DC Velocity - April 2009

animal (ware)house

If you attended this year’s ProMat show in Chicago, there probably were

moments when you thought you had accidentally wandered into a zoo.

Certainly, many of the exhibiting companies’ names brought animals to

mind. Here are some that caught our eye as we wandered the aisles:

Big Ass Fans (industrial overhead fans; a long-time favorite of the DCV

editorial staff)

Factory Cat (industrial cleaning equipment)

Fox IV Technologies (printing systems)

Frog AGV Systems (two-for-one: U.S. headquarters has an address on

North Squirrel Road)

Hammerhead Industries (retractable tethers)

Kurt Salmon Associates (consulting)

Mallard Manufacturing (gravity flow conveyors)

Mouse LLC (order-picking carts)

Panther Industries (automated labeling)

ProCat (picking systems)

Pro-Hawk Corp. (bearings, rollers, etc.)

Ram Mounting Systems (mounting and docking systems)

Tusk Lift Trucks (heavy-duty lift trucks)

Wasp Inc. (conveyors)

Zebra Technologies (bar-code printers)

Most zoolike of all was Kiva Systems’ exhibit, which featured a corral

enclosing a herd of the company’s small orange order-retrieval robots. The

metal fence was adorned with signs asking viewers to refrain from feeding the

robots as well as amusing explanatory placards that featured photos of each

“species” along with its common and “scientific” names, physical characteris-

tics, habitat, and behavior. Visitors learned, for example, that the Common

Blue Inventory Pod (itemus gogetemus) spends most of its time in herds. Kiva’s

marketing staff came up with the idea after seeing attendees at an earlier show

hanging on the fence and watching the pods zip around the floor.

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inbound

Mitsubishi’s
Methuselah

The hunt is over. Mitsubishi Forklift Trucks has announced the winner of its “Keeps on Running” contest, a competition to find the oldest working Mitsubishi truck in the United States and Canada.

The winner is a 1982 FGC25 forklift owned by Prescher Willette Seeds, a soybean farming company in Delavan, Minn. The family-run business dates back to 1933, and the company works its equipment hard: Prescher Willette cleans, packs, and ships more than 100,000 bags of soybeans on its 3,500-acre farm each year. For winning the contest, the company received a brand-new model FGC25N forklift truck.

Prescher Willette clearly respects age and experience. According to a report in the Faribault County Register, the forklift runs every day and is driven by the same three operators who have used the truck since the day it was purchased. In fact, the business operates two Mitsubishi forklift trucks that are more than 20 years old, said Plant Manager Mike Hughes. He sees no need to replace the vintage equipment, even with the brand-new truck on hand, and plans to keep the older vehicles running for several years to come.

The “Keeps on Running” contest was open to companies that own and operate small internal combustion (IC), cushion-tire Mitsubishi forklifts with a capacity range between 2,000 and 6,500 pounds. To see a photo of the winning truck, go to www.faribaultcountyregis-ter.com and search for “Mitsubishi forklift.”