Hello John, you bring up a very good point with your description of working with beams. I myself have been in various shops and worked under different types of conditions where beam work has been handled in a variety of ways. Obviously the larger and heavier beams pose a challenge when you are trying to roll them to accomplish various tasks relative to layout, hole drilling, addition of connection plates, welding, etc. It almost sounds as if maybe you should don a video production hat and come up with some footage to get your point across(you may even end up with a second career). There are some beam glomers and beam clamps that are designed for those types of lifting purposes, that are commercially available and designed for the cases that you have described and then of course, as you described you can also rig a set of chains to accomplish the job. On smaller beams, I have seen a tool used that I would describe as a "beam turn", it is a piece of pipe, tubing, or other shape that is used as a handle with a plate welded to the end of it that has a series of slots cut out at various angles to the handle. It can be positioned to allow the user to slide the slot of the tool over the flange of the beam and roll it over (you have to use great care to make sure that when the beam rolls that you aren't in a pinch point as it goes over). You also mentioned metal saw horses, my experiences have been with many variations of that same basic scenario. Of course room is always an issue when you are trying to accomplish beam work, you never have enough. One of the most productive set-ups that I ever worked with on beam fabrication, was in a converted aircraft style hangar building. It had 80ft. door openings and was roughly 100ft. x 300ft. in length. We were able to set-up rails that were approximately 15 to 20ft. apart and about 40ft. long. On these rails we would bring the beams in and spread them out with enough space between them to allow for them to be rolled. You could then have a man working on making the layouts for holes and copes and plate locations, another man coming behind him to do the torch coping and grinding, another one to drill holes, yet another to tack on connection plates, etc. and then finish out with welding. This system wouldn't work for all types of beam fabrication, but for some it was definitely the ticket. The other nice thing about this particular set-up was having 3 CAT 30,000 lb. forklifts to move material. As you know John, most fab shops never have enough cranes and someone is always using the one that you need, when you need it. Please forgive me I got to rambling. Regards, Allan

Hi JW!

Here's a site you might want to take a look at that imght help:
http://safety.1800inet.com/product.php/name/rigging_safety_booklet/products_id/3928?twss=8a32404e0c13ca4bb8f57ba5bd5b782f

This is their homepage, and they do list a workplace rigging safety video, and rigging safety workbook to use for training purposes. Take a good look at the whole site because who knows, you might find what you're looking for in one of the other subjects listed also. You might want to look under crane safety & hoist safety training in the above site also. At the very least, it'll give you some idea's on making your own training materials.

Respectfully,
SSBN727
Run Silent... Run Deep but, not too Deep to lose control of the load you're lifting!!!