Custom Forklift Attachment Enhances Stamping Plant Productivity

Imagine your job involved being lifted to the edge of an 11- or 12-foot-high railroad car, then passing a sling through a very large object and attaching it to a hook.

“I put myself in the railcar to experience it from the rigger’s viewpoint, and it wasn’t pretty,” says Ken Jurgensmeyer, manufacturing operations director at MiTek USA’s stamping plant in Tampa, Fla.

Every year, MiTek takes delivery of 55,000 tons of master coils, wide rolls of steel slit into narrower coils. Each 11-to-12-ton coil must be lifted from the railcar and moved into inventory. Until recently, the process required three people: two lift truck drivers in addition to the person perched precariously at the railcar.

“We used a 35,000-lb Taylor TH350 lift truck with a wire rope sling strapped over the center of 6-ft-long forks,” says Jurgensmeyer. “We’d make the connection by manually passing it through the coil’s eye and attaching it with a swivel hook. We often had to lift at an angle because of how far away we sometimes had to position the forklift. Once we picked the coil, it was taken to the loading dock and awkwardly swung into position so a second lift truck could move it onward.”

International deliveries are trucked to the plant, but domestic steel comes by train. Each railcar contains six or seven coils and a train might have six cars. Longer trains with up to 94 coils a week have begun coming in from domestic suppliers who want them back as soon as possible, requiring increased throughput.

“Someone could’ve been injured, so our first priority when Ken contacted us was designing a system that eliminated manually rigging the load,” says Dan Mongan, special application support/new product development specialist for Caldwell Group Inc., a lift manufacturer in Rockford, Ill. The result was a 24,000-lb-capacity forklift attachment supplied by Certified Slings & Supply, a Caldwell distributor in Tampa, that MiTek calls the master coil lifter.

“Coils can shift during transit, so they’re very close to each other,” says Mongan. “For the grab to fit, the lifting shoes pivot and the legs are very thin. We were also able to speed production considerably. Even the transfer to the second lift truck is improved because we lower the coils onto a frame from which they’re easily picked.”

What used to take all day is now done more safely in less time with fewer people. Unloading a railcar takes 20 minutes instead of one hour and no longer requires a rigger beneath the forks.

Jurgensmeyer’s team introduced the attachment to MiTek locations worldwide, and a plant in Phoenix has had similar safety and efficiency gains.

www.caldwellinc.com

Caldwell Group, 4080 Logistics Parkway, Rockford, IL 61109, 815-229-5667, www.caldwellinc.com.

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