Skip the Slings. Bulk Bins are Safer and Faster

 

One of the challenges in concrete construction are related to lifting baskets and four post racks/pallets. The jumping of gear from lower floors to the working decks as you remove the shoring off of outriggers is very time consuming. We are strapping bins, stacking them. Then unstrapping so we can move them to the lower item, then flying. It wastes a few minutes on each cycle. If you have 50 lifts per cycle that waste a few minutes every week, we are talking about potentially a couple of hours. Usually this leads over time. So for easy numbers, if we have two riggers, an operator and a tower crane, the costs are probably over a thousand an hour. Multiply that by 2 and if you have 40 weeks, it's an $80,000 problem. Oh... each job. And we haven't accounted for the unstacking either on the working deck.

Eichinger makes a solution for this. Bulk Bins. They stack. They have an opening so you can get to items inside, which means that you don't have to unstack, then restack. They are also crane rated and come with four lifting eyes which means no straps. And it's an unquestionably legal lift. 

OSHA 1926.251 says every item must be rated. When we walk up to a pallet, we know that you can't run straps through it and say that straps are rated. Most contractors extend this, and rightly so, to wood boxes. You can't legally fly a wood box unless it's rated. But when we get to steel, this reasoning runs into a challenge. People forget the logic. It has to be rated. And the Letters of Interpretation on this are clear, over and over again. The lifts in the pictures below are 100% illegal. 

The point I'm illustrating is that lifting items have to be rated and why not having a rating can be fatal. The four post rack is supporting the load in the third picture. So it must be rated. It must be used as the manufacturer prescribes. And it must be maintained. I bring this up because we use heavily damaged gear in the field all of the time. You have to think of this like a manufacturer would. They aren't going to be liable for your misuse of their design. 

Eichinger"s Bulk Bins eliminate this issue. They have a four point lift that is large and unmissable. You literally wouldn't have a reason to not lift them as prescribed. In safety, it's referred to as engineering out the hazard. The Germans have done this for us. ( I would lift these as a double stack for COG stability. This was a look at how level they were as a stack)

These bins are locked in place structurally. They can also have castors added so you can roll them singularly, or as a stack. We have a large variety of sizes from 0.6 yards to 5.3. And the capacities range from 3300 lbs to 13,230 lbs. As an added bonus, they work as debris bins too in that you can dump them out from the lower lifting eyes in the back. 

Look at the size of that lifting eye for a 3300 lb item. It's massive. They are designed to be able to be lifted as a triple stack and still have a 3:1 safety factor. Again, I would be concerned for COG as a triple stack. And you can't really reach into the top one so it's a wasted effort to do it. If it made sense as a move, you might want to consider something like shackling the top bin slings to the eyes so it can't rotate out. 

Just look at that lifting frame as a stack. This is mean to lift and support itself well beyond what you need it for. 

Stop lifting stillage and four post racks with slings. We also have four post racks of 4 different designs that can lift as a four point lift. Let's be more productive and be in compliance with Eichinger's gear. You can save yourself up to $100,000 per job and be faster in the process. It's an obvious solution to the challenges of lifting stacks of gear.