Lifting Equipment

Lifting Equipment Buying Guide

Start with what holds the load up. Every lift hangs from something, and what that something is routes you to a category. If the building already has steel over the work area, a runway beam, a monorail, the flange of an I-beam, you do not need a crane at all; a hoist and a trolley turn that steel into one. If there is no beam where the work happens but a wall, column, or slab can carry one, a jib crane parks a rotating boom over the spot and serves it for decades. If there is no structure at all, or the lift happens somewhere different every week, a portable gantry, davit, or shop crane brings its own frame, stands on the floor, and rolls or lifts away when the job is done. And if the load moves along the ground rather than straight up, a winch anchored to a vehicle or a fixed mount does the pulling. Settle which of those situations you are in before comparing capacities; the wrong category at the right rating is still the wrong buy.

Under existing steel: hoists, trolleys, and their accessories. When the building supplies the beam, the buy is a hoist plus the trolley that carries it along the flange, sized as a pair to the steel. The fork is power. Manual chain hoists from Bison, Harrington, CM, Chester, and William Hackett start around $175 for a half-ton block and run past ten tons; they need no power drop and suit occasional lifts, and the same page covers lever hoists for work off the vertical. Electric hoists take over when the lift repeats all shift or travels far: Harrington ER and NER production hoists, the CM Lodestar, and Bison three-phase units to 10 tons, from 115V machines under $1,000 to multi-fall hoists past $40,000. Harrington chain hoists gathers that brand's full powered line, a quarter-ton mini to 20 tons. Hoist accessories finishes the system: push, geared, motorized, and food-grade trolleys, pendant and radio controls, end stops, and the test rigs that prove a hoist still lifts what its nameplate claims.

No steel overhead: jib cranes, davits, and portable frames. When the building cannot give you a pick point, the crane brings one, and the pattern of the work picks the crane. A jib crane suits one work area served over and over: HSI freestanding jibs rotate a full circle at ratings to 10,000 lb on spans of 8 to 20 ft, and wall and column mounts sweep roughly 200 degrees where building steel can carry them. A davit crane, in the same collection, answers the opposite pattern: the same lift repeated at scattered points. It drops into a socket base, makes the pick, and lifts out, so one Thern, OZ Lifting, or REID crane serves many bases. Read its rating at your working reach; a davit's capacity typically falls as the boom extends. Portable cranes covers the frames that install nothing: REID aluminum and Vestil steel gantry cranes that straddle the load and roll on casters, from an 880 lb folding frame to an 11,000 lb system, Vestil hydraulic shop cranes for engine work, and truck-mounted cranes, including a hitch-mounted unit that hand-winches 600 lb into a pickup bed.

Pulling is not lifting: where winches fit. A winch is a drum, a rope, and gearing that multiplies effort, and the winches collection is organized around a distinction the ratings depend on: pulling duty, dragging a load across a floor or up a ramp, is not lifting duty, holding it in the air on the rope. Decide which duty you are buying for before reading a single capacity. The range runs from OZ Lifting hand and brake winches starting at $85, through geared electric power winches, to Thern piston air tuggers built for shift-long duty. Rate the pull at the rope layer you will actually use; a drum's stated capacity is usually its first layer and drops as rope stacks up. The collection also carries winch ropes, pulleys, and cable pullers, because the rope is a specification, not an accessory.

When the load defines the category: containers and stages. Two collections sort by the load rather than the structure. Container lifting equipment is the Tandemloc-led range for picking ISO shipping containers by their corner castings: lifting lugs and sling sets, spreader beams and frames that keep the pull vertical on ratings past 140,000 lb, and HTS ground skates for moving a landed box without a crane. If the load is a container, start there, not at a generic hoist. Stage hoists is the entertainment-rated corner of the hoist catalog: Harrington KREWMATE motors in 500 and 1,000 lb capacities, single-phase and three-phase, compact enough to tuck inside 12 inch truss and built to the entertainment industry's standards. Rigging over an audience is a different discipline from lifting over a shop floor, and an ordinary industrial hoist is not the machine for it.

Capacity covers the whole lift, and the structure carries the crane. Two rules hold across every collection on this page. First, rated capacity must cover everything below the pick point, not just the load. A 1,900 lb machine on a 100 lb chain hoist with 60 lb of slings and shackles is a 2,060 lb lift, which already rules out a 2,000 lb crane; total the worst case, add margin, and round up. Where a rating depends on configuration, read it at yours: davit booms derate as they extend, telescoping equipment derates extended, and a crane's rating assumes the mounting and foundation its manufacturer specifies. Second, a crane's rating says nothing about the structure it hangs from. A 5 ton hoist clamped to a beam nobody has evaluated is not a 5 ton system; the beam, wall, column, or slab must be verified for the loads, for a fixed installation by a qualified engineer. The ASME B30 series governs the equipment, B30.16 for hoists, B30.17 for gantries, B30.7 for winches, and each machine carries inspection duties that tighten as service gets heavier. Keep the rated load marked, and never exceed it.