Dock Levelers & Dock Plates

It bridges the two gaps between your building and a trailer: the horizontal gap where the trailer stops short of the dock face, and the vertical difference between the dock floor and the trailer bed. Without one, a forklift cannot safely cross the threshold, because the trailer bed is almost never level with the dock. The leveler's deck pivots up or down and its lip extends onto the trailer floor, creating a continuous ramp that moves with the trailer as it is loaded and the suspension settles.

Pit levelers are commonly rated between 25,000 and 45,000 lb, and edge-of-dock units between about 15,000 and 30,000 lb. The number that matters is not the weight of your pallets — it is the weight of your heaviest forklift with its load on it, plus a safety allowance for the dynamic forces of braking and turning on the deck. A loaded counterbalance truck is far heavier than most people assume, which is why under-rating a leveler is the most common specification error we see.

A pit leveler sits in a recess formed in the dock floor, so its deck is flush with the floor and it can serve trailer beds from low to high — typically around a foot above and below dock level. An edge-of-dock leveler bolts onto the face of the dock instead, needs no pit, costs considerably less and installs in a fraction of the time, but has a much smaller working range of roughly ±5 inches. If your trailers are consistent, edge-of-dock is good value. If they vary, it will frustrate everyone using it.

Both are correct and both are used in Canada. The industry, the manufacturers and most Ontario specifications write "leveler", which is why it is spelled that way throughout this page, even though Canadian spelling would normally double the L. If you are searching or writing a tender, expect to encounter both.

A dock plate or dock board is a portable ramp — a slab of aluminum or steel with curbs and lifting handles — that is set into place by hand and lifted out again. A leveler is fixed equipment built into the dock. Plates suit occasional use, low volumes and hand pallet trucks; they are limited in capacity, have to be positioned correctly every single time, and are a manual-handling and fall risk in their own right. Any dock doing regular forklift traffic should have levelers, not plates.

Most of a leveler is rebuildable in place. Springs, hydraulic packs, lip assemblies, hinges, control panels, toe guards and weather seals are all replaceable, and we carry the common failure parts. What is usually not economic to repair is the structural frame or the pit itself — badly corroded steel or spalled concrete under the frame. We will tell you which of the two you have before quoting, because the difference is a service call against a capital project.

Three usual causes. On a mechanical unit the springs have weakened, so the deck no longer rises to full height — this is gradual and easy to miss until it fails. On any unit, the lip hinge or lip may be bent or seized from being driven over out of position. Or the trailers have changed: a new carrier with lower beds can put you outside the unit's range even though nothing has broken. Diagnosis is quick, and only the third one means a different leveler.

A like-for-like swap into a sound existing pit is normally a single day per position, so a bay is out of service for one shift. If the pit has to be rebuilt, the concrete cure time sets the schedule and the position is out for several days — we give you that number before the work starts, not after. Manufacturing lead time on a new unit is typically 4–6 weeks, with 1–2 weeks to schedule the crew.

Yes, and that is the majority of our dock service work. Rite-Hite, Blue Giant, Serco, Kelley, Pentalift and equivalents are all common in GTA buildings, along with units whose manufacturer no longer exists. Parts for obsolete units can often be fabricated or substituted; where they genuinely cannot, we will say so rather than sell you a repair that will not last.