising and lowering pallet trucks, the scissor dock lift is also excellent for transferring other wheeled, load-carrying equipment from lowered height to truck-bed level and vice-versa. This other material-carrying equipment includes fork trucks, portable product lifts and various types of carts.

Apart from enabling truck loading and unloading to take place with optimum efficiency, allowing more effective use of man-hours, the scissor dock lift can provide an additional very important benefit – significant worker injury reduction. Some companies do in fact ask employees to work in tandem to load very heavy materials onto trucks. This can result in serious musculoskeletal injuries, from low-back disc problems to neck and shoulder problems. These injuries can occur suddenly, or over time, such as the development of cumulative trauma disorders. These types of injuries can result in increased company health care costs along with a rise in absenteeism and worker’s compensation claims. Investing in a scissor dock lift will enable a company to significantly reduce the incidence of these types of injuries that can be caused by heavy manual lifting. It is the customer’s responsibility to verify correctness of fit for applications.


Beacon Technology is a world-class provider of Scissor Dock Lift. Since 1949, the Beacon Brand has been serving dealers, architects, specifiers, designers, builders and buyers for commercial, industrial and government material handling equipment projects.Beacon has Dock Levelers that come in a wide array of configurations, and are perfect for any application.