Choosing Reliable Lifting Equipment for Challenging Worksites

Standard lifting equipment often breaks down in the rough conditions of mining and marine environments. 

And it’s easy to see why.

Deep-sea mining equipment deals with 0.6 tonnes per square centimetre of pressure, and underground mines expose your gear to moisture and abrasive substances. It’s a lot of wear and tear that standard equipment just isn’t designed to handle.

To meet these extreme operational requirements, you'll need better materials, precise engineering, and a specialised design for your equipment. And at RUD Chains, we engineer our products specifically for these harsh environments.

In this guide, we’ll explain why standard equipment fails in threatening conditions. Plus, we'll explore different corrosion-resistant solutions. You'll also learn about practical methods for selecting reliable lifting gear.

Ready to improve your challenging worksite operations? Let’s begin.

Defining Needs for Worksite Lifting Equipment

Worksite lifting equipment refers to any machinery or device you use to lift, lower, and secure heavy loads in industrial applications. These operations include construction sites, mining facilities, marine installations, and manufacturing plants. You can’t handle the weight or size of materials and equipment with manual labour here.

We’ll now describe how various conditions can damage your traditional lifting equipment.

The Challenge of Corrosion in Marine Lifting

Lifting equipment corrodes quickly in marine settings because the high amount of salt in seawater speeds up rust and corrosion. Regular steel chains and hoists just won’t cut it here.

Not only that, but when this seawater dries up, it creates salt crystals. They produce spots of concentrated damage in joints and tight spaces. Sea spray, changing humidity, and temperature changes altogether will destroy your equipment in no time.

If you've ever noticed that your equipment tends to rust up quickly when working in the sea, now you know why.

The Demand for Heavy-Duty Mining Gear

In mining sites, your lifting equipment endures brutal physical stress in many ways. For one, dust and mineral particles constantly scrape coatings off your gear. Then you have rock particles, which cut and scratch equipment surfaces via continuous contact.

It’s also worth noting that crusher parts and ground tools in your mining sites go through huge material loss. As you can see, standard lifting equipment cannot handle these conditions.

Selecting High-Grade Chain Slings and Points

The harsh environments we just talked about should tell you one thing clearly: you need particular equipment to do your work under these circumstances.

So, let us introduce you to our specialised chain slings and lifting points. They’ll solve your problems through their advanced materials and specified engineering design. Keep reading to learn what makes them special and what their advantages are.

The Advantage of Versatile Lifting Points

At RUD Australia, we have over 700 lifting point options. This range of choice guarantees that you are likely to get the exact solution according to your requirements. And if you’re wondering what makes our gears special, here you go:

• Permanent Fixtures: Our weldable points stay firmly connected to your loads. It means they eliminate the risk of connections loosening during lifting, rotating, or turning operations.

• Flexible Applications: You can mount and remove our boltable points as you need. They can handle up to 250 tonnes (WBPG Hoist Ring) and work with all standard threads, including metric, pipe, UNC, and UNF.

• Safe Alignment: Rotating designs on certain products ensure you don’t face any dangerous side-loading incidents. These points automatically align with the pull direction during multi-strand lifts. It reduces stress and improves the safety margins of your equipment.

Reliable lifting points keep your job moving. Without them, you risk costly downtime.

Why Advanced Material is Important for Heavy-Duty Chains

We already told you that regular chains easily break down under extreme conditions. That's why we’ve developed VIP and ICE chains with patented materials. These quality products can directly prevent your standard chains from getting destroyed in mining and marine sites.

Our advanced materials give you these three real-world advantages:

1. Higher Strength: RUD Australia’s ICE Grade 120 chains offer 60% more breaking force than Grade 80 chains. It means you can lift the same loads with smaller, lighter chains that reduce weight by 30% and improve handling ergonomics.

2. Temperature Resilience: Both VIP and ICE chains work safely from -60 degrees Celsius to +300 degrees Celsius, depending on their model. This extreme temperature range can handle Arctic conditions and high-heat industrial processes without losing strength.

3. Visual Safety Cues: Our VIP chains use fluorescent pink, while ICE chains use ICE-pink (also known as traffic purple). Both chains turn brown-black as a visual warning when the temperature goes over 300 degrees Celsius. The colour change tells you that the chain’s strength has reduced, and you need to replace it immediately.

RUD Australia’s Customised Solutions and Testing Services

When you’re working on complex projects, standard products won’t cut it. You’re going to need products specifically designed to fit that specific situation and its working conditions. That’s when custom engineering becomes important for solving your problems.

Let’s go through how our custom solutions and testing services work.

Engineering Your Unique Lifting Application

RUD's in-house engineers work with clients from the concept stage to the completion stage to deliver solutions for unique challenges. And after the conceptual modelling and designing process, the engineering team works with the production team to manufacture custom lifting products.

This collaborative approach means you get equipment designed specifically for your application requirements rather than compromising with generic alternatives.

The Assurance of Rigorous Quality Control

All of our products undergo strict internal quality-control measures that exceed standard requirements. How do we do it? With two 200-tonne tensile and a 500-tonne test bed for comprehensive load testing. You can find them both at our facilities in Brisbane. 

And if you’re worried about the certifications of our products, know that RUD's quality control systems are serious about it. Our certifications include ISO 9001 for quality management, ISO 14001 for environmental management, and AS 45001 for occupational health and safety.

These certifications show that we maintain a systematic approach to quality, environmental responsibility, and workplace safety. It also means our equipment performs reliably.

Your Solution to Reliable Extreme-Condition Lifting

You need to do three things to operate your lifting operations in extreme conditions successfully. First, you should know about specific environmental challenges. Second, select advanced materials and hardware engineered for those conditions. And finally, you have to partner with experts who provide custom solutions.

In this article, we've covered how marine and mining conditions destroy your traditional equipment. We also talked about RUD VIP and ICE chains and explained the engineering system we have to provide you with custom solutions.

Visit RUD Australia's website today to browse our complete range of equipment and keep your projects running safely and profitably.