jana_shah•21d agoMost Upvoted

Aerial lift basket puke test caught a bad boom before it got ugly

Last Thursday I was prepping a bucket truck for a job in Tacoma when my foreman Tom made me run the lift to full extension, then slam the controls side to side. Looked stupid at first, like a dumb stress test. But the basket started a weird wobble, the boom creaked on the downswing. We found a cracked weld at the base pin. Field service guy said if I'd climbed in with a ladder rack loaded, that pin could've snapped mid-span. Cost me 2 hours of downtime but saved a 30 foot fall. Has anyone else ever run a stress cycle as part of their morning setup, or am I the only one who skipped that in training?

2 comments

2 Comments

mark43620d ago

Honestly, that story reminds me of this buddy of mine who ran a small tree service down in Oregon. He never did any of that pretrip stress stuff, just climbed in and went. One morning he got the bucket up to trim some maples, and the whole boom just gave this nasty groan and dropped about four feet before the safety lock caught. Turns out there was a hairline crack that had been working for weeks. He told me he now does that exact wobble test every single Monday, and his guys think he's nuts for it, but nobody's taken a dirt nap on his watch since. Tbh, I bet half the guys on this forum only learn that trick after something bad almost happens to them or someone they know.

cora51820d ago

Wait, your buddy actually had the boom drop on him like that? That's wild. I had a friend who did utility line work up in Montana and he had something similar happen with a digger derrick, not the bucket but the boom arm. He was lifting a transformer and heard this weird pop, then the whole thing just sagged a foot or two. Turned out a weld had been rusting from the inside out, looked fine from the outside but was basically holding on by a thread. He still checks that weld with a flashlight every morning and jokes that his rookie year taught him more than any training class ever did.