How to Chain Down Equipment. (without knocking out your teeth)

loading, unloading equipment, strapping equipment down. To me, it's one of the most dangerous parts of the job that we face. When you're out on a site and you're working in the dirt, I feel much safer than when I'm going down the road and I'm driving in and out of traffic around a bunch of crazy people. I don't know what they're going to do hauling a piece of equipment. So, today we're going to cover how to load, unload, and strap down properly. So, how tight do I like to get these things? my choice. We'll show you. This is called the cheater bar for those of you unfamiliar with it. Okay. So, in today's example, we're going to do a fivepoint tie down. If you have a Bobcat, any other most other pieces of equipment, it's just a fourpoint. That four-point tie down means you got to have one chain from each corner of the unit down to the corner of the trailer. So, you have four separate chains, four separate binders. But when you're hauling an excavator like this one, you've got to have a fourpoint plus one extra chain going over the boom. I'm going to also show you how to cheat today. Now, I don't recommend this, but trust me, you're going to find yourself you're going to lose a chain going down the road. You're going to be short of chain. Somebody's going to take it off your trailer and you're going to be like, "Well, how do I do a four-point tie down with only two chains or three chains or whatever?" I'm going to teach you that today, too. These binders, they're tight. I didn't throw that up. That's how tight they are. That gets away from you right there. Get both guys and you start making that dish. You don't want to look like that. You don't want to be like this. You want to be like that. Is a cheat move which makes it safer. Although it uses less chains, it's not legal. Okay. Um, but I want what I'm trying to walk you through right now is a worst case scenario. You get out to a job site. You don't have a couple chains and you've got a piece of equipment that has to be moved off a job site. I'm going to teach you a cheap move how to use one chain to do a two-point tie down. Now, I'm like I said, don't do this unless you absolutely have to. So, what I've done is I've got the back corner of the machine. So the chain runs from the tie down strap here up to the corner of the machine. It loops over the top and then the binder connects back down. So this actually becomes a self um a unit all in and of itself. Here's the remaining portion of the chain. It's loose. You can see it. Blaine has the exact same thing down. All right. I showed you the binders in the back and I'm going to do a com compare and contrast. These binders are a much safer way to do it. So, these are the twist kind of binders. So, basically, you just get them twisted and then you tighten them up from there. Um, I like to loosen them up, get them all the way down to the right before you get to that point. Okay. Um, so that way because you have more throw when you're trying to t chain down your binders. So, um, let's just strap this sucker down. Let's get it going. So, we have a hook in the middle, dedicated chain down hook. I just put the chain over the top, wrap it around, and hook it on to itself. Pretty easy. And in this case, everybody's going to have their own way of doing it. I don't care how you guys do it. I hook it up to the trailer and then put the binder on here. Now, I've seen done a dozen ways and I have every operator has their way that they like to do it. They always tell me their way is the best. As long as my equipment doesn't fall off the trailer. So, so it's as simple as just I run it all the way through back around. Now, I have less of a chance of busting my teeth out when I do this, unless I'm looking at the camera and decide to hit myself in the mouth. See, at any time, I can release. There's no danger this thing popping back. That nails are dangerous. So, you're not always going to have a hook on both ends of your chain. Okay. In this case, I don't have a hook on this end of the chain. It's not a problem. We're going to show you how you overcome an issue like Okay. So, what we're what you're going to see Blaine doing is he's working on chaining down the boom arm of the excavator and he's also using a different tie down slot on the trailer. The track has been tied down to this hitch and the boom arm is going to go to a separate one. You can't have the chain, multiple chains going into the same tie down points on the trailer cuz if the tie down point on the trailer, if this, for instance, gives out, you're now going to lose your load. And so what Blaine has done is he's brought the chain up and over. He doesn't have a hook. This is the chain end that doesn't have the hook. You can see this. There's no hook on it. He's using the binder itself. Hit it. Yep. Always tap it to make sure. Wrap it around even on those binders. Again, if you have an option to go on between the different kinds of binders, use the other ones. They're safer.