Hydraulic Stand Jacks and Alternatives

You might call these guys:

They do this for a living.If you've never done this before, you should not attempt it without experienced, expert assistance.There are no "do overs" in this industry.

Hi Gajendra,

Your tittling of your post confused people-- your text body says strand jacks which is what every heavy lift is made with these days but Your text says STAND jacks which would be hugely dangerous! Any hydraulic failure point and you lost your load!

Strand jacks are what every one uses for virtually every heavy lift everywhere in the world they are inherently safe and typically set up with many times the needed load margin.

The last one I used on one of my projects was the old school with survey instruments and analog scales and gauges but now the equipment in much improved.

You should absolutely use a specialist company for this and now with gps, lasers and inertial stabilizers this is much improved and can be controlled to millimeter fractions instead of centimeters

There is no other way that even comes close to the safety and strength of the strand jack because it gets its back up from the principal of the wedge (in the collets) which lock in the event of any hydraulic failure.

Again as some of the others mentioned the things to watch out for is soil compaction / supporting ability, the viability of your lift points, and the temporary lifting structure ---the strand jack system is the safest part of your heavy lift!

Expat07

Hydraulic jacks are commonly used for heavy loads and for many reasons. Your fears are not funded for 2 reasons:

- those jacks are usually of a special design with locking nuts on the piston rod and an auxiliary piston in the rod for main piston return.

- if the pump is far away then on the hose exactly at the connection with the cylinder and on the cylinder side there are parachute valves which close in a few hundredth of a second if the hose breaks.

The most modern solutions are based on integrated ram+pump units remote controlled by wire or by radio from a central panel. Sensors react on "problems" on the spot closing valves if any load variation occurs out of the allowed "window".

It is more difficult to lower a load than to lift it.

The system I designed already over 25 years ago was based on this principle and all rams were equipped with load cells for fine load monitoring and measurement.

The uncertainty was better 1/1000 of nominal load. It was even possible to show that weight is an invariant independent of load distribution on the lifting points.