Spokane-based manufacturer RAHCO International Inc. has launched an affiliate company that has begun offering high-capacity forklifts for use at seaports, steel yards, concrete-product plants, and other industrial facilities.


The new company, hMACH International Inc., has begun marketing a line of heavy-duty forklifts, commonly known as fork trucks, that have the capacity to move items weighing 40,000 pounds to more than 100,000 pounds, says Leamon Tankersley, vice president of sales for hMACH.


By comparison, forklifts used in warehouse settings typically have capacities ranging from 3,000 pounds to 15,000 pounds.


The new company is contracting with RAHCO to build the fork trucks, the first of which was completed recently and shipped last week, Tankersley says. The company pre-sold that truck, along with two others that currently are being manufactured here, to Seattle-based SSA Marine, which calls itself the worlds largest cargo terminal operator. The lift trucks will be used at SSA Marines terminals in Long Beach, Calif., to load and unload shipping crates, he says.


hMACH has a fourth lift truck under way, and Tankersley says several potential buyers already have looked at it.


In addition to manufacturing the new forklifts under contract for hMACH, RAHCO also engineered them. RAHCO spokesman Dennis Medina says hMACHs only employee is Tankersley, a 40-year veteran of the forklift industry who is based in Scottsdale, Ariz., but adds that so far, about a dozen RAHCO employees have been assigned to engineer and make the machines.


RAHCO is a longtime Spokane company that manufactures big, specialized equipment primarily for the mining industry, though it has designed and built machinery for purposes ranging from potash harvesting to canal building to construction of missile silos. It currently employs about 140 people and is located at 2425 E. Magnesium, on Spokanes North Side.


The company decided to enter the fork-truck market because it had heard from potential customers demand existed for a higher-quality, heavier-duty lift than was available on the market, Medina says. He adds that RAHCO also had been looking for a product it could build that might provide more consistent sales than the multimillion-dollar custom machinery it builds for the volatile natural-resources markets.


He says hMACH hopes to make 20 to 50 lift trucks a year. The line will carry the name MAGNI-lift, under the hMACH brand.


The lift trucks that hMACH makes look much like conventional forklifts, only bigger. Theyre about 8 feet wide and more than 17 feet long without the forks, and weigh nearly 25 tons without a load.


Tankersley says there are other high-capacity fork trucks on the market, but hMACH is trying to set itself apart by building machines that use a higher-strength steel for the lift mechanisms and that shy away from technologies that can break down on the job.


The big difference is we dont use all the electronics. We build it simple. You pull a lever and the fork moves, he says. I call it oil-field tough.


Tankersley says the hMACH fork trucks will be targeted at facilities that do a heavy volume on a continuous basis, and cant afford to have a fork truck down for repair. The 40,000-pound capacity lifts will sell for about $190,000, he says, and higher-capacity lifts will sell for as much as $400,000. He adds that the price of hMACH fork trucks will be higher than those of its competitors, partly because the steel that goes into them is more costly than what goes into most fork trucks.


Were not going to be a lift truck for everybody, he says.


hMACH plans to offer several types of machines, mostly diesel powered, some with lower capacities and solid tires, and others with higher capacities and air-filled tires. They also will be available with various maximum lift heights. For example, a fork truck designed to be able to operate in low-height areas of a ship might have a lift of just 64 inches, while hMACh recently was asked to bid on making a truck that could lift 33,000 pounds of weight 20 feet in the air, Tankersley says.


The lifts also will be able to be customized for lifting specific items, such as big coils of steel or large-diameter concrete pipe, he says.


Contact Paul Read at (509) 344-1262 or via e-mail at [email protected].