For work environments that deal with industrial equipment, regular maintenance is a vital safety precaution. A crane is typically highly useful but also extremely dangerous. Therefore, ensuring you maintain your crane's chain hoist is crucial in offering a safe working environment for your workers. Besides, regular maintenance of your crane ensures it functions more efficiently. 

Continue reading this post for four safety and maintenance tips for your crane chain hoist:

Understand the Most Common Chain Hoist Problems

Before maintaining your crane's chain hoist, learn how it works to identify factors affecting its effectiveness. Your crane might use a lever rachet, hand chain or differential hoist. These three hoists use specific combinations of hooks and chains for lifting and moving objects. While this equipment uses a rotating chain to function, it may experience wear and tear on the chains. As a result, regular maintenance is necessary to extend the overall lifespan of the equipment.

Lubricate and Clean Your Chains

Chains will experience accelerated wear due to rust and debris, which makes them stiff and rigid and impedes smooth motion. To clean some hoists, you need to dismantle them first, which may be a challenging task. however, doing this at least once per year will be helpful, depending on how you use your hoist. 

Perform Regular Inspections of Your Hoist

Regularly testing and inspecting your industrial chain hoists is not only an excellent practice but also a mandatory requirement by the government. As a result, you must check your equipment daily to ensure it's operating as required. Besides, you need to conduct a more comprehensive inspection of your chain hoist every month and document all the findings. Audits help identify potential problems and fix them in advance. 

Conduct Appropriate Testing on Your Hoist

Besides inspecting your chain hoist, ensure you conduct regular tests to determine whether it's functioning appropriately. It's essential to perform load tests quarterly to observe how your equipment performs when lifting different loads. Additionally, ensure you test your chain hoist every six months or so to determine its ability to handle and lift heavy loads. The purpose of these tests is to determine how well your crane hoists will function under different conditions, and it helps reveal various performance problems.

Final Thoughts

Crane chain hoists are vital equipment and are useful in different lifting projects. Hence, you want to make sure proper safety and maintenance of this equipment to extend its lifespan and protect those using it. You may also want to purchase high-quality replacement parts from a reputable supplier to guarantee quality repairs.

Contact a company that sells lifting chain equipment to learn more.