subject: How Stainless Steel Hooks Are Developed, Designed And Tested? [print this page] Stainless steel hooks, you might think, are simply used to attach the end of a load strap to something. So they cant be that hard to design. Can they?
Well, once you start delving into the physics of load creation you begin to understand theres a lot more to that stainless steel hook than first met the eye. So lets have a look.
The load in any cargo shipment be it in a plane, on a train, in a boat or on the road is subjected to a wide range of forces many of which are happening at the same time and from opposing directions.
In general it is possible for any load to be subject from force operation on any plane through any degree of elevation or rotation. Gravity, for example, is a force always perpendicular to the ground so if a ship rolls or a plane banks, the whole gravitational mass of its cargo shifts with it. And that means the stainless steel hooks holding the webbing straps on are suddenly being pulled from a completely different direction.
If that shift in forces happens without any compensation, the fixings on the webbing straps are likely to break. It will always be the fixings because they are the weakest points in the securing system. You can understand that simply by pulling against a hook, which from one direction at least is extremely easy to pull off its mooring and then trying to tear webbing apart with your bare hands. One is easy, the other impossible.
So if the forces in play in a load are suddenly rotated, the stainless steel hooks used to secure that load must have some way of compensating. Normally this is achieved by incorporating a swivel into the base of the hook so the whole thing has a 360 degree rotation independent of the part of it that fixes onto the cargo webbing.
By allowing this kind of movement, the whole webbing strap can effectively be swung through gradations of angles with the movement of the load and the vehicle transporting it. In effect the stainless steel hooks become a kind of suspension system subverting the forces tugging and pushing at the load.
Because there are so many different potential environments and combinations of forces at work in the loading and shipping industries, there are absolutely massive ranges of hook types to secure the webbing straps to themselves; to floor and wall rings or to the load itself. Some hooks are designed to track through an O ring and wire system. Other stainless steel hooks are made for easy clipping with one hand these are called safety hooks, of which the carabineer is easily the most wellknown.
The basic premise is this. Whatever a person needs to secure, there will be a hook designed to make that happen safely and easily. And acts of providence notwithstanding to ensure that load is deployed securely and without incident to wherever it needs to go in the world.
