Wälder Chains in Action: The Construction Industry

Anyone who has ever worked on a construction site will know about the rough everyday conditions in that business. That is why those of our chains which are designed for lifting loads always have a calculated fourfold safety margin – verified through appropriate load pallets to prove the reliability and load-bearing capacity of products made by Ketten Wälder. Nevertheless, there may be cases when chains are exposed to extreme strain and our safety reserve is stressed to the limit. Now what possibilities are there to find out whether or not the chain sling has been overstrained – and whether a safety risk may thus have been produced? There are two good possibilities of testing this – and one excellent one:

Possibility 1:
You go to the manufacturer, leave your chain there for inspection, and get a new one right away in order to avoid idle times at the construction site.

Possibility 2:
You call an inspection service to the construction site and have the appropriate safety check performed there.

Possibility 3, offered by Ketten Wälder, the chain professional:
Wälder GH and EH lifting hooks have two test points showing a maximum value in millimetres which must not be exceeded. Should this happen, then you will know that the hook – and thus usually the chain as well – has been overstrained and must be sorted out.

Rough forces are also involved when sheet-pile walls are rammed into the ground. It may well occur that the eyes on sheet-piles exceed standard size. If, however, eyes have been widened too far, there is a risk that the fasteners of the sheet-pile chains become inadvertently undone and panels topple or come crashing down. Here, too, we had the appropriate idea for a solution: Using a longer fastener has closed this safety gap quickly and reliably.

Another example of a good solution made by Ketten Wälder is the case of a formwork maker who had manufactured special hooks which were to be connected by means of high-strength chains. The first idea, of course, was to use standard connecting links. But the connecting links needed were not to exceed a specified external width, so that narrower, specially made links had to be welded in. Which was no problem for our individual-link welding, hardening and tempering station. For our customers’ problems are the most beautiful things to challenge our inventiveness.