Masonry Magazine June 1997 Page. 28
The advent of powered material handling equipment represented the first great change in moving construction materials in several centuries. Prior to 1946 materials on construction jobs were moved by manpower and animal power horses, oxen, elephants. It is hard to realize that concrete block were handled only one or two at a time, brick might be handled 10 at a time with brick tongs or 20 or so at a time with a hod, and mortar was mixed by hand.
But things were changing! World War II had ended. Consumers who had been deprived of cars, appliances and homes for some five years because of war production started buying whatever they could find - even at premium prices. The result was that the burgeoning demand for new homes caused a shortage of construction manpower. And, as is normal in such situations, mason contractors became receptive to new ideas and products.
At this point in time, the only powered equipment the average mason contractor had was a mortar mixer, a small hoist or conveyor, or possibly a
powered wheelbarrow or two. In those days the conventional ratio of mason tenders to masons was 1 to 1. Keep in mind that this was the situation on building construction sites less than 30 years ago.
The first powered piece of material handling equipment on the scene was the power buggy. At first it was used to move and place concrete, taking the place of conventional wheelbarrows and Georgia buggies. The first units were manufactured by Bell Aircraft Corporation (Prime-Mover) and the Koehring Company in 1946. Their carrying capacity of 10 cubic feet or 1,500 pounds was roughly equal to three or four wheelbarrows. The power buggy was also faster in trip cycles than any man pushing a wheelbarrow. Whiteman Manufacturing and Getman Brothers joined the other two manufacturers in marketing power buggies a year or two later.
Use of the power buggy spread quickly. Mason contractors began using the buggies equipped with dump hopper bodies or tilting platform beds to transport block, brick,
stone, mortar, refuse and other materials.
However, while moving these materials via power buggy was an improvement over wheelbarrows and certainly over hods, it was still a slow and tedious process. Block, for example, had to be picked up one at a time and placed on the power buggy bed at the storage area; the loaded buggy was moved to the point of usage, and then each block was unloaded, again one at a time, and manually placed on the scaffold or on a conveyor.
A logical development was to place a forklift attachment on the power buggy chassis in place of the hopper body or platform bed. In the late forties, Koehring introduced the first machine of this type-a power buggy forklift with a 1,000 pound capacity at 12" load center and a 30" lifting height.
In 1951, Koehring began featuring a 5-foot lifting capacity on its forklifts, so that a load of 240 brick could be placed on the first stage of a 4-foot-high scaffold. This now made it possible for one man to pick up an entire load of brick or block at the storage site, transport it to the point of use, and then raise and place it on the scaffold. Prime-Mover and Whiteman also joined the market in the early 1950's, and lifting heights of the forklifts were increased to 6, 71/2 and 10 1/2 feet.
Bon Tool Co.
America's Finest Quality
Supplying the
tools that build America
4430 Gibsonia Rd., Gibsonia, PA 15044412-443-7080
28 MASONRY-MAY/JUNE, 1997
Original Prime-Mover powered wheelbarrow introduced by Bell Aircraft Corporation in 1948. Power source was a 2-cycle engine.