Episode 14: Up Close with AME Cribbing

Hi, I'm JJ Bock, Director of Operations for Rubber-Inc. Welcome to another episode of In Stock With Bock. Today, we're on site with our trusted partners AME here in Brooksville, Florida, to learn about cribbing and safety. Let's take a look. With AME's focus on safety, today we're going to talk about cribbing. To show us exactly what cribbing does, here's John Mulosie. Hey, John. Hey, JJ. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for coming down. Thanks for coming to our facility. Absolutely. Tell me a little bit about cribbing. So, right here is the components of one

of our more popular cribbing kits. You'll see this plate in front of me is a dedicated bottom plate. What's with the orange? So the orange has to do with the load rating or the capacity of the plates and or the cribbing. Orange is our heaviest duty. Okay. It's our, you know, it's the most robust cribbing we offer. It's got the orange handle on both the plates and the cribbing blocks themselves. That's easy to correlate, right? Yes. Orange goes with orange. Orange goes with orange. And there's a dedicated bottom plate. You'll see that there's grooves in it and the grooves

don't go all the way through to the ends. They kind of cap off. That helps ensure that the cribbing stays snugly in that little footprint and stays where it's supposed to when you build the pile. Is that new? Is that a new feature? That is a newer feature. We used to use the same plate for top and bottom and in the recent past we've come across with the plate where we don't have the slots that go all the way through. It kind of locks things in a little bit better on that base of the cribbing pile. So if you purchased cribbing originally, this may be an opportunity

for you to upgrade your cribbing to help enhance the safety. Exactly. If you've got the cribbing blocks and you've got certain other blocks and connectors you can buy in a different bottom plate and utilize the same equipment you already have in the same cribbing box they'll fit right in this bottom plate. If you grab a few of the blocks you'll see how they lock in and they kind of go together and you build each course. It's important that you always do three by three. You don't want to leave any voids or leave extra. You don't use one in the middle.

You've got to build and have everything snug and secure all the way through. Well, that little gap fits nicely for the next level of blocks. Correct. You'll see that the Lincoln Log style, they've got these ribs on them that help interlock and secure and line up one block versus the next. Say this is a sufficient height for your load that you're going to be lifting. What's the next step? If you're at this height and you've got the right number of actual like Lincoln Log style blocks that you need, the next thing would be to put your top plate. So if you look at the top plate,

the grooves don't, the grooves do go all the way through. The reason for that is you don't want to have to jack or lift the piece of equipment extra high to get the plate up and over the top of the block. This allows you to slide it on. Typically you're not out in an open area like this you'd be under a piece of equipment. Right. And it'd be hard to get up and over and cover that entire cribbing stack. Yeah, because ideally you want to have all three blocks covered by the same plate. Correct. To be able to equally balance the load. You want, yes, you want it and you want to

disperse that weight around and across the whole pile, not center it, not point load it. You want everything covered so that that weight is evenly dispersed across that whole foundation that you just built. Okay so you need to go in a little like an extra inch or two inches. So if you got to go just a little bit higher you could use a connecting plate or two. Here's a three inch plate that you could put on. Now since you already covered the whole surface you're okay using something that's not the exact same size because you're going to disperse still over the whole pile

and then we've got additional plates that have different thicknesses. There's a wide variety of these available. The general rule is you don't want to use so many connectors that you're taller than a cribbing block. If you need six inches or more of connectors you should have used an extra course or extra row of the Lincoln long blocks to bring that whole foundation up six more inches. That's a great start John I really appreciate you taking the time to show us. Yep anytime JJ glad to have you here. Absolutely for more cribbing information please visit our website at www.rubber-inc.com

or see your local sales account manager. Thank you.