Short, practical pieces on the questions our examiners get asked on site: intervals, discard criteria, documentation and what an auditor actually looks for.
Twelve months is the number most people quote. It is right for a lot of plant and wrong for everything that lifts a person or forms part of a lifting assembly. Here is the interval that actually applies to each class of equipment, and where the six-month rule comes from.
A sticker on a machine is worth exactly as much as the record behind it. Here is what a gate supervisor should be able to read off a sticker in five seconds, and the three shortcuts that make a sticker worthless.
Colour coding is a visual shortcut for a six-monthly examination, not a replacement for it. The mistakes are always the same three, and they are all fixable in an afternoon.
Forks fail at the heel, not the tip, and they fail quietly. The measurement takes two minutes with a caliper and it is the check most in-house inspections skip.
Broken wires are the criterion everyone knows and the one that catches the fewest ropes. Corrosion, diameter loss and core protrusion end far more ropes than a wire count does.
The auditor is not testing your crane. They are testing whether you can produce, in order, the documents that prove someone competent looked at it and what they found.
They are two different documents proving two different things, and one never covers for the other. The distinction costs sites a day of production more often than it should.