3 wheel loaders?

[Texgasser1]

Wanting to talk to people who have experience using the 3 wheel style loaders, like the box stores use. The moffitts and princetons mainly, but I know there are a few other manufacturers.

How do they really handle on rough terrain? How about sloops? Tall wet grass?

 

[Welding man]

We work on a Princeton occasionally. They are all wheel drive and seem to go quiet well. One of my customers hauls his on a hydraulic tilt bed lowboy that is very steep. It goes right up the incline. I have played with them in my field behind my shop. They are very agile. You can shift the weight forward and backward over the front drive wheels. I would like to have one but already have 2 rough terrain forklifts and they are a fairly expensive piece in my area.

 

[SkipperII]

The sod/block company I drive for has 4 Princetons. They are hyostatic drive, to the front wheels only. They are great for what they are designed for, delivering materials on paved, gravel, and at least semi prepped construction sites. Loaded they have good traction. Empty, I have had them spinning on real wet grass, and a slope. I have also had one stuck when when the tail wheel dropped off a sidewalk, and the caster style tailwheel couldn't pivot, to back out. It was kind of muddy, and there wasn;t room to go forward, and spin around.

 

[moresmoke]

I had a Princeton branded Kooi Aap forklift for a while. A Dutch built hybrid between a regular Princeton and a Combi-lift. It was AWD, did decent when carrying a pallet on rough ground, but without a load it was heavy on the tailwheel and you could easily spin one of the other wheels. I would rate its off road capability as slightly better than a standard pneumatic tire warehouse forklift. That one was actually equipped with a diff lock of sorts that you could switch the drive motors from parallel to series circuit, the only problem was you didn’t have enough horsepower to drive the wheels in tough going with them all driving.

I had it for delivering livestock feed and it was slick as could be for making deliveries. Farms with drives that were not semi friendly, I could park on the road and use the lift to set pallets wherever the customer wanted them. That said as an overall indicator of its utility, I still used a small articulated loader around the home farm yard and for making the feed almost exclusively.

 

[rrlund]

No personal experience, but they orchard guys here in Michigan sure seem to like Farmall Bs reversed with a forklift on them.

 

[Texgasser1]

Thank Y'all so much for all the feedback already.

I am wanting to use it in a rough pallet yard. So stacks of 20 pallets, 800 pounds tops.

How about tip-over, anyone ever had a prob with that?

 

[Texgasser1]

No personal experience, but they orchard guys here in Michigan sure seem to like Farmall Bs reversed with a forklift on them.

Never seen a Farmall b turned around. There are several Masseys around me that are.

 

[Vito]

The one outstanding feature is they can load them on the back of a truck. Seen them unloading lumber, shingles etc but never asked about slopes. We had rough terrain forklifts for that purpose. Not as nimble but rutted up muddy grounds were never a problem.

Vito