Outrigger Pads for Your Safety

For house renovation or construction requiring heavy equipment, make sure you have outrigger pads to ensure your safety. These pads provide durable 1-inch thick, high density protection against corrosion and different weather conditions. It also provides a stable and safe platform on both aerial and ground equipment. These include mobile cranes, concrete pumps, and mill projects.

Outrigger pads for mobile cranes

When using mobile cranes for your projects, it is advisable to check out the riggers. Make sure they provide a solid platform for the mechanism’s safe operation and efficient use. Check the radius within the crane. You should also check out the placement of the barriers to make sure the pads fit the tools you need to use. Make sure you have enough cribbing under outrigger pads to support the crane and load weight. Check the materials you need to load or unload. Knowing how much weight you need to exert on the outriggers is important to maintain the crane in a level condition and to ensure it has proper support.

How to calculate outrigger pad loading

When working with a hydraulic truck crane, you cannot rely on the tires to keep the vehicle and the load completely stable, especially during the lifting operation. Remember that most trucks employ outriggers, which provides balance and stability to keep the crane from leaning too much to one side. The problem is most users assume that the weight of a load on a crane may equally distribute across all four pads. You need to calculate the potential force that will be exerted on one pad before deciding whether or not it is safe to perform the operation. You may follow these steps to get the right pads for your projects:

Step 1: Add the weight of the crane to the weight of the load you need to lift to get the total weight you need to load or unload on the pads. It doesn’t matter if you are using the metric or English standard systems.

Step 2: Multiply the square root of the radius of the pads by “pi” to obtain its surface area. Remember, the radius of the pad is equal to half of its diameter. Use the same system of measurement, metric or English standard you used in “Step 1.”

Step 3:  Divide the weight you had in “Step 1” by the surface area calculated in “Step 2” to obtain the total potential load that will be exerted on one of the outrigger pads, either in pounds or kilograms. If the crane is not rated to handle this amount or more, choose bigger pads.
You must also avoid point loading. The pads must be built-up to fully transfer the load to the entire supporting surface area.

These are just some of the things you need to know about outrigger pads. You may middlesexmill.com.au  to know more about its specific types and functions.