Riverhawk Company is well known as an engineered solutions provider. We have been challenged over the years to develop solutions across many industries: Petrochemical, Oil & Gas, Nuclear, Wind, Industrial and more. General Electric challenged us to upgrade our tooling and develop a safer solution.

The GE legacy tooling manufactured by Riverhawk for the GE Frame 6, 7 and 9 is commonly identified with the yellow guard surrounding the tool. The newly designed tooling, known as the Hydraulic Safety Interlock Guard tensioner (HSIG), has a new guard design that is orange to allow very quick identification.

This new tooling has been designed to provide users with a significantly reduced lift weight during use and a new safety interlock to secure the tensioner in place during the tensioning process. The design reduces the potential for operator error that might cause the tensioner to disengage the stud. In the unlikely event of such disengagement the new guard design will contain the impact and remain clamped on the flange to prevent operator injury. The system is compatible with existing hardware and will be used on all new installations.

The new HSIG tensioner was also designed to address a few key issues customers were having with the older legacy tooling. The issues that Riverhawk addressed were:

Leaking Issues
One issue customers were having was that the legacy tensioner had a tendency to leak. This leaking was a result of over stoking the tensioner. With the new Riverhawk HSIG tensioners, they have been designed to stop the tensioner from getting damaged when over stroked. No longer can you over stroke the HSIG Tensioner, as it has stops to prevent the over stroke condition.

Tensioner Jumping Issues
The other important feature that the HSIG has is its ability to greatly reduce the likelihood of the tensioner jumping. The old legacy tensioner was a one-piece design, so in some applications it was difficult to attach it to the flange and hardware. It was also difficult to see and/or feel if you had the puller screw fully engaged into the stud to be tensioned. The new HSIG Tensioner is assembled onto the stud to be tensioned, in pieces (modular design). This allows the puller screw to be installed by itself and makes it easy to see if the puller screw is fully engaged in the stud.

Riverhawk is dedicated to supplying the very best solutions to our customers. If you are currently experiencing a pain that has no solution, please reach out to our engineering team to discuss.