Essential Lifting Equipment for Municipal Construction Projects

It is often the responsibility of the town (or city) government to oversee and ensure municipal construction safety, as well as providing work crews with all necessary training and equipment. To keep workers safe and projects running on schedule and within budget, having the right industrial lifting equipment is vital.

Construction Relies on Lifting Equipment

Whenever materials, equipment, or people need to be raised or lowered as part of a construction project, industrial lifting equipment is what does the job. Cranes, forklifts, boom lifts, scissor lifts, and elevators each play a vital role on most job sites and projects. However, one of the most versatile types of lifting equipment available to construction professionals is the wire rope hoist. Either manually operated or mechanically powered, wire rope hoists offer many important features and advantages that make them useful, safe, and reliable mainstays of any construction operation.

What are Wire Rope Hoists?

Known in the industry as puller hoists, come-alongs, wire lever hoists, grip hoists, or by the trade name tirfor, wire rope hoists are available in many different models and variations. But the essential mechanism is the same: a portable steel housing that attaches to an anchor point and encloses a pair of jaws that alternately grip and pull a specially engineered wire rope through the body of the hoist.

This allows for smooth, precise, reversible pulling and positioning. One set of jaws remains locked on the rope at all times to prevent slippage, and both jaws close on the rope for secure positioning when the hoist is not in operation. The wire rope affixes to a load via an integrated hook. Since the wire rope is not gathered inside the hoist, a nearly-unlimited length of rope can be used, allow lifting to be performed over great heights.

Most wire rope hoist models are hand operated. A single worker operates the hoist using an extendible lever, which can be moved from one arm of the mechanism to the other to reverse the direction of the wire rope movement. Models that use hydraulics to operate the hoist mechanism are also available, increasing the effective power (nominal capacity) of the hoist and eliminating operator fatigue.

Lifting Applications of Wire Rope Hoists

The portability and power of these hoists makes them ideal for a wide range of purposes, and their stability and precision are particularly important in maintaining municipal construction safety. Some key lifting applications in construction include:

• Materials Handling: Wire rope hoists allows a single worker to easily and safely lift and lower beams, pallets of building materials, or even vehicles and heavy equipment over nearly unlimited heights.

• Manriding: Specially certified wire rope hoist models can be used for lifting and lowering personnel to perform jobsite tasks. Proper safety harnesses, lanyards, and other personal protective equipment must always be used.

• Platform Positioning: From small swingstages to work platforms holding multiple workers, vehicles, and tons of material, multiple wire rope hoists can be positioned to lift, lower, and stably support platforms over nearly any height, making them particularly useful for use on bridges, towers, and tall buildings

Individual wire rope industrial hoist models that are manually operated have nominal capacities of up to 4 Ton/8,000 lbs, with hydraulic models providing considerably more power (7 Ton/14,000 lbs). Combining hoists into coordinated arrays and using sheave blocks, the potential  lifting capacity of wire rope hoists is exponentially greater.

Additional Construction Applications

Wire rope hoists aren’t merely industrial lifting equipment. Construction managers, civil engineers, and other professionals know how to put them to use for a range of applications:

• Demolition: Wire rope hoists can pull apart specific structure or bring down entire buildings, all from a safe distance.

• Tensioning: From fencing around a construction site to the largest suspension bridge cables, wire rope hoists’ ability to apply sustained force in any direction makes them ideal tensioning tools.

• Wire Pulling: Hoists can be used as come-alongs or tuggers to bring wire or cable through underground conduits or up to the highest floors of bridges or buildings.

Finding the Right Solution

If you are a public official, safety director, or project manager involved in municipal construction, choosing the right equipment is an important challenge of your job. By carefully choosing an experienced partner in the industry, you can be confident that the advice and information you get is reliable.

Questions? Talk to one of our safety specialists at Tractel. As the manufacturer of the original, category-defining tirfor/griphoist line of wire rope hoists, we have decades of experience in municipal construction safety equipment and regulations. With facilities around the world and unsurpassed global support, we are ready to help you with all your industrial lifting equipment needs. 

You can also visit our dedicated Municipalities page to learn more about our solutions to various applications.