I guess it depends on what they are lifting, how much they are lifting. We did it when I worked at the Cat dealer. Get some eyebolts and cut the thread off and weld them to some pipe plugs or other odd things in order to pick up some of the light duty stuff that Caterpillar builds. Oddly enough none of us were anything near professional welders at the time and luckily nothing ever broke! Doing it for somebody to use then you are lucky enough to be responsible! I suppose the other thing is rating them, just things that popped into my head. As far as what we did, was it right? Were the eyebolts weldable? Don't know, we did it though and supervisors didn't care, we got the job done just never got underneath anything on our overhead cranes when we were using the homemade eyebolts.

All of the eyebolts we used we bought in house at the Caterpillar dealer. They kept them in stock so we would expense them out. They were all rated for the size of the threaded end, i.e., 3/8, 1/2 etc. I think they have them in the catalog at the parts department. Not sure if there is a Cat dealer near you that you could check though. The newer ones we got had a wider base on them. These worked good for welding on pipe plugs, different length bolts because of the wider base of the eyebolt.

Shawn

I have convinced the customer to screw the lift eyes in and then weld just to constrain. We are going to load test the  parts after welding. I think this is a good solution. I have seen eyebolts welded before but cannot find any good information about what the materials weldability is. Usually a high nickel rod or maybe even 7018 low hyd.