TRAINING
Which is not to say that light engineering cannot be dangerous also. “Consider a mechanic lifting an engine-block with a small gantry hoist in an auto-repair shop. Compare that with, say, big steel girders weighing perhaps 20t being lifted with an overhead bridge crane in a heavy industrial plant. The engine-block lift doesn’t seem so dangerous – but you can be just as much hurt if it falls on you.” (In June this year, a Liverpool company was heavily fined after a car fell from a two-post car lift and very seriously injured a worker who was on his break.)
“On paper, that 20t beam lift seems
more dangerous than just lifting an engine. Realistically, though, it is somewhat easier to work with steel beams. You can easily find the centre of gravity – it will be half-way along – so you know it will be balanced. It is a uniform shape, there will be obvious rigging points. And if you are working in a large steel plant or similar everyone around you will be constantly aware of safety and of all the regulations and so on. It will be part of the cultural environment. “But an engine block is not necessarily uniform. The shape is awkward. Actually figuring out how to mount it and how to make sure that you are not lifting at an angle – these things are far from obvious. That’s where we come in: with the training to give people the ability and the knowledge to be able to look at
those sorts of tasks and to be able to undertake them professionally and correctly, and with knowledge about what they are doing. “Some of our courses are ‘Lifting and Slinging Safely’, ‘Lifting Gear Examiners’, ‘Lifting Operations Instructor’, ‘Management of Lifting Operations’, ‘Safe Operation of an Overhead Travelling Crane’ and there are several others. They cover the skills field pretty well. At the moment, we are putting together a course entitled ‘Train the Trainer’, which will be essentially teaching people to give the training themselves. And, of course, maintenance is an essential part of safety. We cover that: one of our biggest areas there is on wire ropes. We have four courses on inspecting and examining wire ropes.” (For the consequences of a rope failure, see the case study in the ‘Safety’ feature elsewhere in this issue.) Carl Stahl Evita, like Konecranes, go further than the standard in their training. “When we do our ‘Lifting Gear Examiners’ course, if we have 20 delegates on that, it might be that only eight of those actually become inspectors. A lot of companies that we work with, especially the larger ones, will send their actual lifting gear operators on these courses just so they have the ability to be able to identify issues with the machinery themselves. Big companies want to make sure that any problem can be spotted as early as possible.”
And in any situation there is always the possibility of the unforeseen. “You have always got to be aware of the unexpected. The accident that catches you is none of the ones you are expecting. So that is a big thing we teach people in training as well. Not everything can always be sorted out immediately. If something cannot be stopped it is always best just to get out of the way. If an out-of-control collision is going to occur, it is going to occur regardless and you know something? You really do not want to be in the middle of it.
“Of course, if things are starting to go wrong
there is always going to be that conflict in your mind: ‘If I stop things now, the whole factory will grind to a halt. My foreman will complain, my boss is going to lose money and be cross’ and so on. There is the temptation to carry on regardless, to get the job done on time. But you have to put that out of your mind and say that safety has got to come first. And that is 100%, all the time, and every time. And we always try to put that into the mind of everyone that we deal with. “Lifting is a dangerous sector to be in, heavy lifting especially so,” explains Robinson. A damaged product can be pushed back, repaired or replaced. For people, it only takes one small mistake for something irreversible to happen.
A heavy lifting lesson at Carl Stahl Evita.
26 | November 2025 |
www.hoistmagazine.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71
