Northern Strands delivers presentations on Safety with Rigging at the Agrium Safety Fair.  These presentations included aspects of rigging inspections, examples of rejections and the do's and don'ts of rigging safety.  Northern Strands provided a test bed to perform breaks on lifting slings as part of the presentation.

The test bed demonstration:

New web and wire rope slings ( 3/8 x 6ft and 1” 1ply and 2ply ) were supplied for demonstration. Agrium also supplied Northern Strands with 10-12 used wire rope and web slings in varying degrees of degradation. All new slings were benchmarked to have breaking load 5 x Working load limit. All new slings broke above this benchmark. The used slings broke all over the map. Some of the new slings were given a knot and then tested with an expected 50% reduction in breaking load. Slings with knots were 40% to 60% of benchmark. Hitches were also tested ( Choker style ) there were consistent breaks near calculated load. We did have a number of eye breaks on new web and wire rope slings but above projected breaking point.

Approx. 300 people attended the presentations and were very interested in the demonstration results

Some of the comments overheard were along the lines of: Who'd of thought...I didn't know that...great to see what we only read about before....guess we don't do that anymore.

The comments were very positive and it's very likely Northern Strands will be asked by Agrium to give additional presentations on Safety with Rigging at the Agrium Safety Fair next year. 

Northern Strands is proudly Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada owned and operated.