That might not be a particularly exciting title for a blog post. The last couple of days our Lift Maintenance team conducted "Dynamic Testing", commonly called a "Load Test", on Black Mountain Express. In Colorado, chairlifts need to go through a dynamic testing process every seven years. Believe or not, we just finished our seventh winter with BMX. For the testing Rob brings in a few engineers and lift people. They load boxes full of water on the lift to simulate it being fully loaded with people. They start, stop, speed up, slow down and do just about everything they can to simulate different situations that the lift may encounter. Then engineers break out their laptops, run all kinds of numbers and follow a rigorous process to make sure the lift operates the way it is supposed.
We also took the opportunity to increase the downloading capacity from 25% to 50%, something that helps summer weddings and other events that have people riding down the lift. That upgrade also require a dynamic test so we combined the two projects.
