Chapter 21 — Further Reading

Equipment is a subject where the good sources are unusually concrete: a regulation, a manufacturer's chart, a rate schedule, an association's code of practice. It is also a subject where bad numbers circulate freely, because everybody has a rental rate they heard once.

So a rule for this chapter's reading, and for the rest of your career: every number in §21.2 and §21.3 of this chapter is illustrative teaching data. Purchase prices, fuel burn, residual values, rental rates, and repair reserves vary enormously by machine, market, year, and negotiation. What transfers from this chapter is the structure of the calculation. The numbers you plug into it have to come from your dealer, your rental house, your fuel invoices, and your own telematics.

Below, where I am not certain of an exact title, edition, or section number, I describe the source rather than invent a citation. Standards are revised and regulations are amended — always go to the current primary source, and check which edition your contract and your jurisdiction actually adopt.

Regulation: what the law requires of cranes, rigging, and mobile equipment

1. OSHA's construction standards, 29 CFR Part 1926 — read the actual regulatory text, by topic. The subparts that matter most for this chapter, described by what they cover rather than by paragraph number:

• Cranes and derricks in construction (Subpart CC). The controlling U.S. rule for crane work on construction sites. It addresses ground conditions and equipment support, assembly and disassembly, power line safety at several distinct stages of the work, operation and load-chart compliance, inspections (shift, monthly, annual, and after modification), operator certification and evaluation, signal person and rigger qualification, and the duties of the person directing the lift. If you manage a job with a crane on it, this is not optional reading — it is the document an investigator will hold in one hand while asking you questions.
• Rigging and material handling. Slings, their configurations, angle effects, inspection, and removal from service; the general materials-handling and storage requirements.
• Motor vehicles, mechanized equipment, and marine operations. Earthmoving machines, haul equipment, audible alarms, seat belts, and the requirements around backing and spotters that sit behind every internal traffic control plan.
• Excavations. Where the ground your machine is standing on becomes a regulated condition.
• Aerial lifts and the general fall-protection requirements, which is where the harness-in-a-boom-lift rule in §21.10 lives.
• The control of hazardous energy as it applies to servicing equipment — the lockout/tagout discipline in §21.7.

For: everyone. Managers who have read the actual standards make visibly different decisions from managers who have read slide decks about them.

2. OSHA's "Focus Four" campaign materials and its published guidance on crane safety, power line clearance, and struck-by hazards. The Focus Four framing — falls, struck-by, caught-in/between, and electrocution — organizes the majority of construction fatalities into four buckets, two of which (struck-by and caught-in/between) are concentrated in exactly the operations this chapter describes. OSHA's plain-language guidance documents, eTools, and campaign materials are free, accurate, and written for the field rather than for lawyers. For: orientation content, toolbox talks, and the internal traffic control plan in §21.4.

3. NIOSH — the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. NIOSH publishes research and fatality investigation reports on construction equipment hazards, including work-zone and internal traffic control planning, blind-spot and backing-related fatalities, and equipment rollover. The fatality investigation write-ups are hard reading and are the single most effective toolbox-talk material I have found, because they describe the ordinary decisions that preceded the event rather than the event itself. For: safety training that lands rather than complies.

Consensus standards: what the industry requires of itself

4. The ASME B30 series — safety standards for cranes, derricks, hoists, hooks, jacks, and slings. A family of volumes, each covering one class of equipment: mobile and locomotive cranes, tower cranes, overhead and gantry cranes, slings, below-the-hook lifting devices, personnel lifting platforms, and more. These are the consensus standards that OSHA's rules, your project specification, and most rental agreements ultimately lean on, and they go into far more operational detail than the regulation does — inspection intervals, rejection criteria for wire rope and slings, and operating practices. Confirm which volume and which edition your specification and your jurisdiction adopt, because they are revised on a cycle and adoption lags. For: safety directors, lift directors, and any PM who has to evaluate a subcontractor's lift plan.

5. The ANSI/SAIA A92 family of standards for mobile elevating work platforms, administered through the Scaffold and Access Industry Association (SAIA). The design, safe use, and training standards for scissor lifts, boom lifts, and similar access equipment. The A92 suite was substantially restructured in recent years, and one consequence is that responsibilities for planning, supervision, and training were made much more explicit for the user — that is, for you. If your last understanding of aerial-lift rules is more than a few years old, it is out of date. For: superintendents and safety staff, and for anyone writing a subcontractor's access-equipment requirements into a scope sheet.

6. The Specialized Carriers & Rigging Association (SC&RA). The trade association for crane, rigging, and heavy-transport contractors. It publishes practice guidance, job-site safety material, and training on lift planning, rigging, and heavy haul, and its members are the specialty contractors whose proposals you will be evaluating. When you need to understand what a competent crane and rigging contractor is supposed to be doing, this is where the industry writes it down. For: project managers evaluating a critical-lift plan and prequalifying crane subcontractors.

7. The National Commission for the Certification of Crane Operators (NCCCO) and comparable accredited certifying bodies. Operator certification is a legal requirement in U.S. construction, and the accredited certification programs publish their candidate handbooks, written and practical exam outlines, and load-chart study material publicly. Here is the practitioner's tip: the load-chart portion of a certification study guide is the best free load-chart training available, and it is written for people who are learning it for the first time. If §21.6 was hard, that is where to go next. There are also separate certifications for riggers, signal persons, and lift directors — know which of your people hold which. For: anyone who found the 📋 Try it drill difficult, and for every PM who has to verify qualifications on a subcontract.

