Crazy securement you have seen?

Huh? Cool, what do they do, strap through as much as they can from one end, lift n shift for a proper strap up? Only time i go tight together is when o know there is a fork on the other end, if its a crane pick i go t boards....

 

Usually it gets lifted by the wires that are used to bundle the rebar together. Some places use a combination of a hook and a chain, where they push a hook through the wire, lift it, then loop the chain underneath it. I think they are supposed to set it back down and take the hooks out so the chains are lifting instead of the hooks, but they usually just use the chains as a safety in case the hooks slip.

Other places I've been to have chains with no hooks on the end that get slipped through the wires, then they go back up to a hook on another chain at the top. When there isn't room they use a pry bar to pry the wire out a little bit so they can fit the chain through.

Honestly, though, if you just have them laid flat it would be pretty easy to use a pry bar to separate them enough to get the chain around them if that's what they want to do. I've seen that done with I-beams, they just used a pry bar and pushed them apart a little bit, got the chains around them and lifted.

 

Ive used my winch bar to separate cast or pvc, but nothing that weighted more that 1500 lbs or so, i dont do rebar, i assumed you couldn't get either enough force or contact patch to budge em... learn every day..

 

T Boards I'd the way to do it for lazy/stupid customers that are crane offloading. A decient crane operator just wraps the crane around the corner of the bundle as much as he can, lifts, shifts the bundle, and then grabs the whole bundle.

Shippers and customers are doing this out of pure laziness and putting it on us because no matter how much more work it is for us to secure or in this case how illegal it is, someone will haul it.

I refused a load like this recently. Now I know how I could have secured it but this crap won't stop until we stop hauling it but as I said, someone will always haul it.

I've contemplated pre cutting my own 2X4s for T blocks and just carrying them with me but it just seems like I'd have to carry so much when it's the shipper that should be supplying them.

 

I'm a new chain slinger but I think I would have run a strap over a single bundle then under the rest and do that for each one. Probably on the front and back, then some on top like he did? I know running it under will try to pull up when tightening...but that does not look kosher just with them all on top. Or put dunnage on top and run the straps over that to try to get some kind of down pressure on the middle bundles. And could you not cinch the front and still have a spacing all the way down the rest of the trailer for the crane?

 

That's the way it was explained to me. @Dye Guardian has some pictures of that method in action.

Oh and just to beat the nay sayers to the punch. Flatbedding comes with homework.

 

You probably would't be able to do it with a winch bar, but with a pry bar it's pretty easy. Rebar slides along the dunnage pretty easily.

 

That's just union talk and/or lazy crane operators.

We have steel tube customers that get loads of bundled square tube pushed all together, nice and tight, and they use a 5 foot long pry bar to separate one end, then use the crane to lift it up, swing it out, then back in, and it frees up space on the opposite end.

T-blocks are the best solution though.

 

Just go around a couple of good sharp curves, and if they didn't break the straps or flip the trailer, they should now be nicely bunched up for a proper tiedown...