PLASMA® 12 Strand Slings with adjustable cut guard


C


huck Farmer was leaving West Virginia on the road to the annual Workboat Show in New Orleans as he recalled the story that led to his recent recognition as the 2012 Miner’s Celebration Award winner for Equipment Innovation. A Petroleum Engineer by training, he had worked on drilling rigs


for 20 years of his young life that took him all over the world, and on some of the largest offshore drilling platforms from jack ups, to semisubmersibles, to drill ships on three continents. When an opportunity to get off the non-stop drilling treadmill came along, Farmer came back to West Virginia in 1993, and went to work for a logging supply outfit that fabricated, in addition to logging wire rope and chain assemblies, standard rigging chokers. “Tis is where I first learned how a sling, chain and wire rope assemblies, which I had used in the oilfield, could be made,” recalls Farmer. “I doubled that gentleman’s business and by the end of the year, he couldn’t pay me the agreed upon commission so he let me go… probably not a good idea,” he adds.


Farmer took what he had learned that year and Rouster Logging Supply, Inc. was born. With a little money, an old pickup truck, a couple of trusting friends and family members, Farmer got started in the logging and rigging industry. Rouster had humble beginnings, starting in a one-car garage, not unlike a few others in the rigging industry. Load the truck, deliver goods in the day, take orders, go home and work all night to make assemblies and load the truck was the normal cycle each day. A combination of a down turn in the logging business in the late 1990s due to over regulation, and a steady growth in Farmer’s industrial and commercial business, (which included the purchase of an old 500 ton Esco press from Billy Crowe down in Tampa and the proximity to a few hydraulic test beds regionally) led to a name change, Rouster Wire Rope and Rigging, Inc. in 2004. Rouster had tried to introduce HMPE (High


Modulus PolyEthylene) fiber ropes for the logging business, but between the price being 5-6 times the price of swage rope, and the ruggedness of the terrain, there were no takers. Rouster continued testing, breaking,


fabricating and manipulating the HMPE ropes for rigging and lifting. Trough that testing, and before they went to market, Rouster had to prove that what the manufacturers were publishing about these fibers was true. One-seventh the weight and generally stronger than the same size wire rope, and that the splices developed 100% of the strength of the oldest piece of rope in the splice, just did not seem possible to Farmer. “It didn’t take long to understand that not only was the published data generally true, but other, equally important, physical characteristics of these ropes emerged that become important to the mining industry, and especially to the betterment of the health and welfare of the miners themselves” Farmer notes. As Farmer explains, “we could not break all 12 strands at once in tension. Generally, only in a shock load could we induce immediate failure. But just like in the slow increasing tensional load to failure test, all 12 strands would not break all at once but would break individually until one or two strands left would string out to fail last and allow the material to basically lie down and not whip


WIRE ROPE EXCHANGE JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2013 23


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