BY: Bob Glenn, Editor and Publisher

We recently had the pleasure of speaking with three WireCo executives about several topics of interest to the lifting and rigging community, including evolving technologies in the sector, their recent product launches and manufacturing strategy, and their participation in CONEXPO-CON/AGG 2026.

(Photo above: Wire Rope Exchange photo of WireCo’s booth at CONEXPO-CON/AGG 2026)

Specifically, we spoke with:

• Dan Burch, Vice President – Marketing and Strategy
• Tim Klein, Senior Principal Engineer – Global Lifting and Fabrication
• Jim Stillwell, Marketing Manager.

Wire Rope Exchange (Bob Glenn): ConExpo is obviously a very different audience than you see at the more specialized lifting shows where you also exhibit or present. Who do you speak with there and how they are different from who you might typically speak with at more focused events?

Dan Burch: A show like ConExpo is a big branding opportunity – a product awareness and company awareness show where there are many more people who haven’t heard of WireCo, or don’t necessarily attend an AWRF (Associated Wire Rope Fabricators) or SC&RA (Specialized Carriers & Rigging Association) conference.

The main audience we talked to that we don’t normally see together are folks from the OEM’s – the crane OEM’s or other new equipment manufacturers, they are walking around at ConExpo and come into the booth and talk to our engineers and experts like Tim, while other events we frequent are more focused on the end user or on our distribution channels.

Tim Klein: It’s such a large group – we get all the OEM’s in one place and we get all of our customers and quite a few end users as well. Many people are seeking us out specifically to get information about WireCo, looking at the product family, looking at the technical information that we have available. How can we help them solve their problems and what other product offerings do we have that might provide better solutions or better life for their applications – we got questions like that.

Wire Rope Exchange: And obviously just given the scope and size of the show, I would assume you talk to a lot more people?

Tim Klein: Oh yeah! We know the OEM’s and the big players, we can go see them, but it’s a global market. To get everyone together in one place at one time over a five-day period is pretty amazing.

Wire Rope Exchange: I spoke with several WireCo representatives at your booth in addition to the three of you. Who else did you have on floor at the show?

Dan Burch: We had a pretty big crew. Our CEO, our head of sales, our head of engineering were present. Depending on the day of the week, we had 15 to 20 people on site because this show is only once every three years. It’s not only a chance to meet our customers and talk about WireCo, but also a good opportunity for people to walk around the show and learn about what else is going on in the market that you can’t really do elsewhere. It was mostly a U.S.-focused team, but we had some European colleagues here as well.

Wire Rope Exchange: WireCo was also there in 2023. Do you have a long history exhibiting at ConExpo?

Dan Burch: I know we’ve been there at least since 2017, that’s four shows. We’ve actually expanded our space over that time, moving from a smaller booth on the periphery to a larger booth in the main halls. And we also added a customer event, which we ran for the second time this year. Key customers who made the trip to ConExpo received an invitation to that event.

Wire Rope Exchange: Tim, I attended and really enjoyed your presentation in the Education track. Had you presented at ConExpo before?

Tim Klein: I had never presented at ConExpo. I did attend a prior education program there some years ago, they were doing some special sessions on wire rope, and I thought this was a really good place for the lifting community to educate users and make sure that people know the basic practices.

My presentation covered everything below the hook. We make wire rope, but we also make slings and assemblies so we’re heavily involved in the below-the-hook lifting world as well. And I chair the ASME B30.26 subcommittee, which is about below the hook rigging hardware. That gave me the opportunity to speak about all types of slings, wire rope, chain, web, and all the different types of applications that are found there.

Wire Rope Exchange: You certainly covered a lot of ground in your talk, and had even more depth in your presentation materials. The audience seemed eager to absorb a lot of material quickly, and I sensed that they appreciated your pace in covering the subject.

Tim Klein: I was looking forward to it ahead of time, and I think it was very worthwhile. There were quite a few questions from attendees after the formal session wrapped up.

Wire Rope Exchange: Let’s move on to manufacturing. At ConExpo in 2023, WireCo announced the return of some rope manufacturing back to the U.S. with a $30 million investment. In the bigger picture, are you pursuing a made in-region, for-region strategy, where North American product is largely made here and European product is made there?

