Cable Sling

The binding form: woven webbing, one sewn loop carrying a metal ring, made to order in the width and length the job needs. It holds a cable. It does not lift one.

1. What a Cable Sling Is, and What the Words Mean

A cable sling is a flat woven webbing accessory: a band of high-tenacity yarn woven to a fixed width, plied to the capacity it has to carry, and closed at each end by a sewn joint. In this form it is covered by EN 1492-1, the European standard for flat woven webbing slings made of man-made fibres, which is written around polyamide, polyester and polypropylene webbing from 25 mm to 450 mm wide and requires a minimum safety factor of 7:1 — the minimum breaking load is at least seven times the marked working load limit, with the working load limit marked on the label and reported to the slinger by the colour of the band.

The word is used for two different products, and it is worth being blunt about it. In search results and in ordinary conversation, “cable sling” is very often what the trade calls a steel wire rope sling — the same thing as a steel cable sling, a lifting cable or a wire sling. Professional rigging keeps the two apart, and uses wire rope sling as the precise name for a rated sling fabricated from wire rope. This page is about the woven webbing article. If the sling you need is made of steel wire rope with swaged or poured sockets, this is not it, and we would rather say so than quote you the wrong goods: those are listed on this site under wire rope slings.

Within the woven family the page covers two products, and they do different jobs:

• Cable sling — a rated lifting accessory, made to EN 1492-1 with the 7:1 factor, marked with its working load limit, used with a crane or a hoist. This is the strap that carries the weight of a drum, a reel or a coil of cable.
• Cable binding strap — a binder, usually made with a ring at one end so the free end can be threaded through it and pulled back on itself. It holds cable, drum or coil in position, on a rack, on a pallet or on a vehicle. It has no working load limit in the lifting sense and must not be used to lift.
• Nylon cable sling — the same first article, named by its fibre. Polyamide is the fibre most often asked for on cable duty, because it is the softest of the three against a jacket, because it is the one that resists alkalis rather than acids, and because it stretches, which is a disadvantage when a load has to hang to a height and an advantage when the lift has to be eased (section 9).

This page deliberately does not repeat what already sits on this site:

• The fibre itself, polyamide, and the acid and alkali sides of the comparison: see the nylon woven flat sling page, and for a line that runs both an acid and an alkali stage, the white acid-resistant and alkali-resistant sling page.
• Polypropylene, class by class, and its temperature ceiling: see the polypropylene flat sling page.
• What an eye-to-eye band is, eye length and the length datum: see the acid-alkali flat double-ear lifting belt page.
• White webbing and why a buyer specifies it: see the white polypropylene lifting belt page.
• How a band loads a round surface, and the contact pressure calculation: see the flat lifting strap page — section 6 of this page uses that result but does not derive it.
• Sheaths, sleeves and edge protection: see the reinforced and sheathed lifting straps page.
• Lifting accessories against load restraint, and the standards that separate them: see the polypropylene flat lifting strap page, section 6 of which sets EN 1492-1 against EN 12195-2 line by line.

2. Two Jobs, Two Straps: Carrying a Cable and Binding a Cable

The family of products on this page splits by duty, and almost every expensive mistake in this corner of the market comes from reading the two duties as one. A cable sling is a lifting accessory: it is rated, it is proof loaded, it carries a working load limit and it is inspected before every use. A cable binding strap is a holder: it is sized by the length it has to reach and the tension a hand or a tensioner can put into it, and its job is finished when the cable has stopped moving. The table below is the distinction as it affects the goods you receive.

Two practical notes on the binding form, because it is the form in the photograph at the top of this page. The ring is not a lifting point and is not rated as one: it is a fairlead for the free end of the band, and its job is to let the strap grip itself when it is pulled back through. And the tension in a binding strap is set by the person or the tensioner putting it in, not by the standard, so the thing that decides whether a binding job is right is whether the cable is held with the jacket undistorted — a binder pulled until the jacket flattens has been overtightened, whatever the ring will take.

3. Cable Comes in Three Shapes, and Each One Is Rigged Differently

The single most useful thing to establish before a cable lift is which of three shapes is being lifted, because they have almost nothing in common as loads. A drum or reel is a rigid body with a bore through it. A coil or hank is a flexible body with no bore at all, held together only by its own stiffness and the ties on it. And a cable already in place — in a tray, on a ladder rack, in a duct, on a wall — is not a load to be lifted at all; it is a run to be held, and the accessory for it is a binder.

