Training: Lifting and Rigging

Alright. So another critical component of the AWS systems is safety and stabilization. Okay. So what we're gonna talk about, do a little bit of a deep dive into the safety, in lifting and rigging components of these systems. Right?

So so here we have a properly secured and lifted, AWS unit panel for this two tiered waterfall. The goal is to get this unit as level as possible, okay, using the lifting points, and this particular one has four lifting points with two sets of the, AWS lifting system. So the goal is that get it as low as you can without it hitting the ground or any obstructions when you move it into place. We're here on display pool installing this, we wanna be able to get around the pool and put it in place. So we wanna have it as low as possible to get a lower center of gravity and have less, stability issues, high enough where you're stable, low enough where you're stable, but high enough off the ground where you don't hit anything.

The goal is to get it level all the way around so you have a nice balanced weight load. So as always at AWS, safety is the most important thing. So what's a critical component is that you use the Aquatic Artist lifting system. Okay. This is a proper lifting system that gets connected to this proper setup right here.

Okay. So nothing nothing can be mistaken. It clips in here. These are locked in, and it clips in at the four lifting points, and we locate the lifting points with the proper to anchors, and these are built into the frame of the structure, so it can't go anywhere. Very important that no feet.

You don't get underneath the unit. It's important that you don't have any feet or arms or anything at all underneath it. Okay? For safety reasons. And the other part that's important is that only extremely experienced equipment operators should be, using and moving these AWS units.

They're heavy, big equipment. You wanna be safe. It's dangerous. So only experienced operators should were should move these units. So what we're gonna show you here is the proper way to use the right skid steer with forks to lift one of these AWS units.

The width of the forks at the proper distance so that when you put this fork attachment on, that it's in the proper location. Right? So you wanna put this on, and you wanna make sure that these screws tighten on the center of each fork. And then you tighten them by hand, and then tap them with a hammer to properly snug them up. Now location of where you put them, you wanna put them far enough out where when you connect the unit, it clears the the the tracks and far enough in where it gives you the most leverage.

So it is gonna be judgment on that. And the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna connect the lifting assembly to this hook right here. So one critical thing in all of this is making sure you have the proper weight limits. Okay? This assembly right here has a 10,000 pound weight capacity.

These chains, these lifting points, everything here has 10,000 or more pounds of lifting capacity. That's critical. This unit weighs well under that. That is critically important when using anything in a lifting system. Alright.

So the next step is we are connecting the chains to these blue removable lifting points. This unit is kind of flat across left to right. So what we did was we counted 13 links, one two three four five six up to 13 here, and we counted 13 links on this side to make it even lengths, and then we connected this. The next step is we are and then we we are going to roughly connect the back just rough. Okay?

An estimate. Then we're gonna lift this up, and what's gonna happen is you're gonna see how level it is. If it's level left to right, you're good. Then we're gonna we're gonna look at the back, and you're gonna see is it leaning that way down or is it up? Then you're gonna put it down, make an adjustment in the chains until you get it level all the way around at the right height.

Now, we estimated that 13 links, when you get it up in the air, it's gonna be high enough to clear the ground, but low enough to give you some lower, to give you a lower center of gravity. So it's a bit of a balance. So you can see where we set this forklift hook attachment. You gotta measure the unit you're you're you're setting. Right?

And you gotta make sure that when you if this is far enough back or far enough out or far enough back that when you pick it up, it clears the track. You obviously don't want this rock or this structure banging up against the frame of your machine. The unit won't like it, and the machine won't like it. So keep a little separation, and you're also gonna have go very slow and mitigate your swing. Right?

So it doesn't bang in anything. Right? Okay. Alright. So another critical component of the AWS systems is safety and stabilization.

Okay. So what we're gonna talk about, do a little bit of a deep dive into the safety, and lifting and rigging components of these systems. Right? So we have this panel. Okay.

Lift, suspended in the air. Now this panel is a display panel that's gonna go to a trade show. But we're using it here just for kind of illustration purposes because it is, what the finished product would look like. Concrete reinforced stone on the outside, rebar cage, the whole bit. So you wanna make sure you have the proper bracket to connect the forks.

Okay? In this particular case, it's a skid steer with forks. Okay? This proper bracketing goes to this red, I the hook, okay, which connects to that buckle. Right?

So this is all weighted. Right? So this particular panel weighs 2,000 pounds. When you get an AWS system, the weights of each panel are on it. So you wanna make sure you have the right lifting equipment that far exceeds the capacity.

The capacity of the lifting equipment, the rigging is far exceeds the weight of the, of the panel. Right? So you've got the forks, the buckle, that, and then you've got this hook. Alright. Now, this hook swivels.

That's critical. Right? Because what you wanna be able to do with this thing is spin it. You can see how it this weighs a ton. See how easy it is to spin?

Alright. You don't wanna have something that's fixed because you gotta turn it. It's gonna be harder to turn. It's gonna wanna kick back on you. Okay.