Dan Burch: Yes, absolutely – that is our strategy. Supporting customers locally where they need it. Three years ago, our big story was the $30 million investment we made for manufacturing in the U.S. and Mexico. That infrastructure is now fully operational. It’s what enables us to produce Lazerlift and Boomfit in North America, along with other products that were previously made in Germany and Portugal.

For North American customers, instead of waiting 40 days for ocean freight, we either have product in stock or can ship within 48 hours. This is one of our key strategic initiatives, and it wasn’t driven by tariffs. It worked out that we were already set up to benefit from the current trade environment – many other premium rope manufacturers don’t manufacture in the United States, but we do, across our full product range. And the investment was made three years ago.

Wire Rope Exchange: Let’s talk about new and emerging technologies in your products and in the rope space generally. You launched three new products last year. What’s changing, what’s new, what challenges are you hearing from users, and how are these products intended to address those?

Tim Klein: For the lifting market, our Lazerlift non-rotating crane rope is one of the biggest products we’re promoting this year, and ConExpo served as the North American launch for it. In the lifting market, everyone is working toward higher, heavier lifts and wants to maximize rope diameter and strength.

We took proven technologies and developed Lazerlift from them. The result is an extremely high-strength rope – we’ve optimized the design, lay lengths, and all aspects of rope construction to achieve very high strength combined with excellent spooling characteristics. We’re also seeing very good drum crushing results: the rope is stable in multi-layer spooling and delivers strong fatigue performance.

The extreme test case is wind turbine installation, where ropes perform very repetitive lifts — going up heavy, coming down empty — and drum crushing and rope deformation are common problems. We’ve solved that by using a very dense parallel-laid core with our outer strands, which provides rotation-resistant characteristics while essentially eliminating drum crushing in those applications.

In the heavy lift market with large crawler cranes, we’re seeing the best performance from this product. But it’s also versatile – we’ve deployed it in tower applications and mobile cranes with good results. Overall, fatigue performance in both lab and field tests has been very impressive.

Wire Rope Exchange: So one key benefit you’re aiming for is longer lifespan?

Tim Klein: Yes, overall lifespan, but not just from normal fatigue. In the crane world, most wire ropes aren’t retired because of fatigue. They’re damaged, or you see drum crushing, or some other adverse effect from crane operation. Lazerlift addresses that directly. The construction is very stable and removes the drum crushing effect in multi-layer spooling.

Wire Rope Exchange: Tell me about the adoption of synthetic ropes in lifting applications. Back in 2017, synthetic rope was generating enormous buzz – and some were saying steel wire rope’s days were numbered. But that’s certainly not what we’ve seen. The sense we get from many discussions is that there are some applications where it makes sense, but for most lifting work, people know steel, know how to inspect it, and it’s less expensive. What’s your perspective?

Dan Burch: We do get asked about it. But the real question is whether anyone is ever going to take the leap. Some of our competitors offer synthetic rope, but I haven’t seen it deployed in anything beyond tower cranes or very small cranes. Two factors seem to hold it back: cost – synthetic is significantly more expensive — and a perception around safety. Nobody wants to be the first to put a synthetic rope up there given the perception that it’s more susceptible to cutting or damage compared to steel, whether or not that’s fully accurate.

Tim Klein: I remember those conversations from 2017 – it was the newest thing. But once the testing came in and people took a closer look, it became clear that you can’t simply swap a synthetic rope onto a crane designed for steel. The applications just don’t always align that way.

There are specific situations where synthetic works very well — offshore, for example, where you have long falls and you want to reduce the weight of the rope itself. WireCo, through Lankhorst and Phillystran here in the U.S., and through our Oliveira brand, is actually one of the largest synthetic rope manufacturers in the world.

But in construction lifting — particularly in North America and throughout Europe — steel wire rope is the preferred choice. It delivers high strength, it’s well understood, and for demanding applications like heavy multi-layer drum spooling, a synthetic rope simply won’t hold up the same way. Steel is dominant there.

That said, for applications where rope weight is a limiting factor, or where corrosion resistance is critical, synthetic is the right choice. We actually refer customers to our synthetic team when their application calls for it – weight reduction, extreme strength-to-weight needs, or corrosive environments. Steel’s advantages in crane work come down to inspectability, ease of use, performance, and cost. Wire rope is also a very mature, proven product. It has decades of standardized practice behind it, whereas synthetics in lifting applications are comparatively newer.

Below-the-hook lifting slings are now actually dominated by synthetic – chain, web, synthetic fiber slings. But for mobile crane and crane lifting operations, steel wire rope remains the preferred method.

