What to Inspect Before You Sign for a Delivered Lift

The damage happened somewhere between our loading bay in China and your yard, and the moment you sign the delivery note it becomes yours. That is the whole reason this article exists, and it is why we photograph every container before the doors close.

Twelve checks, in the order they should be done. The first four happen before you sign anything, which means before the truck leaves.

The container doors opened at the delivery site.

Before you sign

1. The seal. Photograph the seal number, then compare it with the number on the bill of lading. A mismatch is not a small administrative problem, it is the end of any claim for what is inside.
2. The doors. Open them and look before signing. A driver who wants to sign first and open later is asking you to accept whatever is in the box.
3. The smell and the floor. Damp, mould or standing water inside the container means the machine has been sitting in a wet box for weeks. Photograph the container floor before anything comes out.
4. The obvious. Anything that has shifted, any strap that has broken, any timber that has moved. Photograph it in place, not after unloading.

If anything is wrong at this stage, write it on the delivery note before signing, with the words "signed subject to survey". Two words, and it keeps the claim alive.

The four damage sites

Nearly every transit claim we see involves one of these, in this order of frequency:

• The guardrail. Bent top rails and crushed gate posts. The rail is the highest point and the thinnest steel, and it takes the hit when a machine shifts against the container wall.
• The control box. Cracked covers, broken display glass, and bent mounting brackets. Usually caused by something falling against it, often the machine behind it.
• The pothole protection bars. Bent or missing. They hang below the chassis and are the first thing to catch on a ramp or a forklift fork.
• The battery cable. Chafed or crushed where it passes the chassis edge. This is the expensive one, because it fails later rather than at delivery, and it fails as an intermittent fault that takes a day to find.

A guardrail section bent during transit.

A fifth item belongs on the list even though it is not damage: the chrome on the cylinder rods. A rust bloom on a rod that has sat in a damp container for eight weeks is not damage in transit, but it becomes pitting, and pitting becomes a seal failure six months later. Photograph it and note it.

The twelve checks

Check 11 catches more than people expect. An hour meter on the electric scissor lift that reads higher than the pre-shipment photograph means the scissor lift has been used, not just moved, and that is a conversation worth having in the first week rather than the sixth.

Photographs that decide a claim

Four, and they take ninety seconds:

1. The seal, in focus, before cutting it.
2. The full container interior with the machines in place, from the doorway.
3. A close-up of each defect, with something for scale. A tape measure is better than a coin.
4. The machine plate and the hour meter in the same frame.

Send them to us the same day, with the delivery note. Claims on a scissor lift get settled on evidence produced in the first 48 hours, and get argued about when the evidence arrives after the scissor lift has been in service for a month, because at that point nobody can tell transit damage from site damage.

The battery after a long transit

Eight weeks in a container does things to a lead-acid pack. Check the electrolyte level before the first charge, top up with distilled water only if the plates are exposed, and charge slowly for the first cycle. A pack that will not accept charge after a long transit has probably sulphated, and the time to raise that is before the machine goes into service rather than after the first shift.

For lithium machines, check the state of charge on arrival. Anything below 20% after a sea voyage is worth recording, because a pack stored deeply discharged for weeks loses capacity that will not come back.

What we do at our end

We photograph every scissor lift at loading, from the same four positions, with the seal number in the last frame. Those images go to the buyer before the vessel sails. When a claim does arrive, the comparison between our loading photographs and the buyer's arrival photographs usually settles it in a day, in one direction or the other.

That is not a substitute for your own inspection. It is what makes your inspection conclusive. Ask for the loading photograph set with your shipment, and keep it with the delivery note. We issue them for every unit in the self-propelled scissor lift range, not only the large ones.