As the pandemic continues to decimate business globally, most of us have seen a slowdown of activity and purchases within our customer base.
For us, at LOBO Systems this has given us some time to take stock and look at ways to review and increase our compliance standards.
LOBOs compliancy to ISO9001 and OSHA are key components to the company’s brand image and success. Interestingly our annual visit by the ISO examiner has come this year in for form of an online examination.
Also, interestingly, this parallels our sales strategy, as a first step, we provide a
15-minute online Internet product demonstration, to introduce the LOBO system to potential customers. It works great.
To schedule an online demo, simply choose your date from the calendar in the footer of this page.
Since we have some time, we now decided to confirm and be able to restate the all-important OSHA compliance.
For the USA market, a product like ours must be OSHA compliant and 20 years ago when I first entered the USA market, I recognised this as a mandatory check in the box.
As a matter, of course, we have had a regular testing programme in place to ensure quality durability and strength of our components.
For us CFR 1926 and 1910 are the two Standards that we need to address.
These two standards that are relevant to the LOBO System, they co-exist and link together, which makes sense.
CFR 1926 states that individual components testing is required to ensure safety and product durability within its life cycle.
All load-bearing components should have a safe working load (SWL) rating, and
quoting CFR 1926 point 451.
“components shall be capable of supporting, without failure, its own weight and at least 4 times the maximum intended load applied or transmitted to it.
At LOBO we state the SWL on the instruction labels and publish this in our documentation.
Our LOBO Catalogue and our Training Course Syllabus
As an example, if you take the load rating of a LOBO deck board, Loboard, rate the safe working load is 300 Kg or 660 Lbs.
To then to comply with CFR 1926 we must prove that this component will sustain a test load of 1200 Kg or 2640 Lbs.
Since we rate our round tubing in proportion with its length, we needed to have tested the tubes to four times their stated rating.
If we take an example of a LOBO T08 tube, we say that that tube can be rated at 300 kilogrammes which means exactly as we state above that we must test the tube to 1200kg/2640 lbs. We test our tubes using the uniformly distributed load method to stress test each standard length of tube we produce and rate.
Another example is reference to CFR 1926.502 which states that Guardrail systems shall be capable of withstanding, without failure, a force of at least 90Kg/200 Lbs applied within 2 inches (5.1 cm) of the top edge, in any outward or downward direction, at any point along the top edge
The longer the tube the lower the acceptable rating. For customers to have trust and belief in your product you must go through these steps.
Not only from a liability point of view but also for the quality.
The LOBO System is, of course, is OSHA compliant, otherwise, we would not have entered the market 20 years ago and it’s always good to keep up a regular retesting of the system components which we have done.
This gives our customer base confidence in our system; it will take these additional loads however excessive you may think four times the safe working load is.