Part 1 – Search For The Perfect Gangway – SafeRack’s G4 Safety Gangways.

SafeRack’s G4 safety gangways are specially designed keeping in view the concerns and suggestions of the customers. Some of the main issues that the end-users of gangways have to face are raising and lowering of the gangways, longevity, and ergonomics, not to mention safety. SafeRack’s G4 FRT gangway is lighter, safer, and is easy to raise and lower.

The idea of a gangway goes back over 50 years as customers came aware that there are safety issues as it related to going up the sides of the tank trucks and rail cars when they were loading or unloading chemicals or dry product. The gangway itself was just a means to get from a fixed platform to the railcar or the truck and safety cages and fall protection followed several decades later.

The G4 design addresses many problems that our customers have come to us with, to solve. Problems such as safety, ergonomics, maintenance, the longevity of the gangway, and engineering design of the gangway.

The SafeRack’s gangway is definitely a result of us looking at the population of gangways in the field saying these are all the problems that our customers face and here are the solutions as we see them.

Actually, it’s supposed to be able to raise this unit by driving a hole here and you can see that weight with it hung out there is just too much.

The biggest issue we have with this gangway is the raising and lowering of the gangway. It’s very difficult to raise, very difficult to lower, doesn’t have a nice counterbalance system to it. If you get it in motion and let it go, it’ll fall and cause the whole rack to rattle and everything.

There’s really no handles to grab, so when they’re letting the unit down, it will drop it down to the top of the tanker truck and it’s just a lot harder to move down as well as move back up. So as you can see, you push this down, it’ll come back up but then we’ve lost the spring. So at that point, I’m trying to battle lifting this up.

The difference in the safe rack and a lesser gangway that one of our competitors may offer. I mean the main function is the ease of operation and the safety that we put in place. You’re not going to find any other product out there that is going to operate this easily and it’s not going to matter if you have women on the job site, older gentleman on the job site. We’re going to lower the game way into working position, and to raise it back up in the stored position; easy as that.

It’s a simple thing, they have this rope here. They have knots there, just pull that. If I can do it left-handed, you know it’s got to be easy.

Not putting bushings in a gangway and not machining pivot point, the consequences of that include wobbly handrails, shaky gangways, and undependable operation of the gangway overall.

These are your upright, these are your handles you’re holding on to, it has got a lot of play in it. I’m very hesitant to actually walk out on this.

It works a lot easier than the yellow ones, I’ve been on. A lot lighter and easier to control. It doesn’t twist as much as some of the others. I feel good and safe on this rack.

You can see how it gets loose. Normally when you’re just bolting a galvanized bolts through a galvanized pipe or tube, it’s going to wobble itself out. We put a lot of time in engineering the bushings and spacers that go into our stuff, what we’ve done is we’ve created a situation here that completely released this step of friction against what we call the U-body which is this piece. So it’s also aided in the smoothness of the gangway.

Overall, I think that we’re making a product that will last longer, that the cost of ownership will be lower for a customer over for years to come. So it might cost a few dollars more to begin with but when they don’t have to maintain it when the operators feel safer when it’s easier to lift and lower down the road, they’re going to be able to focus on what it is that they do for a living which is to make chemicals or make whatever product it is that they make. They’re not going to have to worry about does this gangway work or not.

Proceed to Part 2 of this Video