Kitchen Delivery VRC Lift

Restaurant utilizes a freight lift to transfer pallets, boxes, and containers between delivery dock and kitchen.

A customer recently purchased and remodeled an older building for use as a restaurant, and architectural plans placed the kitchen level above street level. This meant that food and beverage deliveries would have to be moved vertically between delivery and kitchen levels. The customer requested that some type of lift be installed outside the building so as to not consume valuable restaurant and kitchen space, and to save the expense of retro-fitting the lift inside the building and meeting fire codes, etc. Lift speed was not critical in this application, but the customer did request that the lift be able to be left raised for extended periods of time without drifting down and away from the upper landing.

The sales engineer at Autoquip worked closely with the customer’s architect to develop an optimum solution for this material lift application. A vertical reciprocating conveyor (VRC) from our Freightlift family of hydraulically-actuated VRCs was identified as the best solution for this application for the following reasons: 1) performs very well in outdoor service, 2) is designed for low to medium vertical travel distances between two fixed elevations, 3) has a special “automatic re-pressurization” feature in the hydraulic circuit to sense when the carriage attempts to slowly drift away from the upper landing, and automatically start the motor and pump to re-pressurize the system and raise and hold the carriage back to the fully UP position. The lift was also equipped with free-fall arrest devices that would completely stop the descent of a lift in the unlikely event of a catastrophic hose failure. Finally, the lift was finished with a 2-part epoxy paint system to inhibit rust and corrosion in the lift structure.

Lift Specifications for this Application:

Model: FLH-3

Lift Capacity: 3,000 lbs.

Vertical Travel: 202″

Carriage Size: 60″ x 60″

Lift Speed: 25 feet per minute

Lift Actuation: Hydraulic

The customer was given a lift solution that allowed him to maximize his restaurant space and provide a safe and reliable method of transferring large/heavy loads of food to the kitchen from street level almost 20 feet below.