Masterlift Forklift Blog in Oakville Ontario

Masterlift forklift sales and rentals in Oakville Ontario, website boasts a brilliant forklift dealership blog that goes well beyond materials handling and routine maintenance issues.  The authors have lots of experience with heavy equipment and their passion shows in their posts about everyday issues related to forklifts.  Their blog is good reading for modern transport aficionados and small business owners alike as there are many entries which describe the real-life decisions these managers face in the marketplace and at home on the factory floor. For example, there is an entry offering help deciding which fuel fits what business and how to best maintain a busy fleet of forklifts or paperless alternatives to safety checks.  Forklift safety inspection app, Mastercheck app shows how freight handling systems are evolving with technology. 

For Masterlift the idea of having and using a blog as a mouthpiece for their company is nothing new. They are media darlings. This is the firm that conceived and almost made prime time television with Pimp My Lift, a video series about refurbishing older model forklifts in 2008.

The blog’s authors recently chronicled The History of Propane Powered Forklifts complete with vintage photos of Walter O. Snelling, the discoverer of propane, showing his place of business.  The post details the first commercial uses of propane as a home heating and lamp fuel.  You can see in the image above, the headquarters of his American Gasol Co. which was incorporated in West Virginia in 1912, and how the tanks were fitted into the side of residential houses in their home heating business. At the same time the authors traced the origins of the modern forklift in history by showing pencil and ink sketches portraying life inside 19th century smelting and refining plants. These manufacturing centers as well as dockyards and train stations required a lot of heavy lifting and suffered severe labour shortages during World War I.  As a direct result of the war and the need to rapidly scale Allied war materials production and distribution, the world’s first portable mechanized lifting devices were developed for industry. The post ends showing how the many early propane powered forklifts from the 1950s and 60’s are easily identified today; most have no roll bars or give any thought whatsoever to Operator Safety.

Another enjoyable entry, and one which must have taken some time to research is their exploration of the Best Forklift Scenes in TV and Movies.  Most of their offerings include images from the production, and some even have YouTube videos showing the actual forklift action scenes.  The post describes Matt Damon’s movie Hereafter, and the 2002 film Yours Mine and Ours which a YouTube video showing the forklift scene in which the two twin boys go for a joy-ride at a big box store embedded right into the text.

The History of Masterlift

We read in the About Us section on the website how Kap Lift Truck was founded in 1971 as a forklift service company, but in time the company added sales and rentals as it established itself as an industry leader and reliable full-service forklift dealer throughout the nineteen seventies.  In 1983, Master Lift Truck appeared and secured many forklift fleet maintenance accounts in south Mississauga and Oakville. Their team earned a good reputation for quick turn-arounds and exceptional service. Both firms were acquired in 2000 and merged to create Masterlift.  CEO Gary Wilson has focused his life on creating the best forklift sales and service organism in Ontario, even going so far as to design and build their own forklifts overseas for sale in the Canadian market.

In the last half of 2018, Masterlift Canada’s forklift blog really came to life while the company was shooting their 2019 print calendar. The idea of making and distributing printed promotional materials including calendars wasn’t new to them either, but this was the first time they’d ever hired a professional photographer and contracted with several influencers to make interesting pictures inside their client’s holdings. They had Shanny in the City at Rosehill Wine Cellars, and Laura Bilotta from Single in the City wrote about posing at Dan’s Welding and Fabricating in Burlington on her blog.

Above is Raymi the Minx at Maverick Distillery and many other notable females pose for Joel Levy, a top Toronto photographer, who also blogged about the project. But what’s even more interesting is reading about where they went, and we can see for ourselves the many different locations they visited to get the twelve different images they needed for the Masterlift 2019 Print Calendar.

The Masterlift blog is better than your average rental house journal and contains no sales or gimmicky calls to action, or even promotions for new equipment. The blog has none of what you might expect but rather it shows real people and tells real stories.  Its filled with helpful information, and best practice tips and how to information for battery maintenance and safety protocols. But more remarkably, Masterlift shows customers , contractors and new employees exactly what they can expect and where they are on their journey to be the best forklift sales and rental house in Canada.