Be my Guest…Stuart Raby
As part of LEEA’s Be my Guest series we chat to Stuart Raby, director sales, Globestock Safety, who is a specialist in Load Arrest, confined space and working at height. Here he talks about Guard Load Arrest which is the Load Arrest brand for Globestock and gives LEEA members his top tips on how to prevent failure and fatalities.
Guard Load helps members to work in conjunction with other products, as a secondary backup to prevent loads failing and hitting the floor. It means clients don’t have any issues onsite such as a chain failure, if a Load Arrest is next to it.
Raby started his career in 1993 after applying for a job as an administrative assistant in a lifting equipment company. With no prior knowledge of the lifting, handling safety equipment industry, he began to learn about the products then moved into sales, where he learned about inspection processes. Eventually, setting up his own business in lifting handling safety equipment.
“Load safety is quite a niche sector. A lot of people know the risks but don’t understand everything, as lifting equipment is a very broad subject. I’ve been selling Load Arrest since the mid-90s. We’ve got several large projects on at the moment; our work is varied but we work within the entertainment industry, we’ve got an event in Europe for a large quantity of units, a project in America, where we have an aerial fitness course with Load Arrest suspending the units above the water, to working with industrial doors, keeping oven doors open, and the automotive industry,” he said.
“We’re trying to develop safe solutions so instead of waiting for an incident to happen, to get ahead and actually start thinking about safety up front. There's always this potential where if a load failed, it would hit the person. So, by putting a Load Arrest next to it, it limits the load hitting someone or hitting the floor.”
Globestock has been a member of LEEA since 2018.
“I did my first LEEA course in 1998. The association is something that I'm aware of and the work that LEEA does to support their members and promote good practice within lifting, is what we all strive to, to promote best practice and have people thinking ahead,” he added.
Raby’s top tips for load safety are; always plan ahead and especially in training your operators. With regard to load safety, maintenance is always key. A well-maintained hoist is unlikely to fail or less likely to fail, alongside the training.
“Also, start to consider that you could use a Load Arrest unit alongside a hoist or winch within your system to prevent failure, particularly when you're dealing with smaller or lighter loads. With the solutions that can be achieved, you need to think ahead rather than wait for an accident to happen,” he said.
Next, Globestock is developing more units in terms of load safety.
“I've got a desire to create some quite big units in terms of load safety so that we can protect bigger loads, which at the moment are currently exposed because there's no obvious means of protecting them within a standard set up system,” he said.
“We've got plans to develop some unique testing to validate all of the enquiries we receive. We capture all our data so we can validate the testing for these types of solutions. It’s a question of going through due diligence and testing so we can show clients how it works. Testing in a specific scenario so we know it will work because we've proven it. And hopefully that gives the user more confidence in using the equipment. So hopefully this will be something to help develop the market and allow us to protect more loads.”
Click HERE to watch the video on LEEA YouTube channel.
