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A 30 year guy told me to stop watching the load chart and start feeling the boom, and I can't stop thinking about it
Was up in Tacoma last week on a tilt up job and got paired with a guy named Ray who has been running cranes since the early 90s. We were setting panels all morning and I kept hopping out to double check my radius on the chart every single pick, and he finally asked me how long I had been doing this. When I said 6 years he laughed and said the chart tells you what the crane can do, but it does not tell you what the ground under you is doing. He talked about a job in Everett back in 2009 where the charts said he was fine and the outrigger still sank 4 inches into fill dirt because nobody flagged it. That one hit me because I trust that paper way more than I trust my own gut, and honestly I have never once walked my outrigger pads before a pick. Now I am second guessing every setup I have done in the last year wondering how many of them were fine by luck and not by me. Any of you old heads actually run by feel like that, or was Ray just showing off for the new guy?
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jones.brooke23d ago
Did you actually take him up on it and try running by feel at all? Because there's a middle ground here and Ray was pointing at it without saying it out loud. Every pick I do starts with the chart, then I walk my pads and look at what's under them, then I make the pick and listen to the crane while it comes up. If the boom flexes more than it should or the truck starts to lean, that's the crane telling you the chart missed something like soft ground or a slope. Six years in is exactly when you should be building that feel, because the book can't see the fill dirt or the old septic tank under your outrigger. So no, he wasn't showing off, he was telling you the chart is step one and not the whole job.
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