Jim Stillwell: One area worth highlighting: we’ve had some real success developing synthetic boom pendants for the mining space. Where you’d traditionally use a steel pendant, our synthetic boom pendants developed for electric shovels and draglines significantly reduce vibration throughout the machine. The challenge is that they’re roughly three times the cost of steel. Adoption is taking time because of that, but we’ve had excellent results with the mines that have installed them.

Tim Klein: That’s a great point. On draglines especially – with those long booms, two to three hundred feet of suspension – steel ropes can start to gallop, the boom moves, and you get vibrations throughout the machine. With synthetics, that vibration is dampened. The mines are seeing less weld cracking and reduced need to take the boom down for maintenance. The data from our tests on those products was very promising.

Jim Stillwell: And the reduction in vibration for the equipment operator is significant too – it improves their working conditions considerably.

Wire Rope Exchange: What’s the latest in testing and inspection of steel wire rope? In the synthetic world, there’s some remarkable technology using camera systems and AI-driven analytics to assess a rope’s residual breaking strength within a few percent. Is anything comparable emerging for steel wire rope?

Tim Klein: That technology is definitely making its way into steel wire rope inspection, not just synthetics. What’s important to understand here is that steel wire rope is a very mature product with very well-defined retirement criteria. ASME, ISO, and other standards for the lifting world specify exactly how many broken wires are permissible over a given lay length and over the full rope. It’s black and white, with no interpretation required.

Synthetic rope retirement, by contrast, involves much more interpretation. Discoloration, fuzzy strands – one person might pass a rope and another might fail it. That ambiguity is another reason synthetics haven’t fully taken hold in the crane world.

But for steel rope on large mobile cranes – where you might have 3,000 feet of rope requiring quarterly inspection – visual inspection is extremely difficult to do thoroughly. An AI-based system that runs the rope through and captures hundreds of images per second, fully examining 360 degrees, is a massive advantage over visual inspection or tactile methods.

The potential is huge. When we first started hearing about AI, I thought it would never really enter the wire rope world, and now we’re discussing it every day. Applications range from inspecting rope at a distribution center before it ships, to annual in-service inspections on cranes. It’s going to see increasing adoption in lifting and rigging.

Wire Rope Exchange: What about magnetic resonance testing? Is that something you currently do?

Tim Klein: We do that presently at our distribution facilities, upon request. It’s not performed on every rope, but we do it for customers who ask for it.

What it provides is a baseline test at the time the rope leaves our facility, confirming there are no broken wires before it goes into service. The key advantage over current AI visual tools is that magnetic testing examines the full cross-section: the core, inside the strands, and the exterior surface. The customer can repeat the test later and compare it against that baseline to track any degradation.

What we’ve seen from AI tools so far is that they’re primarily analyzing the visual surface. They’re not yet doing internal examination. That said, most wire ropes are designed to fatigue from the outside in, so you’re going to see external broken wires first – that’s not necessarily a limiting factor for AI tools. Both technologies have a role.

Wire Rope Exchange: Tim, I understand that your role at WireCo changed recently. Can you tell us what you’re doing now?

Tim Klein: I’ve been with WireCo for 26 years, so I’ve had a hand in many different areas of the business. I’ve always been involved in the crane and lifting markets, but for the past 15 years I was focused on building our structures division.

I recently had the opportunity to step into a Senior Principal Engineer role within our lifting division. I’ve been in the role for about four or five months now and am really getting my arms around it. It’s also a global role, whereas structures was primarily North America-focused. It’s a great opportunity and I’m genuinely excited about it.

Wire Rope Exchange: Anything else to share that we did not discuss?

Dan Burch: The main thing we want people to know is that WireCo carries a full range of products across many different brands. As Tim mentioned, we sell a lot of synthetic products into different applications, and many customers buying steel rope from us don’t realize they can also source synthetic rope from WireCo. Many of our customers buy both without knowing they could get both from us.

The other point is that with our new products, we can now manufacture them here in North America. The brands people used to associate with Germany or Portugal – Casar, Oliveira – are now also being produced here in the U.S., mainly in Missouri, alongside Union. In the current global macroeconomic environment, that matters a great deal.

We extend our sincere thanks to the team at WireCo for taking time to share their perspective with us in this interview. Learn more about the company at www.wireco.com.