End of an Era

[Woodsy]

I retired 12 years ago at 65 but I am pleased to say that I am frequently consulted by the younger generations as they slowly realise their online solutions aren't worth the dust on their screen, and the advice of the old boy with the many years of 'hands on' experience is actually useful! Luckily not all youngsters are devoid of common sense and logic but the percentage is getting very small. It appears that many of the larger percentage are getting into politics and the news media which tends to make crossing the under-engineered bridge a viable option!

[Ovidio]

I retired 12 years ago at 65 but I am pleased to say that I am frequently consulted by the younger generations as they slowly realise their online solutions aren't worth the dust on their screen, and the advice of the old boy with the many years of 'hands on' experience is actually useful! Luckily not all youngsters are devoid of common sense and logic but the percentage is getting very small. It appears that many of the larger percentage are getting into politics and the news media which tends to make crossing the under-engineered bridge a viable option!

Yes. There are still good kids. Actually, I think they are mostly good. They just need the advice of grown-ups, which has nothing to do with age. Just with attitude and common sense. These people are scarce, so too many youngsters just don’t get the necessary examples… I see it every day at work and elsewhere.
Let’s keep doing our part and save as many as possible!

[CINDERS]

In our industry we have had a plethora of the churn & burn dogman/riggers/crane drivers providers offering 5 day tickets one would hope most come from an industry background like construction as when I went into it I was just a labourer operating a hand shovel, pick axe & crow bar but improved my position by private classes night schooling though after a 12 hour day it was pretty difficult.

But what I saw from on the ground and being in the cranes was more often than not young ppl who had their quals but not the industry grass roots experience and when your dealing with cranes and loads then the propensity for accidents is magnified if your not onto it.
It's easy in the training yard to sling up 4 round pipes or calculate & sling a square 2m x 2m x 12mm plate but get onto site where there is a whole lot happening other cranes etc and it ramps up where I could I got out of the crane and helped them obviously as I'm in charge of getting the loads safely there, but some were just too much of a risk.
I usually talked to them and said see if you can get on a wobbly crane (BHB or Franna) to gain more experience in slinging they all want to please and show skill but that comes with time on the job not 5 days in a yard.
To many of our workers never come home from the job and that's sad I was on one site for 30 months with 3,000 workers on site and in that period there were 3 deaths on site (One was from the company I was with) then 1 more as a MVA coming to site so 4 in total.
One chap it was his first day on the job had a momentary lapse trying to do the right thing fell 15 meters head first onto concrete, he was married with 2 little children and it hurts as your all there together we took up a collection $20/head but it wont bring them back.
I blame the churn & burns for exposing ppl to a very high risk occupation without any real aptitude for nutting things out on the fly or recognising through experience the potential risks or how to safely sling unevenly weighted loads and out of shape loads.
Just recently DOSHWA went through one provider and pretty much shut them down for falsifying ppl's abilities through back handers and passing them when they clearly failed!

[Surpmil]

The ever-growing number of videos of heavy duty telescopic cranes being tipped over by operators backs you up Cinders. Here we had some numbskull taking the locking pins out of the tower of a tower crane in a rush to get it down with the result that it took itself down and killed some people.

Rigging and load-handling is nearly an art and I'm inclined to think that like other aspects of mechanical sense, people are born with an instinct for it or not. I've never worked in that field, but have seen some silly things done and the general lack of ability to foresee "what could happen" demonstrated.

[CINDERS]

Lastly there was a notice in a crane operators learning guide "No single piece of construction equipment has the potential to do so much damage as a crane toppling over."
So for ease of example I'll use my last crane I operated for 4 years ~ Liebherr LTM 160 - 2 a 160 tonne capacity machine carrier is 15 meters long & 3.9 meters wide with a road going weight of 60 tonnes and onsite when fully counterweighted weighs 110 tonne which it can mobile itself around sites like that set up in a special way which I have done.
So it has a 60 meters main boom power pin boom you check your load weight & radius then pic a boom configuration that gives the best capacity it has a gripper system where it will take one section at a time out lock it, the gripper will travel back to grab the next section, top sections first, got to get it right as to reconfigure it takes a lot and the client will be p*ssed.

