Welding Tips and Tricks

Had some out of service tugger davits laying around the back of the shop that were going to be cut up for scrap, the shop mechanic is always tying up the fork lift moving compressors around so we decided to kill 2 birds with one stone, had to purchase the casters (7000lb, 3T beam trolley and 3T chain fall), had the I beams laying around for the top and bottom

2days later we have a 12ft tall x 10 wide portable gantry that will lift and travel with a 4000lb compressor, all welds were with 045 dual shield,

Had fun and got some of the young tenders involved learning to cut, prep and fit up larger members we work with daily

Mike

I love this rebirthing materials into something really useful. Great job.

As a certified overhead crane inspector, I have to ask if that was built to ANSI B.30 requirements?

Don't answer. Just consider if OSHA saw it, and asked where the engineering drawings and other paperwork for it were.

I know the tugger has documentation, but the new gantry is a scratch-build, and won't fly if there wasn't an engineer involved.

That said, that's great work!

Steve S

Nice looking job for a scrap built project - liability / testing issues aside though I'm slightly worried that for it's height there appears no bracing to keep the legs upright ?

It looks like a great device, but I too wondered what keeps the legs from spreading? I would like to see some triangulation bracing or similar to prevent this.

Pretty cool.

The insurance liability would be a nightmare if someone ever got hurt or worse.

On closer examination, that does not appear to be larger than a 2t chain-fall, so the gantry is overbuilt enough to excuse the lack of rack-bracing, on perfectly smooth surfaces. Should a caster hit a rock and the load swing, one might wish some rack-bracing, but it does not appear "speed" is the objective.

I misread the original post... I thought he was using the tuggers. On a re-read, only the davit is being repurposed, and from the look of it, the chain-fall is far below the capacity of the rest of the structure.

This does not exempt one from liability issues, but greatly reduces the risk of facing them.

Steve S

Nice work! Heavy duty! In fact, everything in that shop looks heavy duty!


From comments, however, it is true that without some OSHA documentation, etc. that the project can be rejected. I am running into that here at my school. I need to build a material rack, but instead I have to purchase one. What a load of crap. My rack; which will duplicate those I have built before, will take up less room, cost less and be far more functional than anything 'approved' that I can buy.
Gary

They made special carts at our shop for moving big valves between tri tool stages. They designed it in the shop and made one. Then they got an engineer to check his magic charts and give it his blessing. Then they were allowed to paint a weight rating on it. That made osha happy.