Chester Develops a Hand Chain 4 Point Pickup Hoist

As the industry leader in customized lifting solutions for complex applications, Chester Hoist creates one-of-a-kind hoist and trolley combinations on a customer by customer basis. When a customer requested a specialized hoist to raise and move large rolls, the Chester engineering team got to work.

The customer needed a four-point pickup hand chain hoist and incorporated hand geared trolley to run inside of 5” channels. The hook spacing had to be 12-inch perpendicular to the runway and spaced to accommodate the 12-inch diameter roll parallel to the runways. The hoist was also to have 42-inch hand wheel extensions on the trolley and hoist mechanism. All four hooks must be timed to raise at the same time, chain containers were required and max. The headroom needed to be 13 inches.

Luckily, Chester Hoist is the industry leader in customized low headroom hoisting equipment. The engineering team started with a standard four plate low head and severely modified the unit. The real challenge was to come up with suitable hook spacing and be able to run hooks in opposite directions with a single hoist mechanism.

Special gearing and sheave arrangements were added to the modified low headroom hoist. Because of low operating height, the customer also required special guards over the gearing. Special shields were fabricated to fit between the outboard and inboard side plates to guard the gearing arrangement. Because of the compact design to achieve the 13” headroom, a special roller chain trolley drive was incorporated into the unit.

A special roller chain trolley drive was incorporated in the compact design. The trolley and hoist hand wheels were mounted on a separate support trolley located 30.5” outside the hoist trolley channels.

The end result was a special 1/2 ton capacity hand chain four-point pickup hoist with extended trolley and hoist hand wheels and a hand geared trolley drive to run inside of five-inch channels.