JLG Liftpod Aerial Platform

Safer than a ladder and much more practical — your super or porter is surrounded by railing, he or she can turn 360 degrees to do work, with both hands free, and there's a tray right there for tools, lightbulbs, what have you — the Liftpod is lightweight and highly portable. Its three parts snap together in 30 seconds (a video on the company's website shows a willowy blond woman assembling it in just that amount of time), and it has wheels for easy carting.

With a platform height of 7 feet 7 inches, and a working height of 14 feet 2 inches, the Liftpod can hold up to 330 pounds on its platform and up to 33 pounds on its accessory tray. You can make it go up and down with a regular old 18-volt power drill, which your worker just fits into a slot, or you can buy an optional rechargeable power pack to do the job. The base is made of steel and the mast of what the company describes as "aircraft-quality aluminum."

Among its safety features: The gates open inward, so your worker can't accidentally push against them and fall out, and there's a manual descent feature, for descent in an emergency. (Or, we suppose, you could just bring a ladder — nothing wrong with having a backup. Or with irony.)

You can see a product brochure here, and a fact sheet here. We also highly recommend the videos, which, while informative, are also inadvertently hilarious. It's probably the dramatic, heavy-metal bass-and-drum music, or maybe the Terminator-like whirring of the power drill. But hey, safety: That's no laughing matter — even if the company does refer to its Liftpod as "the right way" and a ladder as, um, "the rung way." That's too awful a pun even for us.

JLG Industries • 1 JLG Drive, McConnellsburg, Penn. 17233-9533 • (717) 485-5161 • toll-free (877) 2-LIFTPOD (254-3876) • E-mail contact form here

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