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That moment when your main hoist cable decides to retire mid-lift
So I was running a 150-ton crawler crane on a site in Tacoma last Thursday, lifting a big steel beam. We were about 40 feet up when I heard this loud pop and a twang from the boom. My heart just dropped. I looked up and saw a single wire on the main hoist cable had snapped and was sticking out like a bad hair. I stopped everything right then. We had to lower the load real slow with the aux hoist, which was a tense 20 minutes. The foreman came over and said, 'Well, that's your sign to call it a day.' We swapped the whole cable section that afternoon. It was a good reminder to check those cables every single morning, even when you're in a rush. Has anyone else had a cable give you a warning shot like that before it fully let go?
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wren_rodriguez2d ago
Hearing that pop at 40 feet up would have made my blood run cold. I can't believe you saw the single wire sticking out like that, a clean break before the whole thing went. @johnh82 is right about that death rattle, it's the only warning you get. I saw a cable on a truck crane fail once, but it just gave a weird groan and went slack. No pop, nothing. You got lucky it gave you that one wire signal so you could stop everything. Lowering with the aux must have felt like forever.
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