Drifting Loads Out of Buildings - Just No

This video makes me sad for the worker. They posted it on a website with a crane page and we all..

 

I'm not as upset with the rigger as one might expect. People rise to their level and know what they are taught. This emblematic of where he works. You might recognize it. What you might not know is it's an abysmal place with regard to safety. The problem there is they have these construction managers that are simply a little shield for the developers. They hire them. Then they hire all of the subs and everyone is responsible for their means and methods and acting safe. This means no one is managing safety or planning ahead. It's just subs trying to get by on a lot of jobs. I've been to sites in this town. It's appalling. Little better than developing countries. So we see behavior like in the video. If you pay attention, you can look up these construction managers and none of them last more than 15 years. Something will go wrong, they'll close the doors and suddenly a new entity pops up. 

If you are going to get things from below a constructed floor with a crane, you have two options. A Balance Beam with a moving weight on a beam, or you and get a Crane Loading Platform. 

The Rigger in the video could roll that load out on to this deck and simply hoist up. Get the slings positioned correctly. Don't have the rigging rubbing on two spots. Don't cause a swinging load. Don't set up a load that the crane can't refuse. In Seattle years ago someone was helping a self erector tower crane lift a load it was refusing. A forklift helped it lift the load the crane had refused to lift. Then they pulled the forklift away. It went as anyone thinking would expect. I've never been able to find pictures. 

If this ramp is too much, you can do this with a Fixed Outrigger Deck as well that is perfectly level with the floor. 

Buying a fixed deck is $12,500 and shipping. Shipping varies. But you can rent them as well. When you consider the ease of the deck and the time savings, it's going to make sense. More importantly, we should all be going home and not sending out lifts where the rigging is being endangered, the crane can't refuse the load, and things and be swept off of the building. This drifting out loads should never be a thing. 

 

We've all seen Plastic Bulk Bins that mechanical contractors love. They'll buy these bins for $350 or $400 and then spend another $150 on a steel frame welded up for castors. The cost of castors are a push, so let's say they are $500 into a bin. Then they need to lift it on a jobsite. The cost to install slings occur with a crane and crew idling at $500 per hour as a minimum. So $22 for 2.75 minutes. If you do this just ten times a year and the bin last 10 years, that's $2200 in lost production compared to hooking in to a crane rated steel pallet bin. But our bins will last 30 years or more if cared for. If we don't account for inflation or buying new pallet bins, that's $6600 lost to save $500 today. Given the new purchases and inflation, I'm gonna bet that's 10k over 30 years. 

The same happens for wood boxes. People will spend a couple hours putting together a wood box. Let's suggest the materials are free. So $160 a box, with no rating. So if it fails, it will be gross negligence. So what does this do to the value of the savings? How many boxes are you gonna need to cover a 5 million dollar wrongful death? 

Economics and risk aside, it's illegal to lift unrated materials handling devices. OSHA 1926.251 requires a rating on anything that is for "Materials Handling". This assertion triggers some people. I get push back about what this means because it means everyone you know has been doing it wrong. Very true. But let me help make it clearer than my assertion that might feel "bald". OSHA writes letters of interpretation. Here's one that clears up with OSHA 1926.251(a) is pointed at. 

Under the "General Duty Clause" (Section 5(a)(1)) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, employers must:

furnish to each of [its] employees employment... free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm...

The construction industry recognizes the necessity for inspections of below-the-hook lifting devices. An employer who follows ASME B.30.20, specifically sections 20-1.3.1 through 20-1.3.7 and 20-1.3.9 with respect to inspections for below-the-hook lifting devices (other than for slings), would be considered to be in compliance with OSHA requirements.

OSHA goes out of it's way to avoid adopting ASME B30.20 as the code. However, they cite it as being in compliance with their intentions. They want everything rated. And why wouldn't they. Does it make any sense to lift 1000 lbs in a Styrofoam box because the slings under the box are rated for 10,000? Of course it doesn't. We need to know what the box is capable of supporting. That's where I come in. 

We have around a dozen different bins for different purposes in many sizes. There are probably 100 options in crane rated bins from Eichinger and CraneGear.net. It is more expensive to purchase a steel bin from us. Would you rather your coworkers are relying on a weld, or a nail not ripping out for their life today? If you are a rigger or crane operator, do you want to explain to a child why their parent is coming home when you lifted the plastic bin that has no rating? We often aren't serious enough about our jobs. If you have any responsibility in the decision making on crane safety, you have a responsibility to know the rating of the item. This isn't just the US. Canada has about half of it's provinces citing ASME B30.20 in their codes. This would specifically require steel, and disallow plastic and wood as an option. The ASME design criteria requires steel. You have to jump through hoops to use any metal other than steel. 

Crane Pallet bins - Get it with a ramp. Roll items in up to two pallets and 6600 lbs. 

Pall Skips - up to 9' long at 6600 lbs. Could work for trash.

Steel Pallet Bins - Same size as pallets. Taller or shorter sides. Castor ready - 3300 and 4400 lb options

Drop Bottom Bins - Crane and forklift ready. Stacks, Castors, up to 2.6 yards 4400 lbs Durable

Square Stacking Stillage - Crane Rated stacking stillages. Various sides

Round Stacking Stillage - Links on base for lifting. Quick. Large cups. Board holders available

Automatic trash Bins - rotating latch makes it so operator can dump out bin without assistance. 

Bulk Bins - Stack, dump, lifts as stack, up to 4 yards, 13,230 lbs, durable.

Forklift Tipper - Crane lifting eyes available. Rated to 3300 lbs. Various tippers are crane rated. 

