Festoon Ready Pendants – Episode 1 in a Series

This Series will address how a Festoon Ready Pendant can be a good solution whether you use and maintain your own pendants, are a manufacturer of complete cranes, or a branch of a crane service company.  In each of these different situations – a Festoon Ready Pendant can pay for itself with less cost due to down time, increased electrical department capacity, customer satisfaction –  and in most of these cases – reduced freight costs.

A Festoon Ready Pendant has the cable already attached – and ideally can be plugged into the festoon lead trolley.

For this first post – let’s focus on our customers who use and maintain their own cranes:

I think all will agree that because the pendant is hanging from the crane on a busy production floor, it will eventually need to be repaired or replaced.

In almost every case – it is a sure fix if you place a stocked Festoon Ready Pendant on the crane and remove the one needing repair.  Your crane is back up and running in a minimum amount of time and the removed pendant and cable can be taken to a bench and investigated or returned to the manufacturer for repair.   The repaired pendant can become the stocked pendant.  If it is beyond repair it can be salvaged for parts.  No need to overnight parts, no need to work on the pendant while it is hanging from the crane and causing costly production delays.

All cranes are not the same though – so how many stock pendants would be required?  Is it possible to have a single stock pendant that can be used on most of the production floor cranes?  Likely the answer to this is YES.

In some cases, you may want to use a Spotter Pendant as your stock pendant, because it is very rugged.  While using the Spotter pendant – the lighter duty pendant that failed could be replaced/repaired and put back on during the next down time when crane service is scheduled.  The Spotter Pendant could then be inspected and put on the shelf until the next time it is needed.

This approach takes some upfront maintenance dollars, time and information gathering – before the failure occurs.    Maybe you also need to add the plug capability to an older crane that has a J-Box on the lead festoon trolley – an email and perhaps some pictures would be all that is required to start the dialog toward planning for a Festoon Ready Pendant solution.

Next Post in the Series:  How a Festoon Ready Pendant can increase a crane manufacturers capacity for production of cranes – by reducing the bottleneck that typically occurs in the last department – the Electrical Department –the department that must wait for the completed fabricated crane before they can finish wiring and testing of that crane prior to shipping.