That 20 ton crawler gave me a wake up call about load charts

I was working a job last Tuesday over in Riverside, setting HVAC units on a new school roof. This older operator named Joe came by and told me my load radius looked off. I waved him off, thinking I had it figured out since I've run smaller cranes for like 5 years. Turned out I was about 6 feet too far out on my chart, and that unit weighed close to 18,000 pounds. If I had tried to swing it over the building like I planned, I could have tipped the whole thing. Joe saved me from a major incident, and now I double check my radius on every single pick. Has anyone else had a close call like that from trusting your gut too much?

3 comments

3 Comments

felixhenderson12d ago

What exactly did Joe catch, was it the ground condition or the boom angle that threw your radius off? I've seen @young.thomas mention he was off 4 feet, but that 6 foot gap you had sounds like a perfect recipe for disaster on a school roof with all those curbs and parapets. When you're running a 20 ton crawler, that outrigger spread changes everything compared to the smaller stuff you mentioned. Did you have your chart folded to the right page or were you working from memory like a lot of guys do?

young.thomas12d ago

Man, that's wild... did you at least buy Joe a beer? I had a similar thing a few years back with a boom truck, thought I had room to spare but my gut was almost 4 feet off on the radius.

wells.christopher12d ago

You're saying that 4 foot miss was just a gut feeling thing? I'm gonna push back on that a little bit... @young.thomas I think you're being too hard on yourself. 4 feet off on radius sounds like more than just a guess, especially on a boom truck where the chart is right there. And @felixhenderson, with all due respect, I don't buy that a gut check is always a recipe for disaster. Sometimes your experience is worth more than the numbers on a page, especially when you've run the same setup a hundred times. I've seen guys nail picks within inches just by feel, no chart, no math, just years of knowing their machine. Sure, it's risky, but acting like every miss is a disaster is how you end up overthinking simple jobs.