Saturday Night Chop & Weld Shop

This weeks diary will be on an overhead crane.

The exhaust specailty shop I was working at in 2005 needed a way to lift the dies for the bender onto the machines. Steve the owner was going to add a new machine to the one he already owned.

Steve had been planning this for a while. His father found an old building with an overhead crane in it. The building was going to be demolished so he unbolted the rails & beams.

Make the jump please.

The main beam was like 25' long. In the picture you can see it fit just right. The light blue machine is the old bender.
The area the crane covers is 45' x 25'.

One rail is hung from the building poles that hold the roof beams up. It's 45' between those 2 poles. You can see that we put supports to hold the beam in place.
You can also see that the other rail has poles.  So on one end of the traveling beam hangs from the roof. On the other it rides ontop of the beam.
The beam that it rides on top of is against the wall. On the other side of that wall the roof support poles are 7' from the wall. We cut holes in the wall & connected that beam to those two roof support poles.
The beam sits on 4 poles. The 2 center poles are also supported with tubing to the roof beam. I'm trying to show that there's plenty of support holding this sturcture in place.
The traveling beam had 5 or 6 coats of pain on it. I used sandpaper disc & grinders to remove the paint.
As much as I hate painting I painted all the beams & tubing connected to the project.

In the second picture you can see a yellow airline. Steve likes air hoist.
So I made brackets to connect the air lines to the beams. We ran a cable for those lines to travel on.

These other 2 pictures are of the new bender.

This machine will bend anything from 1 3/4" to 6" pipe. The dies are big bucks.

The max weight they will lift is around 500#'s.

This is a short diary so I'll add 2 pictures of how I ran the electric, air & internet connections to the new bender.

The service to the new bender needed to be put under the floor. There is a steel rack & saw about 15' away. If we would have hung the service down from the roof it would have made the steel rack a pain in the neck to load & unload material. So I channeled the floor & made a nice lid. I got all the stainless from the scrap yard!! So I was recycling :=).

It took me a week to get the new bender in place with eletric & air. I built a dip pan for it also. The electric was already inplace in the overhead. The air line was right there also so those connections were easy to make up.

For those of you that have worked with airlines before, the lines in the building are the high dollar push on connectors. To add a new connection you drill a hole & put a clamp on fitting. It can be done in 10 minutes. Very nice design. Also very expensive. I ran all the airlines in the building from the get go.