Lesson: 2.1 Weight Dimensions and Centre of Gravity

Weight
Intro (voice to camera with cut aways to diagrams)
(Voiceover by Adam start with talking head and then cutover to diagrams )
In order to work out how to restrain you load adequately you need to know its weight.

Not only will the weight of the load determine the vehicle you choose, the loading performance standards specify the amount of force the restraints need to provide in terms of fractions of the weight.
(cutover to following diagram)

(continue voiceover)

Which means the amount of force required is related to the weight of your load. – These forces can be provided by friction in the case of the tie down method or directly via vehicle structures or lashings in the case of direct restraint.

If you do not know the weight of the load you cannot work out how many restraints you need to adequately restrain it.

Sometimes, working out the weight of an item is easy.

• The customer may already know the weight of the load,
• in other cases in may just involve reading a the label on the load the manufacturers plate on a vehicle or searching on the internet (my need to create a new image with various labels and compliance plates for a mouseover)
• In other cases, you will need to use documents such as a manifest, do some simple calculations, or use equipment such as a forklift (fitted with scales), or a weighbridge.

Manifest and Container weight declarations
Where shipping containers are sealed it may be difficult to determine the weight of the container. To address this issue the Heavy Vehicle National Law (and WA and NT legislation) requires the use of Container Weight Declarations (CWDs) to record the weight of the load they are carrying. These legal provisions also impose chain of responsibility obligations on all parties in the transport chain. Container weight declarations | NHVR (mouseover for Container weight declarations – noting that container weight declarations may not be reliable and you may need to check them using a weighbridge or other method)

Calculations
When calculating the weight of the load for:

• Multiple items- add up the individual weights of the components of the load
• Bulk items: multiply volume of vehicle by density of the product (or maybe in some cases divide the vehicle capacity by the density to calculate the volume you can load
• Volumetric loading schemes for livestock – Under these schemes the volume of the vehicle is used to calculate the number of animals that can be loaded onto the vehicle based on estimates of the average animal weight.

Checking with a weighbridge
photo of weighbridge