Mortar Bins - Most mortar bins have no ratings. Even with lifting eyes, no rating is given. We give a rating with ours. 

New Concrete Buckets Open up New Options

 

One of the challenges of tools is we learn one way, then unlearning that way is a challenge. I was an ironworker that was constantly told, "That's how you do it." Ironworkers are clever people, but this behavior leads to myopic thinking about how to do things. When I was supplying tower cranes I would supply flat top cranes intentionally. This way it would be three of us erecting a crane. I'd ship tools wire tied in place. I put plugs on the 480v power. And as a result, we erected our fastest tower crane in 3.5 hours. There is always more than one way to get things done quickly. I've strived to do that. 

In concrete bucket pours, I've been the tower crane operator for many different crews. The most aggressive pour I've been involved in was due to a concrete pump breaking down. We now have 6 concrete trucks standing by. The pour is a deck pour on the 14th floor. Grab the 2 yard bucket and we are off to the races. It was 15 minutes per truck. The signal man on the ground was in tune with me and we would come in with heat. After the bucket is full I'd be off bringing it to the roof. The guy on the roof would open the gate and I would hoist down for the next 7-10 seconds as the entire bucket would empty. 15 mins a truck to the 14th floor was as fast as it was going to be done. It was maximum everything. But how can we make it faster? 

A four yard laydown concrete bucket is an option. Save two hoisting cycles in the ten yards. We do have a five yard option. If we just worked with a 1032 that has a chute, hose, or gate pour option, it would be 3 buckets per truck. Is it ten minutes per truck with a good operator? 

We have 500 Concrete Bucket options at Eichinger. You can get them at www.Cranegear.net. If you have a small pour where the quality of the finish is the driver, we have a 1017 that has the gate on the hose. One person is in control. You can get the level right every time and not pay to chip out the excess. You can get a hose to fill the wall where letting it flow for 4 yards quickly can get the work done quicker. If 20 yards is just four lift cycles instead of 10, wouldn't that make up a lot of time? When the equipment and crew are over 2k an hour, you can save a lot of money with a larger concrete bucket. 

If you want to see what Germany brings to the market, come check us out at CraneGear.net. 

Maritime Personnel Transfers

 

Maritime Personnel Transfers that happen by crane are unique in that they don't require testing. Most Suspended work platforms use a weight to test out the crane capacity at the working radius. This has costs associated with it that can be avoided if the practice isn't required. We happen to have a suspended platform that avoids this requirement as it's uniquely North American. We can do it in a traditional platform for lifting people and we'd be $10,000 as our starting final cost. This is before a weight is added. If we go for a two person platform in powder coat, we'd start at $3300 dollars. So why go pay 3x your cost for something you don't need and won't use? 

If you need a crane and forklift work platform, or a personnel transfer platform, we have them. We'll need to get a quote to ship it to you, but the over all cost is going to be significantly lower than other suppliers. The manufacturer is out of Germany and has been in business for 120 years. It's state of the art manufacturing and engineered to the highest standards. Check it out at forkliftgear.net. Or here is a direct link to the suspended work platform. 

 

The challenge for riggers and crane crews in general is that subs, and even GC's, show up with garbage lifters. They have silly ideas like lifting pallets of unstable items. The shrink wrap on the paint pails is an example. Twice in my career I was working from the blind and the rigger sends up pallets of paint on straps. Both of these occasions I saw the twisting start and make a run for the roof. Once I got it landed safely. The other time I was clear of people, but not to the roof yet and we painted that brand new roof with hundreds of gallons of paint. It wasn't a lift I would have made in either case had I seen what was happening. So how do we prevent all of these dangerous lifts? Pallet Bins. 

We have a Pallet bin that can be sold with ramps. If you get your subs and jobs to put everything on castors, you can literally roll everything in the bin, and then roll it out. You would have no more straps going under and through things. You can make two lifts at once and stop the silly conversations about "Multiple lifting" and how people apply that to standard rigging practices when it only applies to ironwork in the US. You could set up 2,3, or 4 lifters at one time and fly what would be 8 lifts to a floor at a time. If this were planned ahead, it can literally speed up your operations for the cost of $3300 and shipping. You have a multiple million dollar lifting program that can pick up the pace for $3300. Let me do the math to see if that makes sense.... 

A lot of what we've learned to live with just isn't workwise. We should just be flying bins and the subs can get their product out of the bin. The right way would be for everything to be on castors and you never cut free of the bin. But you could have three or four on a job and just have the next one stocked up to grab and go. It's a terrible practice to stop the crane from moving at $500 an hour or more. When you lose 2.5 minutes its more than $20. You need to keep the next lift always ready and eliminate time loss at every turn. Our Crane Pallet Bins can do just that and provide a rating where the subcontractors are having you lift things that aren't rated which is both illegal, and unsafe. 

Flying forks come in all sorts of forms. One of the little known options in North America is a a system widely used, and required, in the UK. It's a set of flying forks that incorporates a net with the system. Once you have the pallet loaded on the forks, you wrap up the items with a net that hangs from the top and around the bottom to catch anything that might dislodge during the lift. These are a bit more expensive for the added structure, but it's all still pretty affordable. 

If the added safety feels like it makes sense for you, you can order these at www.cranepalletforks.net. Here is the link to the specific page. The net is sold separately. 

Here is the link to the video of the action with these as well. You can also reach out at sales@crangear.net if you just want to reach out directly. Note that you are looking for a 1056T set of forks and if you want the net as well. The only shortcoming with these forks is they don't ship as easily. I'll work with you on the price and consider the shipping costs in it.