Testing Technical Committee

By Charles Lucas, Chair

The Testing Committee will be having a pre-meeting in an effort to complete the rewrite of A 4108. This antiquated mill standard does not cover all the widths used in today's lifting activity and the language in many instances does not reflect the technology of today. Bob Jasany is working on the first draft for the testing committee to consider during our pre-meeting.

The Board of Directors accepted the protocol developed by the Testing Committee and the Web Sling Committee to conduct a testing program on the strength of Web slings against various corner radii. The program was fully funded with Bob Jasany, acting as the WSTDA administrator, to oversee the testing being done at SpanSet. The Association has secured five donors to supply 150 slings of 2 inch webbing of three different ply from Nylon 6, Nylon 6.6 and Polyester. The project will consist of testing five slings from each donor, from each material and ply, against various radii.

Bob will be at the test site, to oversee all the testing, record the data and examine the fractures. He will also take selected pictures and videos of the testing procedure. It would have been wonderful to have had a high-speed camera to record the actual fracture and availability of a scanning electron beam microscope (SEM) to examine the fibers after the failure, however, this was way beyond the scope of the protocol.

We hope to have all the slings in house by the first of March and the testing complete by the end of April. This would allow us time to review the data statistically and develop graphs to show the basic results. We will use our meeting time in Maui to discuss the results, view the pictures and videos and put the data into a definitive form to give to the Web sling committee for their analysis and interpretation.

It is the hope of the Web sling committee that this new data will provide valuable insight into the performance characteristics of Web slings during lifting activity.

Web Sling & Tie Down Association

2105 Laurel Bush Rd. • Suite 200 • Bel Air, MD 21015 • phone: 443-640-1070 • fax: 443-640-1031 • wstda@ksgroup.org • www.wstda.com