Handling your steel material properly. And you can avoid all those problems by following a simple set of rules for handling steel.
Employees
The very first thing you need to make sure of is your employees’ competence. Nothing will spoil your work with steel more than incompetent workers. That’s why you need to check thoroughly who you are hiring. You should check the certificates of your employees, but if you want to make sure that everything is going to be done flawlessly or if you simply like double-checking everything, you should ask for recommendation letters from your employees’ previous jobs.
Equipment
The next thing that you need to think about when it comes to handling steel is the equipment. Here you need to make sure that you have everything from hard hats for your workers to lifting attachments. So first, you need to make sure that you have hard hats, gloves and steel-toed boots for your employees. During the working process, you need to make sure that employees are wearing them. Then you need to make sure that everything from cranes to hoists is load-rated for the work. That’s why you need load charts to be displayed to a large extent. You must also make sure that all the equipment, especially chain-shortens, is properly installed.
Transporting
You need to pay attention to the way you’re transporting steel materials. Steel is commonly transported by flatbed trucks. You must make sure that the vehicles are provided with headboards that will protect the driver from, let’s say, steel bards moving forward. The chains that used for securing the materials and tying them down to the transport must be properly checked on whether or not they are load-rated. Last, but not least, you must remember that you should never load or unload the material from the transport on an uneven surface.
Storage
Now, let’s talk about storage. First of all, you are going to save yourself a lot of time, if your employees involved with storing the material have the needful knowledge-base. They need to know everything about weight and storing the different types of steel materials. For example, round bars must be stored in racks, while large steel pipes must be stored lying flat. When it comes to the coil, you need to store larger coils should be stored beneath smaller coils. Otherwise, their weight would push and deform small coils. There are a lot of places to buy steel from, and purchasing steel is easy in general. But handling steel is an absolutely different story. Especially, when it comes to steel building materials that come in various forms. The vast array of shapes and forms of steel building materials includes squared and round bars, pipes, flat plates, beams, etc. And the wide range of the forms of steel is the reason why handling it can be so problematic. Each type of steel requires a particular method of handling, transporting and storage.
You need to keep your equipment from gliding. And sometimes it can give you a lot of headaches. You don’t want your construction work stalled because you failed in transporting or handling.
