Posted By Alan Woodage Alan, A bit of a tricky one when looking at stillages as people tend to treat them as pallets. They should be designed to take the required load plus a FOS this will be dependant on environment and risk etc. This should ideally be done and proved by a competent structural engineer. With regard to inspection and testing, an inspection regime of visual inspections by a competent person, looking for weld or material cracks, deformation and or damage to structural parts and finally signs of corrosion. Personally I use LGH lifting gear hire for inspections of lifting accessories etc and they will either do this at there branches or on site. Yes they should be marked with SWL and a unique identifying mark to comply with LOLER and to be traceable from an inspection point of view. Coming back to where I started are they used as no more than pallets with sides on and what / how do you deal with pallets?? sorry if this has muddied things more but it is down to your Risk assesment again.

Posted By Alan Woodage Alan, A valid point with the strapping down as i guess the stillages at the top will tend to deform in sideways. Were they ever designed for the task or are they off the shelf items?? could some additional bracings be provided for tying down thestacked load to prevent the crushing by ratchet staps. The other way to look at this is what accident or incidents have there been involving the stillages and risk assess the situation accordingly. no records of failures, incidents or accidents then possibly just some visual routine inspection for damaged articles. alternatively if this has come from accident and incident maybe the stilages may need to be re-designed or alterantive methods employed. I appreciate the latter would be V expensive and may be a struggle but if incidents are occuring then the current solution os no good. I can see you have a quandry on your hands and wish you the best. Alan

Posted By Innes Gray Mine Field here mate when you head downe the CE marking SWL line By the Way LGH have a little bocket book on LOWER / PUER Regs give a good insite on Proof Testing and Load Testing. My local depot is verry helpfull alwasy wort giving them a call

Posted By Christopher Kelly Hi Tony, waste skips do come under LOLER as they are physically attached to the truck with additional means than just using the forks. We used to advise people that pallets, stillages etc were not LOLER items, they required risk assessment under PUWER. The PUWER RA might then determine that the best method of dealing with them was to have inspected by the lifting engineer, it depends on your planned maintenance arrangements. Are the skips being lifted by FLT or are you talking about the type which is lifted by a skip loader ? If the latter then I would not consider to be a LOLER item, although any item with lifting points on it has to be considered high-risk PUWER and consequently a higher level of inspection / competence should be considered. I had a similar problem as you at the last company I worked for - they had some very interesting methods of lifting pallets of unsecured sheet steel into a large skip. The area is very vague, not many operators seem to have thought about it. If your skips are full of holes then you do have a risk of items falling out, the skip is probably in danger of collapse and there will probably be a risk of people cutting themselves on it. If the body isn't cared for then the lifting lugs are likely to have had poor treatment. We had this out with our scrap dealer and they sorted it out. We had a system of checking the skips on delivery, however made it clear that we were only carrying out visual checks, the supplier was to carry out a more 'thorough' (non-LOLER) examination. I would think that the onus for inspection falls onto the firm who are actually lifting them. As regards SWL / proof-load testing etc. There should be clear guidance from the original supplier. Most engineering departments of insurance companies (who provide most of the competent lifting personnel) are dubious about the value of follow-up load tests - it doesn't assist in the thorough exam process of certifying for the upcoming 6 or 12 months. Regular inspection based on the original design capabilities is sufficient. Whether under LOLER or not it is always a good idea to put information on the items. As I understand it the supplier only has a duty to put SWL on if it is a LOLER item, if not they should still supply paperwork making sure you are aware of the equipment's capabilities but you will still have to carry out a risk assessment considering what level of planned maintenance / inspection you need to implement. Regards,

Posted By Christopher Kelly No problem Tony, hopefully you will be able to help me out sometime. From a purely selfish point of view - it is in my interest as I can now put down against my CPD points ! Cheers