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Rant: cherry picker arm failed mid lift over a pool
Last month I was setting a beam for a backyard patio cover and the whole load swung right over the customer's pool. The hydraulic line on my 16 ton unit blew at the worst possible moment, just hanging there like a water toy. Took me 45 minutes with a secondary cable rig to lower it down while the homeowner filmed everything on his phone. He asked if I could leave the beam as a diving board after. Has anyone else had a sudden line failure on an older rig, and how did you get the load down without dropping it?
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the_anna8d ago
One thing nobody ever talks about with old rigs is the weather that day. Heat makes hydraulic fluid thinner and puts more stress on lines that are already dry rotted. Cold does the opposite and can make the seals brittle. So if you blew a line in July at high noon, that's a whole different failure than one in November. In my experience tracking the temp and how long the unit sat in the sun before you fired it up tells you more about why it popped than the hours on the machine. Your mileage may vary but I started logging outside temp with every service and the pattern showed up fast.
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