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- An overhead crane is a piece of machinery
that is used to lift a product
and move it from one spot to another.
An overhead crane is brought in for two reasons.
Efficiency and safety.
With a lot of fork truck traffic,
you're looking at a major safety issues,
in the fact that you have personnel trying to move
within the plant as well as fork trucks,
that tends to get pretty congested.
So in comes the efficiency where an overhead crane
can move from one end to another rather quickly,
and doesn't have maneuver around
any obstructions on the floor.
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Impact after putting in an overhead crane is immediate.
Your efficiency is immediately increased,
because you no longer have to deal
with the floor obstructions.
Everything can be lifted overhead,
and moved in an efficient manner.
Safety again, immediate impact.
You don't have a bunch of fork trucks running around
on the plant floor,
and your personnel can move about without having
to have that obstruction in their way as well.
With putting in a new overhead crane you'll also have
a few safety things that you need to be concerned with.
One of them being moving product over top of personnel.
That's something against all OSHA policies.
You also need to be cognizant of what that does to
change your process.
While it's easier to move materials around,
you also do need to be cognizant that there are
new concerns that you need to take into account.
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So most common applications we see.
Die handling, coil handling, general fabrication
where you are lifting parts from one workstation to another.
Welding, that is what an overhead crane
is typically used for.
Now you'll also see them in steel mills
or heavy fabrication as well,
where they're doing a lot more work.
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An overhead crane can be used both indoors and outdoors.
You'll see them even partially indoors and outdoors
for moving materials a lot of steel processing facilities
will be stocking their materials outside,
and then moving them indoors for fabrication purposes.
So they do have a versatility being used in any environment.
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Basic components of an overhead crane.
You have a bridge which moves on runway rail,
so we'll start with the runway itself.
You'll either have runway beams that have two beams that
run outermost portion of the bay,
and those are either mounted to a building column
or on its own separate sister column.
So with those runway systems,
you also have header support beams.
You can have kicker beams that are used for support.
The bridge itself is carried with what we call end trucks,
and those are again used to run on top of those rails
back and forth down the length of the bay.
The bridge beam itself is what spans the bay,
and that we call a bridge girder.
Now that could be a single or double girder
meaning one or two beams, for the hoist to ride on.
Hoist itself is actually the piece that does the
mechanical lifting.
That can be manual powered, it can be electrical powered,
or even air powered.
The piece that carries the hoist back and forth
across the girder is called the trolley.
So the hook is attached to the hoist by a wire rope or chain
and that is what is used to attach to the load
and do the lifting.
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So a good place to start with regards to determining
the style of crane you need is how is it mounted.
You can have an under running crane that is mounted to a
building structure that doesn't actually have
columns to support it,
it uses the building structure to hang from.
What you have to account for in that is whether
the building is designed to actually support it.
You can still do an under running crane,
but if the building is not able to support it,
then a whole structure is needed.
From there you'd look into a top running crane
which allows you to have a little bit more hook height
than an under running,
because there is no support header above the crane,
to support it.
So the real thing you want to look into
is whether your building can support,
whether you have the floor space to support it,
and then how important is that hook height
that you guys are looking to attain.
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