A good customer of ours brought this to our attention. This situation has the potential to be so dangerous that we have decided to warn our customer base with a dedicated page. We take safety seriously. We have the best safety record in the industry. Non-Stop has NEVER collapsed in use since we began in 1976.
A customer sent us these pictures from the field, asking for advice on how to make it fit on our scaffolding properly. We were horrified to discover that these were knockoff bridges that, had the scaffold been decked, loaded, and cranked up would most likely collapse. Murphy’s Law applies all to well in construction, meaning if something can be assembled incorrectly, one day it will be. Genuine Non-Stop components cannot be assembled incorrectly, where these can. This is a first class example of why it never pays to take shortcuts or try to save a buck on knockoff components.
It’s obvious the company that made these silver components attempted to copy our design but they cut corners. We also don’t know if they used the same grade of steel that we buy to manufacture our towers or bridges. You can go to a steel service center and buy 2 inch square tubing that looks like ours but has half the tensile strength (all of our structural tubing is made for us by one particular mill in the US). We don’t know if the knockoff trusses have the same strength as ours. It’s not likely. We don’t know if you can load these the same way you can load ours.
They are not the same as Non-Stop and can easily be installed wrong. The knockoff is silver where Non-Stop is green.
In the picture above, the truss and the component that supports the planks (the bridge bracket) are not locked together as ours do. At this stage of assembly, your men could plank the scaffold, load it up, and go to work. The bridge bracket would most likely slide off the truss, causing a catastrophic collapse.
Contrast this to the picture below showing our green Non-Stop components locked together. This is the only way a Non-Stop bridge can be assembled – so that it is locked together. When installed on Non-Stop the silver components cannot be locked together without physically deforming the truss.
Background: A salesman talked our customer into trying this knockoff bridge on our scaffold. When it was hard to install, the customer took the picture you see and sent it to us asking for advice on how to install it.