Then you got to lift this rigging assembly right here. Has these chains connected to it, and these are adjustable. And that's critical when lifting these panels. You can adjust these chains up and down to get your panels level before you set them. Alright.

So that's a critical part. And then they're connected to these these blue buckles which are removable. Right? These blue buckles are or screw or bolted into the, into a lifting point. Okay.

That is tied into the cage. Right? You can see right here. This is tied into the rebar cage before the concrete's poured. Right?

So you got this will be concrete, this lifting point, and then these bolts screw into here. Okay. Which is the female side of the lifting point. Right? So put them in, screw them in, and then you could see these clip right in.

There's no way to do this wrong. You clip them on, and that's why you gotta use this proper equipment with the little safety clips here. You clip it on and it locks in. Okay? This is clipped.

This is clipped. Nothing can slip. Nothing can move. So this is the proper way to to kinda utilize this equipment. Right?

So all this is proper. Now if you're using like, have a we have a an excavator, which is a bigger piece of equipment. We also use that to install these systems. For example, this is what we use for our excavator. Right?

The hook's bigger. This clamp right here is bigger. Right? Now this fits, okay, onto the arm of the excavator. So the same idea.

This whole assembly would then clip onto here, and then we use it in a very similar fashion, but it's critical depending on what equipment you have. Number one, it can handle lifting these the weights of these these panels, but also having the proper equipment. Again, this is a swivel that will turn, and it's properly connected from your equipment down to the panel, so you're operating safely at all times. Alright. So now that we went over all the rigging equipment, okay, the next part of this is we're gonna talk about stabilization brackets and, plates, stabilization plates to make sure that these panels are secure when they get placed.

Okay? So what we're gonna do is I was gonna set this down, okay, in place. Now this is a concrete pad we have, for our testing pool, but we're gonna show you kinda we're gonna use it as let's say this would be a footing, okay, on a pool. This would be getting set. Now we purposely set this about six inches back from the edge.

Okay. So now what's critical, right, is we've got the stabilization brackets. Okay? Right here. These are these are like a standardized stabilization bracket that we have, right, that we made.

Now the idea behind this is that before before you disconnect, okay, what you wanna do is you wanna plumb this up, and then you wanna install these, stabilization brackets. Right? Okay. You can see they're flexible. They go multiple ways.

Okay. And it allows you to so what you wanna do is you wanna put these in place, and then you're gonna put anchors, and we're gonna drill these drill these in on the footing in the wall, and you're gonna anchor it in. Okay? And what that'll do is it'll stabilize this panel, and you wanna do that before you disconnect it from the rigging. This way, there's no way that this panel could fall over.

What you do not wanna do is you do not wanna just put this panel up, disconnect it, and then go to your next panel without proper stabilization of that panel. Okay. That's critical. Alright. So we're not gonna drill this one in.

So the idea here is that there's multiple ways to use this bracket. That's why it's got hinges. Right? You only got a small footing where you only got, like, six inches. You could see here.

Okay. You could put put it this way, and then you could anchor it in like that. Right? Drill it and anchor it. Right?

Okay. And then you anchor here, here like that. If you've got a big footing okay. We're gonna show you. If you got a big footing and a larger wall where you gotta go higher onto the wall to stabilize it, you could also do it like this.

Boom. Like that. Where it's out here. Right? Now that's dirt, but the idea would be if you had a much larger footing, could anchor that in.

Okay? Or you could pour a footing. Okay? Depending on the situation. Right?

So this is kind of the idea, and then once you get this thing, you put these in, then you put your rest of your panels in the same way. You just these will come with your AWS system. These are removable, so you can reuse them. That's the idea. So you put them in, and then you do that for all the panels.

Okay? And then, right, that let's say you had another panel that went this way. Right? These plates go in the corner, and you again, you anchor, drill them in, and you anchor them. So that locks all of your panels together where they tie together so they can't go anywhere.

Then you put the Grotto top on, cement it all in. Alright. So we anchored in some plates. Right? We supply these aluminum plates with the system.

Okay? And the anchors. Right? You just lay the plate down, drill through the plate, tap in the anchors, tighten them. Okay?

Now in this case, this doesn't have to be perfect. Okay? When it come to leveling these three units all the way around, you wanna get them as level as you can. Okay? Because it's gonna be easier.

But if they're off a little bit, it doesn't matter because you're gonna shim it anyway. The critical part is that the Grotto top is level where the water runs across. That's the critical part. Okay. So in this case, we actually lowered this a little bit because the gap on the bottom was a little bit more than we wanted, so we decided to tap it down a little bit and and, and minimize the gap between the tile and the bottom of the rock, which brought this down.

But, again, not a big deal. Put a shim in, keep it level, run it straight across, you're good. That one's closer to being level, the front's level, so we're pretty good. Alright. So now it's real stable.

Let that harden up. Now you got plates, you got stabilization brackets, and you got a Grotto top that's mortared in to hold this in place. So now nothing can move, and at that point, then you take these out. You take these brackets out, you know, and then this is what you're left with, you can cut it. Cut that off, or if it's being buried, can leave it either way.

