So what is an “Amish” forklift???
Let me give you a little bit of a back drop. I worked for a company called Stoll Family Farms for 12 years. SFF as we called it, was an Amish run warehouse that shipped produce to chain stores in Toronto Ontario during the summer months. It all started out as a family business when my grandfather Joe Stoll started selling tomatoes to Loblaw’s in the 1980s. Over the years it grew into a business that sold produce for almost all the Amish and Mennonite communities in the area. When I started working for SFF in 2012 we were shipping around 800,000 dollars worth of produce in a summer. By the time I quit that number had grown to well over 2 million.
This was a lot a produce to handle by hand with pallet carts. There was a real knack to getting a two ton skid into a slot 1 inch wider than the skid. Many of us who worked at SFF had continual problems the muscles in our shoulders from jerking on pallet cart handles all day.
Anyway, I digress. In the Amish community at Aylmer Ontario, forklifts were not allowed. There was this concern that they would be used as a means of transportation. i.e. going to town for a coffee or to the neighbors with a skid of stuff with the forklift rather than hitching up a horse. Very real concern by the way, and a big problem in some communities, only they generally viewed it as progress instead of as sin. (That was sort of my view on the subject as well but don’t worry, I never said that out loud.)
Enter the “Amish” forklift.
An Amish forklift was simply a forklift that did not have the power source on the forklift itself. Its power was generally supplied via a hydraulic umbilical cord. Electricity was not an option. Too easy. The logic was simple, if the power supply was not on the forklift there was simply no way that forklift was going farther than the end of its tether. No going to town for coffee.
Never mind the fact that a forklift meant to run on concrete would not go more than five feet on a gravel drive. Trust me, I tried it. And I clearly remember the day one the workers got off the concrete pad in the main drive through of the unloading bay. It was six inches off the pad and there was no getting back on the pad. I was called to the scene only after the driving wheel was buried past the axle because the poor fellow who had gotten stuck did not want to admit that he was stuck. Typical….
We fastened one end of a chain to the forks and the other to a trailer not too far from where we were stuck and then ran the forks up which tightened the chain and because the mast was sticking up past the top of the forklift it gave the chain a lot of leverage as well. The forklift neatly tipped forward and rolled onto the pad. We thought we were really smart, which may or may not have been true.
In my days as a mechanic, I neutered at least 5 forklifts and converted them to run on hydraulics. I would take the electric motors out and somehow or the other monkey patch a hydraulic motor in its place. Then the controls had to be converted to hydraulic as well. Controls were the big thing, hydraulic forklifts were extremely hard to drive (impossible if you aren’t Amish) if they didn’t have the correct controls and almost none of them did.
For example, if you were moving along at a decent speed and happened to let go of the lever responsible for forward motion, the wheels locked up instantly. This usually translated to a skid of produce upside down on the ground. There was no grace, hydraulic motors do not freewheel unless you install a special freewheeling valve. And if you did install that freewheeling valve you had no brakes.
The other big problem we had was having to run out to the diesel shanty every time to start the engine that actually ran the equipment. I got tired of that and wired up a 12-volt system, (12-volt was allowed) that could start and stop the engine from several different locations in the building, including on all the forklifts. Well, the next problem was that it was really easy to remember to start the engine, nothing worked if you didn’t, but somehow people just forgot to stop it. This was hard on the fuel bill so I wired a little timer into the circuit that stopped the engine after 15 min.
The other problem was that the forklifts were slow. Forklifts were never designed to run on hydraulics and if you wanted to do that you needed a large pump in order to get anywhere at a decent rate of speed. Solution: Larger pump, bigger engine. Well, the cheap alternative to a larger pump obviously is to run the smaller one faster but if you ran the engine at full speed all the time that really showed up on the fuel bill. So whadda we do??
We had what is called a pressure compensated hydraulic system. Basically, that means the pump pumps a certain pressure, say 1500 psi and then it self regulates to keep the pressure from dropping. The problem with the forklifts was that they used more than the pump could pump. The pressure dropped and the forklift became sluggish. One day I hit upon the solution.
I cobbled together an apparatus that would speed up the engine whenever the oil pressure dropped below a certain level. The first version did not work out too great but it proved the concept. With time we managed to fine tune the system to where you could step on the pedal on the forklift and the engine would rev right with you. The faster you drove the forklift the faster the engine ran. As soon as you stopped, the engine idled down.
That was, unfortunately, my main job while I was Amish, fix imaginary problems created by the system. Self-inflicted problems. Problems that really did not exist. Like hydraulic forklifts.
I am more and more of the persuasion that the Amish are not the only ones who create their own problems. Humanity as a whole does it. When are we going to take responsibility for and fix the problems in our own little corner of the world. Starting with the ones we have created personally.
But I will have to admit that I miss the innovation that these problems, imaginary or not, created. Innovation that makes the world a better place, makes things more efficient is always a good thing. Above all innovation needs to free people to be who they really are, allow them to be creative, to pull them together and help them collaborate. Humans are humanity’s most important resource.
I hope to never lose that Amish innovator/hacker mindset.