Here is a one of a kind system! This is only used by the City of Anchorage, Alaska and they were early adopters. Originally designed by Dempster in 1955 as their first splash into the front load market, they only advertised it for a year or so before switching to a traditional side pocket and fork method by 1957.
The City invested heavily into this system with thousands of containers. A local metal fabrication shop, Bob's Services Inc, during the 1980's built every singe front loader the City used. They were copies of a Maxon Legal One and the city ran them for many years before switching to the Wittke Starlight in the early 2000's.
In the late 1990’s, the manager over the Solid Waste division started the process of converting the city's large dumpster stock over to the traditional style side fork and as of late 2017, at the time of this filming, they only have about 500 left in service and should have the rest phased out by the end of the year. What is amazing is that many of their "curl-fork" style containers are from 1978 or older! They were built to last and it shows with the minimal up-keep required to keep them in service. I'm sure a lot of this is because of the minimal abuse these containers take in order to service them.
Now you might be thinking to yourself, “it must be really easy to lose containers in the hopper!” I would disagree. The drivers report that losing a container in the hopper is rare. What is more common in the container will over rotate and slam into the back end of the hopper opening. To lock the bars on the container in place, a gravity assisted lock comes down to close the opening on the “claw” portion of the fork. This feature is an added feature to the original design of the Dempster style fork and a logical conclusion to make this system fully usable.
The benefits of this system over the fork/pocket style are quite numerous. With this system, it’s quite easy to pick up containers off uneven ground, which any front load operator will tell you is difficult to master with forks. The container is also self-levelling while being raised until the front hooks lock into the bar on the forks. You’ll also notice that it is relatively quiet when the container is being emptied.
Drawbacks? Container size…maybe? I couldn’t see you picking up a 8 or 10yd container using this system only because you would have the same issue as rear load: it would be long not tall so the balance would be off when you rotate it to empty it. The City used only 3 yd’s and for business that needed larger containers they put in rear load cans.
Enjoy the video; comment, like and share to your hearts content.
3 окт 2024