Right. So, again, let me stress the most important part here. Right? These panels could weigh four, five, six, seven thousand pounds. They could be tall.

You do not want to disconnect this rigging until this anchor is anchored in. Drilled in, anchor, screwed in, so it can't go anywhere. Okay? That needs to be done on every panel along with the Grotto tops being put in, if you have Grotto tops, and everything's cemented in and getting hard, then you disconnect these. Again, this is for just demonstration purposes.

Right? This is the concrete pad that we flipped upright and shim. But, you know, imagine this kind of being the the, like I say, the panel. Right? The the front panel.

Now this is taller. Okay? So depending on like I said, these stabilization brackets are gonna come with the AWS system. The nice part about them is that they are adjustable. Right?

As you noticed, they're hinged. We have a three foot one. Okay? And the idea here is that, right, it goes like that. Right?

Kinda like this. Right? Now, this one, we have a we put this back further. So you could see you need a larger if you have a large larger footing here, okay, then you can you can install this bracket with the foot out. Like I say, you could do it either way.

You can go like that or you can go like that. We're gonna show you guys kinda how to install it, but the idea is that we're gonna drill these in. One, two, three, four, and, anchor it in. And then once that's anchored, this thing won't go anywhere. Alright.

So you can see we anchored this in with, one bolt on each end. We would suggest you do both to be safe. Do both on each side. We just did one for display purposes. But you can see, right, this thing is anchored in.

It is not going anywhere, and it's, flexible. You know what I mean? So you have some adjustment ability on this. Right? So again, you wanna install one of these AWS stabilization brackets on every panel before it is disconnected from the rigging system.

And then once all the panels are in, Grotto tops are on, and everything's kind of done and stabilized, then you can take these off. You can remove them, unscrew them, and then cut the anchors off the bottom or leave them and bury them. If they're getting buried, you might leave them, but I would suggest cutting them off clean, sanding it down so have no sharp edges, and you should be good to go. So in this video, you're gonna see us using these eye hooks, okay, for our EZ lifting system. These are removable, and you get this with the system.

You would screw this into the EZ lifting rock system, the single rock panels, and then you're able to pick the rock up. And then the idea is you unscrew it and go to the next rock. So it allows you to move the rocks simply and safely. Well, with that being said, this is threaded, and this gets threaded into the female thread into the rock. Right?

So when you put this on, you wanna screw this tight. You wanna get it pretty snug and pretty you wanna thread it as much as possible, which should be an inch or so. Alright? And then pick it up and move it around and do what you gotta do, put it in place. But there's a a note here to make sure that, you know, if you're pick this rock up and you're moving around and you're spinning the rock, if you spin the rock a whole bunch of times, right, this does unthread.

Right? So, again, there's an assumption of common sense here, but if you've got this on your machine and you spin that rock a whole lot of times counterclockwise, you know, it starts to unscrew. So if you keep doing that, it's gonna separate. Right? And that could be dangerous.

So it's important that when you number one, when you screw it in, you screw it in tight, get it close to tight till it's all the way bottomed out. And then when you're moving it around the set, make sure you don't, you know, you don't turn it more than once or twice so it stays fully threaded so it doesn't go anywhere. Besides having our rock panels, sometimes we have single rock panels, okay, where an individual rock is part of the system. Well, in that case, you don't have concrete reinforcement. You don't have rebar pinning that we would normally anchor our lifting points to.

Okay. So part of the EZ lifting system is what you have right here. Okay. There is a large anchor. We drill this rock from the top all the way through to the bottom, and then we put a large pin and anchor through the rock.

And then on the bottom, we put washers and plates on the bottom so that this rock so that this anchor cannot pull through the rock. Okay. Anchors it from the bottom, and then on the top, we screw in an eye an eye bolt. And then as you can see, it's very easy to lift. Now what we do is, as you can see, there's two rocks here.

We take the large boulder, and we orient it the right way of where it would be in the system. And then, obviously, the bottom's not flat. Right? So we put this second rock in as a shim. This rock is pinned and mortared to this larger boulder.

So you'll see when this rock goes down, it'll lay perfectly vertical, and it'll be oriented in the right spot. So if you put this on a flat surface on a pool beam or in a landscape, that rock is gonna sit in the exact right spot or very close to it. So that's part of it. Okay? This is guaranteed not to go anywhere.

And then once it gets set in place, then you just unscrew the I hook and move on to the next unit. So once you get done installing your AWS system that has the single rock panels where we drill the rock and there's a eye hook that goes in. Once you're done installing all of it and you're completely done, you're gonna disconnect all of the eye bolts. You're gonna have holes in those rocks. Right?

So we have a a patching system where you fill those holes in and kinda blend it all in. So make sure that you watch our EZ Lifting Rock Patching videos in our training section of our website to show you that process to fill those rocks in so it looks awesome.