No one seems to track tower crane accidents world wide. Annually we see 30 plus major accidents world wide with around 50 deaths. It's a dangerous game and we all need to be vigilant in the construction world.
Thursday, May 2, 2024
Loading up multifamily buildings takes a lot of materials. Each apartment is likely to have around 20,000 lbs of stuff in it. When you think of the time to carry up 50 lbs of items up four flights of stairs, It might cost $15 for one way at today's wages. Now we divide 20k by 50 and find that it's $6000 to load up the apartment with stuff. And if you have 150 apartments, we are talking about $900,000 to load an apartment building 50 lbs at a time. Not to mention crane days, damage to product and so on. So if you are a contractor that needs to load a building efficiently, you want an elevator. Of course the builidng ones won't be ready. Exterior ones require an operator that might cost 20k a month if you are using a third party. So what to do?
How about an automated hoist? Our Transport Platforms are automated. Send it up. When it passes the floor before where you wanted to get to, hit the stop button. It will stop at the next floor. No more inputs needed. Then your subs can open the gates and off load the car. When they are done, they can send it down or to another floor from the floor itself. Literally, no operator needed.
Tuesday, March 5, 2024
Pallet Lifting Safety
There are so many ways to lift pallets safely. Yet I routinely see people lifting unsafely. I caught these two examples literally on the first job I walked by in Washington State, then again on the next block. This is where the state as a requirement for ASME rated attachments but the Crane Department in Washington can't seem to figure out what that means. ASME can include straps in their designs or use. This doesn't exclude the requirement for the support to be rated. yet...
Our 1058SC is a cage and set of tines in one. Land it over a pallet and charge the tine. Lift a couple of feet up and you can close in the gates below. Then everything is wrapped up in structure and it's level on a four point lift. You do need a little more room for these to get the tines in and out. But it won an innovation award in 2018 in the UK.
There are a number of ways to make this work. The double pallet bins with the ramp are my suggestion. $3144 plus shipping. Affordable. 6600 lbs. Fly two pallets at once. The crane crew can drop and let them handle it with a pallet jack. Grab on another cycle and send it down. It saves a lift cycle with the forks. Everything is prepped without the crane, or can be. Everything is wrapped up in the cage and ASME B30.20 certified and maintained as level by the four point lifting system.
Tuesday, February 6, 2024
Nixon Era Rules not Enforced or Understood
The beauty of AI is illustrating problems. I've spoken until I'm just exhausted laying out concepts. There are always operators who refuse to get the premise. But here's the deal, AI lays it out a bit. OSHA says that everything lifted has to be rated and tagged. There isn't an exception for placing straps below the supporting structure. The code just says rated...