Crane and Rigging Editing and Proofreading Services

A lift plan is a document that has to be right the first time and read under a helmet. Everyone involved — the appointed person who wrote it, the crane operator, the slinger, the supervisor and whoever is standing in the exclusion zone — is working from the same piece of paper, and any ambiguity in it becomes a decision made by the person with the least information at the moment the load is airborne.

We edit what crane hire and lifting companies produce — lift plans and lifting operation method statements, crane appointment and duty documentation, ground bearing and outrigger loading assessments, rigging arrangement descriptions and sling calculations, exclusion zone and access documentation, complex and tandem lift documentation, wind and weather limit statements, thorough examination and inspection records, operator and slinger competence documentation, permit to lift documentation, and briefing material for lift teams. Our editors work on the plan the whole team is working from.

The lift plan is where lifting operations are either controlled or improvised, and its failure is describing the crane rather than the operation. A plan giving the machine, the load and the radius has stated the arithmetic and left everything else to the day. We work through these so the plan states the load with how its weight was established — weighed, from a drawing, from a supplier's figure, or estimated — since a load whose weight came from a guess is the commonest cause of an overload; so the centre of gravity and any eccentricity is addressed where it is not obvious; so the configuration is fully specified, covering boom length, counterweight, outrigger extension and the ground preparation it depends on, given that a plan valid on full outriggers is not valid on partial; so the radius at pick and at set is given separately with the capacity at each, because the worst case is frequently the set and not the lift; so the exclusion zone is described as a physical area somebody can mark out, with who marks it and who watches it; so the wind limit is stated for the load's actual sail area rather than the crane's generic figure; and so what happens if the load cannot be landed is planned rather than discovered. Plans written this way get lifted in the sequence they describe.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including lift plans, calculations and project information. We are editors rather than appointed persons, engineers or lifting specialists, and we offer no view on lift planning, capacities or safety. What we can do is make the plan unambiguous to everyone holding a copy.