JLG opened its doors to the trade press earlier this month as the lift equipment manufacturer took the opportunity to display its new expanded customer training centre and proving grounds.
About 20 editors from equipment-focused magazines in the United States and Canada took part in the event, which centred around JLG’s manufacturing plant and marketing hub in McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania, from October 15 to 16.
The two-day meet-up between JLG staff, its public relations partner Godfrey, and trade journalists started with a lunch at JLG’s headquarters, located just outside McConnellsburg. Brian Courtney, JLG’s marketing communications manager, welcomed the guests, distributed press packs including a thumb drive of JLG’s latest announcements, and gave a history of the company founded in 1968 by John L. Grove.
JLG began as a small manufacturing shop with 20 employees that developed a prototype for high-reach equipment needed by workers who had become frustrated with cumbersome scaffolding and ladders. Its original boom lift rolled out in 1970 could extend 27 feet. That same year, JLG came out with its aerial work platform and in 1973, introduced its first scissor lift.
The company grew rapidly in the 1970s and 80s, and in 1986, JLG’s 10,000th boom lift rolled off the assembly line in McConnellsburg. Today JLG, owned by parent company Oshkosh Corporation, is a leading manufacturer of aerial work platforms and telescopic material handlers.
Following the orientation in the JLG boardroom, the group was divided up and taken on a tour of JLG’s manufacturing facilities. The plant has 550,000 square feet under roof and sits on 68 acres. The highly-automated facility with about 1,500 employees runs on three shifts to assemble machine components, including side frames for telehandlers, steel cylinders for boom lifts, and engine parts. The plant includes a paint shop that bakes-dry the various components in large open-air ovens, and nine “boom tube” welders. Interestingly, the telehandlers are built upside down and then righted near the final stages of assembly.
After the tour, the group headed back to the hotel in nearby Chambersburg, PA, for a couple of hours of R&R before heading to a networking session and dinner at a local restaurant. Sitting at my table was one of the key organizers of the event, Rick Smith, JLG’s senior director of product training. Smith is responsible for all aspects of JLG’s product training, including the company’s “Train-the-Trainer” program. A former soldier who served in the U.S. Navy as an electronics technician, Smith joined JLG in 2011 after stints with brewer Anheuser-Busch, Carpenter Technology and General Physics Corp.
Smith was the man in charge when the group travelled to JLG headquarters at the crack of dawn the next morning. The focus of the last day was to experience JLG’s new proving grounds by actually operating the equipment. JLG’s focus on safety was evident when Smith described the various protocols in place, such as the hand signal indicating “stop”, mandatory high-viz vests and safety glasses, and around 20 JLG staff who were placed throughout the proving grounds to ensure the safe operation of the equipment.
Completed in August, the $2.5-million expansion quadruples JLG’s original training facility to accommodate more students and machines.
A four-acre outdoor proving grounds course provides trainees with a hands-on learning experience to develop driving and operating skills on telehandlers, scissor lifts and boom lifts.
“We’ve expanded the indoor demonstration area to include four bays that feature 30-foot-high ceilings to accommodate as many as four JLG Ultra Booms,” Smith says.
The additional bays also allow JLG to conduct multiple training classes concurrently, while protected from the elements. A lift and access equipment simulator was recently added to the training centre. The simulator employs gaming technology to hep familiarize operators with the controls and operation of the JLG 800S telescopic boom lift and the JLG G10-55A telehandler.
Customers can operate JLG equipment outside on the new proving grounds, a safe environment that recreates a working construction site. The grounds feature mixed terrain, structures for placing and picking telehandler loads, and aerial work platform targets to simulate real-world applications. Participants maneuver equipment around obstacles, including simulated power lines, while moving up and down slopes and grades.
After a tour of the training centre, the editors were asked to put away their pens, cameras and mobile devices, and invited to step onto the proving ground to try operating the equipment.
Divided into three colour-coded teams complete with t-shirts, the editors were given a crash-course – no pun intended – on operating telehandlers, boom lifts and scissor lifts. A friendly telehandler competition involved carrying a container full of water through a series of stations that tested the operator’s ability to place and remove a load at height, traverse through uneven terrain, and back down an inclined platform.
For the boom lift competition, the operator was asked to maneuver the platform up to the mock power line, pluck bean bags from the line, and then drop them into a bulls-eye target on the ground below.
A highlight of the proving grounds experience was going up JLG’s new 1850SJ Ultra Series Boom Lift. The machine features a telescoping boom with jib that at full extension, rises some 185 feet into the air, giving those without fear of heights a commanding view of the sprawling JLG facilities and surrounding Pennsylvania countryside. An 1850SJ was recently moved to New York City to work on the highest reaches of the Occulus, the new transportation building that will serve the new World Trade Center complex currently being constructed.
