Do You Need a Boom Lift or a Knuckle Boom?

Saving money on access equipment doesn’t just mean finding a reliable and safety-conscious company to hire your machinery from; it also means carefully judging the range of elevated work platforms and access equipment available in order to choose the best option for the job at hand.

Spending time planning your access equipment requirements and setting a realistic schedule for carrying out the work can save a fortune later on. While many elevated work platforms are designed to function in a variety of environments, the ultimate decision on whether you need a boom lift or knuckle boom comes down to spatial awareness, terrain and geometry.

Knuckle Booms

Occasionally referred to as articulated booms, a knuckle boom is intended for access where your platform needs to reach both upwards and over an obstacle. This means you can work around obstacles such as fixtures, walls and machinery while maintaining a compact footprint on the ground.

Similar in appearance to boom lifts or cherry pickers, knuckle booms have two hinged sections, offering the user more manoeuvrability while maintaining a small working base to improve access and efficiency on the ground. Like cherry pickers, these versatile machines can help you to reach awkward spaces from tight angles, but have the added advantage of enabling you to reach up, over and around.

Knuckle boom hire from Force includes diesel knuckle booms with a reach of up to 21 metres and smaller electric models for indoor jobs with a reach as compact as 6.3 metres.

Cherry Pickers

Cherry pickers, or boom lifts, are a step up from scissor lifts in terms of manoeuvrability, but don’t have the up-and-over functionality of knuckle booms. A boom lift is designed for reaching into awkward gaps and tight spaces where you need to extend your elevated work platform beyond the base of the lifting equipment.

Force’s boom lift hire features a choice of maximum working heights from 14 metres to 43 metres and almost every height in between. As with our knuckle boom hire, you can choose anything from zero-emission electric models for working indoors right up to sturdy diesel 4×4 engines for outdoor work on churned up sites.

How To Choose The Best Machine For Your Job

Every work site and task is different, but having the right machinery in place can save time and money in the long run. All the access equipment Force offers can be viewed online beforehand with downloadable specifications and diagrams demonstrating range of motion.

Ultimately, only you or your site manager has all the information on terrain, access and work required to make this decision. However, hiring rather than buying equipment means you have total flexibility, can change your choice of machine as the demands of the work alter and don’t have the hassle of maintaining and securing expensive equipment that you may only use a couple of times on each job.

Finding it tricky to decide? Contact Force’s experienced team for help and advice, or call into one of our depots.