Hire, servicing, repair, parts and sales — all from one independent team near Pontefract, covering Castleford and the surrounding West Yorkshire towns. Below is what each service actually involves and when it is the right choice.
Short-term hire covers anything from a single day to a couple of months. It is the right answer when the need has a clear end date — and it stops you buying a truck to solve a problem that lasts three weeks.
When businesses in Castleford use it
Seasonal peaks — a busy quarter, a big contract, a stock build
Covering a truck that is off the road waiting on a repair or a part
A one-off delivery or an unusually heavy load
Moving unit, clearing a warehouse, or a stocktake weekend
Trying a truck type before committing to buying one
The daily rate falls sharply once you move to a weekly or monthly term, so it is always worth telling us the realistic end date rather than booking day by day.
Hire · months to years
Long-term & contract hire
If your handling requirement is steady all year, contract hire is usually cheaper and far less hassle than owning. You pay a fixed monthly figure, and the servicing, thorough examination and maintenance are built into it.
What contract hire gives you
A predictable monthly cost instead of an unpredictable repair bill
No capital tied up in a depreciating machine
Servicing and LOLER thorough examination included for the whole term
A newer truck than most businesses would replace to on their own
A clean exit — at the end of the term we collect it and that is that
Terms typically run from several months up to a year or more. Tell us the hours you expect to run and we will work out whether hire or purchase makes more sense for you — including when the answer is "buy it".
Hire by truck type
Electric, gas, diesel and reach trucks
The right machine depends on the building as much as the load. Here is how each type earns its place.
Electric forklift hire
No exhaust emissions at the point of use and much quieter than an engine truck, so an electric counterbalance can work indoors all shift without ventilation becoming a problem. Three-wheel models turn in a very tight circle, which matters when aisles are narrow and the yard door is not far from the racking.
Best for: indoor warehousing, food and drink, print, light manufacturing, anywhere with noise or emissions limits.
Worth checking: you will need somewhere sensible to charge, and on a multi-shift operation it is worth asking about lithium-ion, which tops up during breaks instead of needing a battery change.
Gas & diesel counterbalance hire
The workhorse. Pneumatic tyres cope with yards, gravel, potholes and ramps that would stop a warehouse truck, and higher capacities are readily available. LPG runs cleaner than diesel and can come indoors where ventilation is adequate; a cylinder change takes a couple of minutes.
Best for: builders' merchants, steel and timber yards, waste and recycling, outdoor loading and unloading.
Worth checking: diesel is the strongest option outdoors but should not be run inside. If the truck works both in and out, LPG is usually the compromise that suits.
Reach truck hire
Purpose-built for racking. The mast reaches forward to place or collect the pallet while the truck body stays put, so it works in a far narrower aisle than a counterbalance and lifts considerably higher — well beyond what a standard counterbalance mast will manage.
Best for: warehouses racking to height, third-party logistics, distribution and cold store operations.
Worth checking: tell us your aisle width, top beam height and pallet weight. Also confirm your operators hold a reach truck certificate — a counterbalance ticket does not cover it.
Attachments & specification
The base truck is only half the specification. Side shift lets the operator nudge the forks left and right to line up on a pallet without shunting the whole truck, and a fork positioner adjusts fork spacing from the seat.
Also worth thinking about: mast type. A duplex mast lifts less high but has a lower closed height, which matters if the truck has to pass under a low door or work inside a container. A triplex reaches higher from the same closed height.
Tell us the door height and any height restrictions on site and we will make sure the truck actually fits through them.
Compliance & maintenance
Servicing & LOLER thorough examination
We service and thorough-examine our own hire fleet, and we do the same for trucks that customers own outright. It is the same engineers either way.
What the law actually requires
A forklift is lifting equipment, so it falls under LOLER 1998, and it is work equipment, so it also falls under PUWER 1998. In practice that means:
A thorough examination at least every 12 months for a truck lifting goods
Every 6 months where the truck is used to lift people — for example with a working platform attachment
A report of thorough examination kept and available for inspection
The operator's daily pre-use check before the truck is used each day
Defects acted on rather than logged and forgotten
A thorough examination is not the same thing as a service. The examination is an independent inspection that confirms the truck is safe to keep using; the service is the planned maintenance that keeps it that way. Most operators need both, and we can schedule them together so the truck is only off the job once.
A forklift that will not start stops the whole loading bay. Our engineers work from stocked vans, so a large share of faults — hydraulics, brakes, steering, electrics, mast and chain wear — are put right at the first visit rather than booked in for a return trip.
We repair customer-owned trucks as well as our own hire machines, on the major makes including Linde, Toyota, Doosan, Hangcha, JCB and Jung.
Sometimes buying is simply the better answer — usually when the truck will run for years and the hours are predictable. We supply new machines and refurbished used trucks.
Refurbishment is something we do in-house: we strip trucks down and rebuild them, so when we sell a used machine we can tell you what was replaced and why. That is a very different proposition from a truck bought at auction and pressure-washed.
Filters, forks, lift chains, hydraulic hoses and seals, tyres, brake components, bulbs and beacons, and the general wearing parts that keep a truck working.
We can supply and fit, or supply over the counter if you have your own maintenance fitter. If you tell us the make, model and serial number we can usually identify the right part first time — the serial number matters more than people expect.
