As I'm in the process of bringing home my J&S540 grinder (no, I haven't got it home yet -nearly there!) I had to upgrade my lifting tackle. My existing block & tackle was only rated at 1/2t while the grinder weighs 3/4t. I was half tempted to give it a try, but thought I'd do the right thing and get some bigger lifting gear. I bought a
1t block & tackle from ebay -looks like the kind of thing machine mart sell from the picture (cheap & cheerful, but it won't get used much). I was rather surprised to find that the chain on the 1t unit was smaller than my old 1/2t unit -and the quality of welding on the chain links was very poor.
Has chain got much stronger, or is there something badly wrong here. Perhaps the FOS has been dropped signifficantly -the leaflet with the new block & tackle suggested it had been tested to 1.5t. For the record the chain links on the old unit was 6.4 dia while the new unit was 5.4 dia -but of course this is little help as I don't know the grade of steel used.
Regards
Kevin