Texas-based lifting and rigging company Laguna Crane Services has used Straightpoint force measurement, load monitoring and suspended weighing load cells on a variety of projects from small industrial applications to those involving large mobile and crawler cranes with multiple chain falls.
Laguna provides training, inspection, service and parts for many different lifting and moving technologies. Jerry Lopez, the owner of the business, has charted the development of load cells over the past decade and believes Straightpoint is at the pinnacle of technological advancement, which now gives customers the ability to monitor the pick points of dynamic loads while they are being moved and relay the information 100% wirelessly to a PC.
Lopez said: “We started using load cells about 10 years ago; they were all hard-wired back then. The wireless capability has made it much safer, while data logging has made the process look very professional; it’s a massive improvement on the system which used to record information on a small paper roll. I especially like the capability of being able to capture a pull or load test on a graph as proof for the customers and their records.”
Laguna Crane Services utilizes this dynamic capability to verify the weight of the components it uses for load tests and also employs load cells in proof testing. In many cases it is too expensive or logistically challenging to transport weights to a job site so a load cell is used in conjunction with a crane to verify the weight of a component that a customer might have in their own yard.
Other industries place different demands on Straightpoint’s portfolio; for example, drilling companies use an abundance of components, all of which need to be weighed and marked so it is clear when they are applied as part of an application.
Lopez said: “On one standout application we rigged up the load cells on each corner of a drilling rig and used them to monitor the pull on each end while we skidded the rig over several feet. Using this method saved the driller a significant amount of money because they didn’t have to disassemble the rig—just disconnect it, move any obstacles safely out of the way and skid the whole rig derrick before hooking everything back up and drilling again.”
Laguna Crane Services could soon have a local Straightpoint facility to support its work with John Molidor, the general manager of the U.S. operation, acknowledging that Houston is the undisputed leader in domestic and international business. He added: “The city is also known as the ‘energy capital of the world’. Most of the industries we serve—oil and gas, shipping, wind energy and construction to name a few—are domestically headquartered in Houston. There is no better location to serve the North American load monitoring market.”