So as a quick example I may want a selection of booms in percentages from the bottom to top 92 - 92 - 92 - 46 - 46 if you mess up and have to change say the 2 46's then you have to suck the whole lot in again starting from the bottom 92's it takes time for the gripper to travel up & back inside each section.
On top of the main boom you have a 36 meter fly so all up 96 meters of boom/fly combination.
Now your a person on the ground working 90 meters away from this crane when for some reason or another it topples over the fly can effectively hit you so imagine the velocity & weight impacting your body, in a certain scenario it may go beyond 96m if the headache ball is slung on the rope!
So take notice of cranes as they are still able to get to you even though you think your outside their red zone!
Thanks for your patience guys hopefully you may have learned a little bit about them but there is so much more to operating a crane than fits in here.

[Surpmil]

Yes, that was interesting Cinders. Do these cranes not have a built in load sensor to warn the operator when he tries to lift too much for a given angle, extension and ballasting etc.? Or does the use of blocks(?) on the cable rule that out?

Just the sight of those massively heavy and long booms relative to the footprint of the crane sets off my "spidey senses".

[Sapper740]

Cinders, one of the projects I was involved in when I was in construction was the rebuilding and adding on to the Fort Worth Convention center which required a very large crane with a jib boom on top of the main boom to be able to deposit the roof top air handling units. Flat deck truck after flat deck truck arrived with steel ballast blocks for the crane....so many in fact that I took it upon myself to see exactly how much ballast they had to install. It was a staggering 225,000 lbs in all! I made sure I was no where near it when they started raising the AHU's lest something toppled.

[ssgross]

A mathematician, an engineer, and a physicist chaperon a sleepover when a fire breaks out. The engineer wakes up first, finds a fire extinguisher and begins reading the manual. The physicist wakes up second, and begins finding and moving combustable materials. The mathematicians wakes up last, sees the engineer and physicist, and says "AHA! A solution exists!" and goes back to bed.

[CINDERS]

In my early days of operating conventional cranes (Lattice booms) you had a boom angle indicator, a known boom length (As you assembled it), load chart and what boom length will lift what weight at a said radius with varying counterweight configurations minus deductions, no computer all done by your seat of pants and how the crane was reacting.
If in doubt and possible do a dry run with the weight to the said radius over the weakest point for the crane usually over the side if it handles the weight there it will definitely do it over its strongest point usually with the drives (On a crawler) to the rear and the tracks wedged, blocked where the track lifts up to go up to the sprocket or idler.

One thing you never ever do with a conventional crane is come inside the minimum radius for any given boom length as what happens the pennant ropes that connect the boom head to the car body do not take the stress of the load being lifted, this also applies to hydraulics as we said "If it don't bend it will break."
You then get into the realms of compressibility of the lattice boom where all the force is placed directly down the boom itself which has happened the end result is the boom concertina's collapsing on top of you in the crane!

Yes the hydraulic cranes from the early 80's onwards had load cells in them fast forward to the machines I operated and they gave boom length, boom configuration, degrees of boom angle, what winch you had in operation, radius of hook, what you could lift, what load you have on, percentage of SWL which auto stops when you reach the limit at that point you override the computer and carry on.
You learn by experience what a machine will do if we had a lift that was really out there we set the scenario up in the yard to see if the crane could do it, I operated for years on the wrong side in uncharted waters but due to my extensive experience and knowing exactly how much you could push it.
I always informed my riggers prior to a lift where we had a barrel stretcher and where possible kept the load 5" off the deck whilst placing it mainly with tilt panels as they were the biggest baine of all with poor layouts or no access, but those days are long gone for me yep it was wrong with jail time assured for me plus being sued if anyone was seriously injured or killed.
There are a lot more intricacies in the operation of different types of hydraulic cranes of which you have to be proficient in their use understanding how to operate them properly the secret of operating any crane is soft hands your not driving a digger and a very good sense of perception of not only the crane but the task at hand.

The 160 tonne hydraulic crane I operated fully counterweighted 110,231 lbs of weights, with an all up machine operating weight of 242,508 lbs. (110 tonnes)

[Flying10uk]

People seem to want everything done as fast as possible nowadays regardless if a totally crap job is the result.

When I started work in the mid 1980's if you produced a totally crap job you were in the foreman's office and you got the sack.............Back then the foreman's office was in the top centre of the shop floor and the top half of the office was all glass. Anyone "invited" into the foreman's office was in "full view" of the shop floor and virtually the entire workforce; it was almost like being on a podium or stage. If the then foreman had you "lined-up" for the sack it would normally follow a familiar pattern and always on a Friday. The "unfortunate one" would be "invited" into the foreman's office and this would be combined with a sudden, rapid, decrease in productivity as the rest of the workforce surreptitiously "spectated" and the person would be gone by 12 noon all because they had produced a crap job.