You have a crane, you have a hook. What else do you need to increase your load? The answer may be "a lot." You need to connect the hook to the load, but the environment may be too hot or too dangerous for people to connect. Some loads may not have lugs for the hook to fit, so you need to use a sling. But the sling may rub the load and damage it. Once the load leaves the ground, it may deviate from the direction you need. Julian Champkin looks down-a hook attachment that can help.

Lifting weights is rarely as simple as it seems. The difficulty can start from the hook itself. Connecting the hook to the load usually requires someone to put their hands in the area between the two-this is a clear risk. There is a solution. The Gigasense automatic safety hook from the Swedish company Gigasense does this automatically. It can be connected, safely locked and released without requiring anyone in the loading or placement area. Therefore, the risk of injury is greatly reduced.

Unlike many professional accessories, it is a completely mechanical device and does not require a battery or power supply. When the hook rests on the load and stabilizes to an angle of 60 degrees or less, the opening/closing mechanism starts to work. This is unlikely to happen before the rope has slackened.

In that position, the hook can be manipulated to the lifting point; when the rope is tightened, the hook is closed and locked. Once the load is hung on the hook, the hook will never loosen; it can swing back and forth safely without worrying about accidental release. To release the hook, it must be stabilized again to an angle of 60 degrees or less, which will not happen until the hoisting rope is relaxed and untensioned.

Because the hook is completely mechanical, it can also be used in water and other liquids. “For example, it is often used in hot-dip galvanizing plants, where the smoke can make people decouple nearby and it is dangerous,” said Malin Nordin, Gigasense's marketing director. "For the same reason, it is used in wastewater and sewage treatment projects. In industries where work needs to be done on heavy equipment, such as aero engines or heavy diesel engines, Gigasense hooks can be safely hung on the engine while the engine is working. In the air.

"Other applications can be loading and unloading trucks or similar high-altitude operations." Gigasense automatic safety hooks range in size from 2 tons to 27 tons.

For a long time, hanger beams have been used to carry long, wide or large loads. Their concept is very simple: basically a metal rod with connecting ears at both ends, people would not have thought that so many technologies or development methods could be applied. One would think it was wrong.

For example, Modulift has its modular spreader beams whose components are bolted together to provide any beam length required for each specific job.

This summer, they added a new product to their product portfolio. Their U-shaped drop link and triangle plate are connected to the end of the beam to carry the load and are designed to replace the standard drop link in some rigging situations. Triangular plates of different sizes are suitable for various bottom shackles, and can be installed on the same U-clamp hoisting chain, making the product compatible with multiple shackles, so it is very flexible. It can be assembled quickly and easily on site, replacing one larger lower shackle in the standard spreader configuration with two smaller shackles.

"Feedback from field trials confirms that the product is very easy to use and saves installation time, especially when performing repeated lifts," said John Baker, Modulift's commercial director.

In contrast to solid beams, lattice spreader beams are suitable for longer and lighter loads. Lifting beam manufacturer Britlift recently introduced a new, larger size: it is modular and has a 6-ton working load limit. It said that this is the largest capacity lattice spreader beam on the market.

It comes in two sizes, the three-ton LAT-3 and the six-ton ​​LAT-6. It is designed to lift loads up to 44 m long and has 44 lifting connections that can be connected to any position along the way.

Britlift stated that its engineers prioritized transportation, storage, handling and self-weight when designing the system. Some of its suggested applications include lifting roof slabs, long pipe sections, tube bundles or bars, track sections and even wind turbine blades.

Modular houses-formerly known as prefab houses-served the UK well after World War II, when "prefab houses" housed families facing housing shortages due to bombing. This technology is again beginning to receive attention in Europe, and is suitable for low-rise and high-rise buildings. Speed ​​of construction, affordability, green certificates and not relying on increasingly scarce skilled labor are just some of the reasons.

The prefabricated wall units across the Atlantic, and further modular houses—entire rooms are manufactured off-site, then transported and hoisted in place—have never been outdated and are standard. It is not easy to lift the entire factory-made room-floor, wall and roof from the truck without damaging it, and then place it exactly near the next room without gaps.

However, a Canadian company called "Under-The-Hook" introduced clever aids designed specifically for this purpose.

Its BTH BX 6PT is a four-point or six-point lifting frame kit consisting of seven manually adjustable booms and four corner connections. It can be assembled into a rectangle with exactly the same footprint as the module to be lifted, with a maximum size of 20 feet x 45 feet (6 meters x 14 meters). In this way, the elevator at each connection point of the module can be completely vertical. This versatility reduces the bending of the box.

The company's patented Autobox BTH BX 18/30-20/34-45 model adds complexity. It is a "folding transport" design and does not require on-site assembly. The boom is automatically locked to the pre-selected length, and only one rigging is required, and the crane can complete all the lifting work. "This greatly reduces labor costs and reduces the risk of injury, because compared to standard types of booms, only a few manual lifting and pulling are required," said CEO Bernie Sandrowski.

The average set-up time of the Autobox frame is ½ to ¾ hours to be fully assembled, which significantly reduces crane and labor time. An eight-point configuration kit with additional booms can handle modular boxes up to 30 feet (9 meters) wide and 76 feet (23 meters) long.

A related problem when placing modular units next to each other is the clearance required for lifting slings. This usually prevents the two room units from actually touching each other. Instead, they must be as close as possible to each other, and then pushed up sideways in the last few centimeters to narrow the gap. The following hook has a solution. They can provide lifting belts instead of slings, but thin flexible steel belts each 50 feet (15 meters) long and 2 inches (5 cm) wide, each about the thickness of a saw blade. For this reason, they provide close to zero clearance requirements. Sandrowski said: “Therefore, you no longer need to slot the sill plate or the top of the module to accommodate the removal of the sling.” “You can also place the units side by side tightly without further sliding the units. The straps are cut and left in place, or They can be cut on one side, and when the rigging is lifted, the crane pulls them out." Each strap can only be used once, but it is recyclable. Custom lengths are available; and, like all lower hook lifting products, they are manufactured to meet or exceed ASME BTH-1-2011 standards.

