Swinging a 40-ton beam and the brake pedal went to the floor

I was lifting a steel beam for a new parking garage downtown last Tuesday, had it about 30 feet up, and suddenly the boom brake just gave out with no warning. The load started drifting sideways toward a row of parked pickups, so I had to drop the whole thing in the gravel lot next door - cost the company $2,000 in damage to the beam but nobody got hurt. Has anyone else had a brake line blow mid-lift like that, or was I just unlucky with this old American crane?

2 comments

2 Comments

king.lisa1mo ago

You checked the brake fluid reservoir lately? A lot of the older cranes use a shared hydraulic system, so a leak in one spot can mess with the whole system. Most guys blow off the routine checks on those old machines because they've been running fine for years, but that's exactly when they'll fail on you. Could have been a slow internal seal leak that finally gave up. It's worth going over every hard line and fitting with a flashlight before you trust the rig again.

john4301mo ago

Man that bit about "slow internal seal leak that finally gave up" hit home. Had a 1996 Grove do the same thing last fall, brake pedal went soft on a Friday afternoon. I traced it to a tiny split in the rubber return line on the master cylinder, barely visible unless you bent it. Thing had been weeping for months probably, just enough to keep the reservoir low but not enough to drip on the ground. I replaced that line and flushed the whole system with DOT 5, been solid since. Worth pulling the cab floor mat too, @king.lisa, that's where the wet spot hid on mine.