How do you protect your portable lift's aluminum basket from getting dinged up?

[arbor pro]

For those of you who own self-propelled or towable lifts with aluminum baskets on them, how do you prevent the soft aluminum from getting dinged up from your saws? Last week, I used my brand new Genie towable lift to take down a storm-damaged tree. It was a difficult removal that required a lot of man-handling of debris in the basked and, I must have been careless in how I transitioned my saw from the tree to the saw scabbard mounted in the basked because now the basket has several knicks in it.

Whenever this happened to a fiberglass basket, I just refiberglassed the knicked areas and problem solved. I suppose I could have the aluminum welded to fill in the knicks but I'd like to spray on or wrap the top of the basket with some type of protectant if there is one available. Has anyone ever sprayed the top rung of their basket with some type of pickup bed liner or other spray-on protectant that is chain resistant or wrapped it with something that won't come off easily?

P.S - Let's pretend that the advice of "keep your saw chain away from your basket and you won't have the problem" has already been covered. If that solution doesn't seem 100% sureproof, what would you advise for protecting the basket?

 

[WellbuiltEquip]

The idea of protecting the basket comes up allot in the lift industry, and I have seen some pretty creative ones for painters.

However when it comes to protecting the lift itself from impacts I haven't really seen anyone who had a need for this. In the past though we have had lifts come back off rent with pieces of PVC pipe cut in half and zip tied together over the rails.

As for the spray on bedliner, we have tried a couple times to use them a on the standing surface of baskets to give traction, for some reason they always rust back off after a year or so. Maybe it is because they aren't designed for it, or maybe its because we live in Chicago and everything rusts here.

 

[BC WetCoast]

How about fibreglassing the top rail. Would be easy to do, just cut the cloth into 6" strips and wrap the rail like you were taping a hockey stick.

 

[arbor pro]

both good ideas. I think a combination of the two - maybe wrapping the top rail in pvc and then wrapping that a couple times with fiberglass would give pretty decent protection.

Thanks.

 

[WellbuiltEquip]

Either way, one thing I would make sure is that you take into account how much weight is added to the basket, even though the machine won't tell you that you are overloading it, it will just limit your range, there are several problems that arise from overloading the basket.

The first and most dangerous is that the mount where the basket attaches will start to fatigue and start to stretch and then fail. We had this happen with a customer who was using a boom to bring 55 gallon drums up and pour them into a tank. Luckily we caught it while doing an inspection on their lift before anything happened though.

The second is that it will start to burn out the hydraulic motor and pump more quickly as well as put extra pressure on the seals of the cylinders which can also lead to early failure.

Obviously if you are using it to carry branches you have been keeping tabs on the weight, it's just my two cents.

I'm curious to find out what actually ends up working though, as I love the crazy contraptions people come up with for boom baskets.opcorn:

 

[arbor pro]

Either way, one thing I would make sure is that you take into account how much weight is added to the basket, even though the machine won't tell you that you are overloading it, it will just limit your range, there are several problems that arise from overloading the basket.

The first and most dangerous is that the mount where the basket attaches will start to fatigue and start to stretch and then fail. We had this happen with a customer who was using a boom to bring 55 gallon drums up and pour them into a tank. Luckily we caught it while doing an inspection on their lift before anything happened though.

The second is that it will start to burn out the hydraulic motor and pump more quickly as well as put extra pressure on the seals of the cylinders which can also lead to early failure.

Obviously if you are using it to carry branches you have been keeping tabs on the weight, it's just my two cents.

I'm curious to find out what actually ends up working though, as I love the crazy contraptions people come up with for boom baskets.opcorn:

The only thing my lift actually lifts is me and occasionally a helper. I don't use it as a crane or lift platform for anything else. Protecting the top rail from chainsaw nicks with pvc and/or fiberglass will add negligible weight.