ELECTRIC CHAIN HOISTS
HOISTS OUTSIDE THE BOX
Turkish manufacturers CMAK are now developing a new type of electric chain hoist. According to CMAK, it comes from rethinking the chain hoist from scratch. “For years, we accepted the same trade-offs that every other hoist manufacturer accepts, but about 18 months ago, we stopped accepting them. We threw out assumptions we had held for years. The result is a product unlike anything currently on the market.” The particular failure mode they addressed stems from the environment. The particular assumption that they threw out is ventilation. “Ask any operator, site engineer or maintenance manager what kills a chain hoist, and you will get the same answer: the environment. Water. Dust. Chemical vapour. Temperature swings. “These are not edge cases of failure. They are the daily reality on construction sites, offshore platforms, steel mills, chemical plants and food processing facilities around the world,” says CMAK. “And yet the dominant design approach for decades has been to build a hoist with ventilation openings for the motor: a fan, airflow slots, gaps in the housing to cool it. The aim then is try to protect those openings with filters and seals.” That approach works, they say, in a clean workshop. “It does not work reliably in the
real world. And the field data shows it. The most common causes of chain hoist failure in industrial environments are motor winding failure from moisture ingress, bearing contamination from airborne particles and control system faults triggered by water or conductive dust. Every one of these failure paths starts at an opening in the housing. We kept asking: why does the opening have to be there?” The company’s engineering team tried to answer that question. It sounds simple but turns out, they said, to be surprisingly difficult: “What would it take to build a hoist with no openings at all? The answer was: it would require rethinking almost everything.” The motor; the thermal management; the structural approach; the manufacturing
process; indeed the architecture of the entire product all needed to be changed. It was far from clear that it was possible at all to maintain duty-cycle performance without active cooling. “It turned out that it was difficult, but it was not impossible.” The CMAK team believe that they have succeeded. They are not ready to release the full details, but they are saying this: “The new durable electric chain hoist is designed around the idea that the enclosure itself is not a cosmetic shell but instead it is a functional engineering component. The housing does work. It manages heat. It provides structural integrity. It eliminates the gap between the hoist’s internal environment and the hostile external one.” The result is a product that achieves full IP66 protection against water jets from any
direction and does so not through elaborate sealing workarounds, but because the design has no pathways for contamination to enter in the first place. “It is rated for FEM 2m continuous duty operation. It runs a Class H insulated motor. And it does all of this without a fan. There is no fan. No filter. No ventilation openings. Just a sealed, passively cooled system engineered to work harder, for longer, in conditions where conventional hoists give up.” Chain hoists aren’t glamorous. They don’t attract much attention or engineering
investment. The result is an industry where the dominant products have remained unchanged for decades. “We think this product proves it does not have to be that way.” The thermal management strategy, the structural architecture, the testing programme and the performance data of the new hoist will be revealed by CMAK in the coming weeks, as will the product itself, its name, its full specification and how to get one.
One company that has embraced RFID technology is Tiger Lifting. Their products are now equipped with RFID chips which are fully compatible with RiConnect’s Compliance Management System. RiConnect is a global provider of cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) and is dedicated to simplifying and digitalising the processes around compliance and traceability for equipment management. “By moving to paperless systems, companies can improve the accuracy of maintenance, safety checks, incident reports and regulatory compliance, while ensuring seamless information sharing,” says RiConnect. RFIDS are also extremely helpful in ensuring regulatory compliance; RiConnect’s suite of RFID-related solutions includes Digital Product Passports, (DPPs), to confirm product compliance to the European Union’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR). (The regulation came into force in July last year.) According to Hugh Todd, sales manager at Tiger Lifting, “RiConnect’s technology represents the best digital package on the market. We are seeing more and more demand for DPPs, which is why our whole range now comes with digital functionality. Our customers are driving demand and, with ESPR, we are ahead of the curve.”
Staying compliant Full traceability helps ensure not only quality of components but also compliance with industry standards and regulations, both national and international, and of manufacturing processes as suppliers and clients move towards net zero in their operations. “In an industry where non-compliant products can easily enter the market from importers, it is vital that end users know that the products they are using comply to standards,” says Todd. “Our customers can now access complete historical information, real-time data, and achieve Net Zero goals.” Many other manufacturers use RFID. The Crosby
group, for example, have a new addition to their RFID tag family called Quic-tag. It can come factory-embedded into their products or can be retrofitted – they have tags designed to be fitted securely to chains, to wires, to synthetic slings and others. Green Pin similarly have them for slings and shackles; Konecranes use them as part of their crane and hoist inspection service. William Hackett are another company whose
products are RFID-embedded. Benefits, they say, are many: “For example, a lifting technician can scan a chain sling’s RFID tag with a mobile app, and the system instantly displays its latest inspection record and confirms it is in compliance. If not, the item can be flagged, isolated and reported in seconds – without paperwork or delay.” The company’s Hack8 and Hack10 chain assemblies now come RFID enabled, readable with the William Hackett app which is downloadable to a smartphone. The basic chain hoist, therefore, is becoming very much less basic. If a chain and a motor are at the heart of it, smart electronics are transforming it into an extremely sophisticated smart lifting machine.
26 | July/August 2026 |
www.hoistmagazine.com
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