A few years ago (November 2019), we wrote about two new inventions in Australia, both of which were designed to eliminate the rotation of the load. For example, it is necessary to accurately align the cladding slabs with the tower, and this kind of load rotating in the wind is suspended from the hook of the tower crane at high altitude, no one would think of efficiency or safety.

On construction sites around the world, the alignment so far has been done through the use of rigging ropes, "slogans", which are dragged down from suspended loads and by workers on the ground or-more dangerously. -Fixed by high-level workers-dangerous and often difficult. The building tries to grasp and control the load because the crane operator is as close to them as possible.

With new equipment, neither slogans nor expensive and scarce ground troops are needed. No matter how the wind acts on the load, the load can maintain the required alignment throughout the elevator. It is controlled by an observer with a remote control placed in the appropriate position.

Australian equipment from Roborigger and Verton follow different but related principles. When we wrote last time, both companies were recent start-ups and were in the introduction stage of their technology. Since then, both have made great strides in development and global acceptance and sales.

Roborigger is located in Perth. The first use of its products was in the New Western Australia Museum in Perth in 2018. Since then, many units have been operating across Australia, including the Australian 108 Tower in Melbourne, which has the tallest residence in the southern hemisphere. The company has shipped devices to Singapore, Dubai, Germany and other places, and oil and gas operators are also using it.

The Roborigger device is suspended on the crane hook, and the load is suspended on the hook. It contains a vertical flywheel with fan blades; a lithium-ion battery rotates the flywheel fan assembly. As General Manager Derek Markwell said, the conservation of angular momentum solves the rest of the problem. "If you accelerate the flywheel counterclockwise, the load under it will rotate clockwise. Not only that, the fan blades can also provide continuous torque."

Therefore, if the wind or rope torque starts to rotate the load clockwise, then accelerating the flywheel clockwise will tend to rotate the load counterclockwise; to get the correct speed, the load will not rotate at all.

The new technologies that Roborigger is developing include a voice operation control system and a novel data capture system that allows all load movements of Roborigger anywhere in the world to be automatically captured and recorded and accessed on the network.

In July of this year, the company opened a new manufacturing plant in Wangara, north of Perth, and expanded its scale. The facility will enable it to expand its manufacturing operations to meet the emerging demand in Europe, Japan and other markets.

Also in July, the agent JOTO Sangyo Co. Ltd announced to represent them in Japan and reached a cooperation agreement with JOTO and Sumitomo Mitsui Construction Co., Ltd., one of the largest construction groups in Japan, to use Roborigger system high-rise buildings in its SQRIM. Concrete construction method.

In September, Roborigger established an agency partnership with Ludwig System, a German-based radio-controlled crane hook manufacturer. The company will now lead the development of Roborigger's business and operations in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and Switzerland.

"We are now seeing an exponential increase in the deployment speed of Roborigger. We will involve Roborigger in the Sydney and Auckland metro projects, large projects in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, shipyards in Germany, construction of power lines and processing loads in northern Australia, and will The equipment is loaded onto the supply ship for offshore drilling," Markwell said.

Around the same time, Verton in Queensland introduced its anti-rotation underhook device. Its product is similar to a spreader beam, but contains a fast-rotating gyroscope, which is also battery-powered and remotely controlled. They are modular: several can be connected together to control the required load scale. Their brands are now the Everest series for onshore work and the Columbus series for offshore work.

Verton has also been signing contracts globally and has a good reputation. In September 2020, international heavy lifting expert Mammoet signed an agreement to introduce Verton products to customers; offshore operator Global Gravity did the same; Verton’s products have been approved for use in the oil giant Shell and have been Trial at multiple locations.

In April this year, Verton signed a contract with Red Rooster Lifting and became its first distributor in the UK. In the United States, the Crosby Group completed a major investment in the company in February of this year; the two companies will work together to accelerate the adoption of the technology. Also in the United States, Hale Steel also ordered three Everest SpinPod 7.5 for its construction work. Hale Steel used Verton's gyroscope modules to install large modular insulated metal wall panels on a project in Little Rock, Arkansas. The panels are 32 feet wide, 60 feet high, and weigh 10 tons. Hale Steel uses Verton Everest 6 lifting beams to remotely lift and accurately position concrete panels. It usually takes six days to install eight modular panels for one of the walls, but Hale can do it in three days: Verton's remote control direction means a worker can command 10 tons from a safe position 35 meters from the load panel.

In September, Indian prefabrication company Dal-Lago signed an agreement to distribute Verton products in the subcontinent. The company has received orders from the United Kingdom, Germany, the UAE, India, North America, Singapore, Malaysia and South Africa, and has signed contracts with three other distributors, and another 14 global distributors are in preparation. It also delivered two Everest SpinPod 7.5s to Danish wind turbine manufacturer MHI Vestas for deployment in the North Sea off the coast of Aberdeen.

Verton is also advancing the proof of concept of its "WindMaster", which is specifically designed to lift and orient wind turbine tower sections, nacelles and blades without slogans. The use of Verton's wind vane and gyroscope technology for load control is designed to solve key problems caused by strong winds and unstable working platforms during offshore or offshore installation and maintenance.

It seems that the orientation equipment that did not exist three years ago will join many other hook attachments and become a global standard tool.

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