8. The American Concrete Pumping Association (ACPA), plus the American Concrete Institute's guidance on measuring, mixing, transporting, and placing concrete. The ACPA publishes safety practice and certification material for boom and line pumps — line blockage, boom operation, setup and outrigger loading, and clearance from power lines. ACI's placement guidance covers the delivery-rate and placement-planning side, along with the hot- and cold-weather practices that turn a pour plan into a schedule item. Between them they cover both halves of the §21.9 pour-day plan: the machine and the material. For: anyone who has ever stood on a slab at 6 a.m. watching the first truck arrive.

Equipment cost, production, and rate data

9. Manufacturers' performance handbooks and product literature. The major earthmoving manufacturers publish performance handbooks — compendiums of production estimating methods, cycle-time and fill-factor guidance, material weights and swell factors, grade and rolling-resistance effects, and machine-specific performance charts. They are written to sell machines and they are also, unapologetically, the most useful production-estimating references in the industry, because the underlying method is sound and the data is measured. Read the method carefully and treat the rates as a starting point to be replaced by your own stopwatch and your own telematics. For: estimators and anyone building an earthmoving spread.

10. Manufacturers' load charts, operator's manuals, and outrigger-reaction data — for the specific machine, in the specific configuration. This is not a filler entry; it is the single most important source in the chapter. The illustrative chart in §21.6 is teaching data and must never be used to plan a real lift. The real document is the chart supplied with the machine on your site, for its counterweight, boom, jib, outrigger extension, and quadrant — along with the outrigger or crawler ground-reaction data that sizes your mats, and the manufacturer's maximum wind speeds and load-area limits. Most manufacturers publish this literature and their lift-planning software openly. Get the chart for the machine that is actually coming, before it comes, and read the notes on it — the notes are where the deductions and the restrictions live. For: you, before your next pick.

11. Published equipment ownership and rental-rate references. Several are in common use and each answers a slightly different question. Commercial construction cost references — RSMeans being the most widely used in North America — publish equipment rental rates and operating cost data alongside their unit-cost data, useful for estimating and for sanity-checking a quote. Separately, there is a family of rate schedules used to reimburse contractor-owned equipment on force-account and directed work: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers publishes a construction equipment ownership and operating expense schedule used on federal work, most state departments of transportation specify a rate basis in their standard specifications, and there are long-established commercial rate books that public agencies and owners reference by name in contracts. Which one governs is a contract question, not a preference. Find out which schedule your contract adopts before you set an internal rate or price a change order with equipment in it. For: estimators, project managers pricing changes, and anyone on a cost-plus or GMP job facing an equipment audit.

12. The Associated Equipment Distributors (AED) and the Association of Equipment Management Professionals (AEMP). AED represents the distribution and rental side and publishes industry cost, utilization, and market material; AEMP is the professional body for fleet managers and has done the substantive work on telematics data standardization, so that machines from different manufacturers report hours, fuel, location, and fault codes in a common format — work that has since been carried into an international standard. If you are building the utilization and fuel-burn discipline recommended in §21.10.4, this is the community that has already solved most of it. For: equipment managers, and PMs who want their utilization report to mean something.

13. The Associated General Contractors of America (AGC). AGC publishes and hosts training on equipment management, safety, and contract risk, and — more usefully for this chapter — its contract-documents commentary and risk-management material addresses how equipment costs, rental agreements, and operated-rental liability are treated in construction contracts. Pair it with your own risk manager. For: the question in §21.3.2 about who controls the operator, which is a genuinely litigated issue that varies by state.

Emissions, fuel, and what is coming

14. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's nonroad diesel engine standards, plus your state or regional air district's in-use off-road equipment rules. Off-road diesel engines are regulated by emissions tier, and the tier of the engine in the machine matters in three places: some public owners and some jurisdictions require a minimum tier or a percentage of the fleet at a given tier; some urban areas restrict older engines outright; and some green-building certification paths award credit for cleaner construction equipment. California's in-use off-road regulation is the most restrictive and most frequently copied, and several other states and cities have adopted their own requirements. Requirements vary by jurisdiction and by owner and they change — check the project specification and the local air agency, and make it a prequalification question at buyout rather than a surprise at mobilization. For: anyone bidding public work or work in a nonattainment area.

Inside this book

• Chapter 8 — bank, loose, and compacted volume, swell and shrinkage, and where the production formula started.
• Chapter 13 — where equipment lands in the estimate, and the difference between a quoted rental and an allocated internal rate.
• Chapter 14 — where equipment lands on the schedule, and how to tell whether days saved are actually money.
• Chapter 17 — the permit matrix, and where a crane oversail license belongs.
• Chapter 18 — the pick schedule, and crane time as the scarcest resource on the site.
• Chapter 20 — the burdened operator rate and the productivity effects of premium time.
• Chapter 22 — the ground and the structures your equipment loads: mats, shoring, reshoring, and construction loading on a green deck.
• Chapter 24 — the safety management system all of this lives inside.
• Chapter 28 — cost codes, and why idle and standby need their own.
• Chapter 34 — what owning a fleet does to your balance sheet and your bonding capacity.
• Chapter 39 — telematics, machine control, and battery-electric equipment, taken up properly.
• Appendix A — the conversion and volume arithmetic.
• Appendix D — the rental log, the equipment schedule, and the lift-plan form.
• Appendix F — Focus Four checklists and competent-person duties.
• Appendix G — the clauses that decide how owned equipment may be charged to a cost-plus or GMP job.

A note on currency and jurisdiction. Crane rules, operator certification requirements, aerial-lift standards, emissions restrictions, and the treatment of operated-rental liability all vary between U.S. jurisdictions and vary more internationally, and all of them change. Several states and cities impose crane licensing or permitting requirements beyond the federal rule. Nothing in this chapter substitutes for the standard your contract adopts, the rule your jurisdiction enforces, and the chart that came with the machine sitting on your site.