The third row is the one that is ignored most often, and it is the reason this page keeps the binder and the sling apart. A cable run that has been made off to a tray needs to be held there, and a binder does that job well and cheaply. What it does not do is turn the cable into a lifting point, and a run that has been bound is still a run that cannot be lifted: cable is not designed to carry its own weight between supports that are metres apart, and a binder will not change that.

For the first two rows the deciding number is not the weight of the cable. It is the geometry — the diameter the strap has to wrap, and the diameter the cable is allowed to be bent to. That is section 5, and it comes before any capacity table.

4. Lifting a Cable Drum: the Rules That Are Not Obvious

A loaded cable drum is one of the most common loads in the cable trades and one of the least forgiving, because almost everything about it invites the wrong rigging. It looks like a big cylinder with a flat top, so a strap goes over the top; it has a wooden middle that looks solid, so the drum gets lifted by the middle; it rolls, so it gets nudged along instead of chocked. Each of those three instincts damages either the cable, the drum or the sling, and the rules below are the ones that prevent it.

Two details belong with that table because they are where a correct rigging plan is most often defeated. The first is the bore. A bore is the best lifting point a drum has, and it is also a small diameter, so the strap or the shaft passing through it bends sharply — and the diameter of curvature is one of the inputs that sets a sling’s rated load, which is what section 5 is about. The second is the eye. Where a sling eye is put over a shaft or a bore bar, the object in the eye must not be too large for it: the working rule is that an object in the eye of a sling must not be wider than one third of the length of the eye. A bore bar that fills the eye is already a rigging fault, whatever the weight is.

5. The Diameter of Curvature: Why the Bore and the Coil Set the Limit

This is the section that changes the answer on most cable jobs, and it is the reason this page spends its length on the load instead of on the strap.

When a sling is rated, the working load limit is not derived from the material alone. The published rating basis lists six inputs, and the diameter of curvature over which the sling is used is one of them, alongside the material strength, the design factor, the type of hitch, the angle of loading and the fabrication efficiency. Curvature is in that list because a band wrapped round a small diameter is not in the same condition as the same band lying flat. On a cable job the same fact appears from the other side, and it is more important there: a cable has a minimum bend radius of its own, and bending it tighter than that damages the cable permanently, whatever the strap is rated at.

The multiple that applies is a property of the cable, not a universal number. Three published figures, for three different cable families, make the point:

Because the multiple multiplies the cable’s own diameter, and because a bend radius is half a bend diameter, the rule converts into a minimum coil or drum diameter by doubling it:

The table below works that expression for three cable sizes and the three multiples above, so that every figure in it can be re-checked with a calculator. It is worth reading down a column rather than across: the same 40 mm cable needs a coil of at least 480 mm on the most permissive figure in the table, and at least 1,600 mm on the most demanding one.

Three conclusions follow, and they are the reason the section exists. First, the limit is usually the cable and not the sling: a coil can be well inside the working load limit of every strap in the catalogue and still be an unacceptable lift, because lifting it means squeezing it. Second, the rigging decides which limit applies. A basket passed under the coil supports it and lets the coil keep its own shape, so the cable is barely bent at all; a choker pulled tight around it forces the cable into a bend whose radius is set by the diameter of the choke, which is exactly the case the table above is about. Third, a drum’s bore is a small diameter by definition, so the same arithmetic applies to the bar or the strap passing through it — which is why the eye rule and the curvature rule in section 4 sit next to each other.

6. Protecting the Jacket and the Sling at the Same Time

Cable duty has two things to protect and only one strap to do it with, and they are in conflict more often than buyers expect. The sling has to survive the edges of the load; the cable has to survive the sling. The rule for the first is stated in the standard itself: slings in contact with edges, corners, protrusions or abrasive surfaces have to be protected against damage. The rule for the second is the one this page adds, because it is specific to cable work: a strap bearing on a jacket is a load on the jacket, and anything that concentrates that load — a narrow band, a hard corner underneath it, grit worked into the weave — is a way to damage the cable while the sling is doing exactly what it was bought for.

Two notes on the equipment, because the shape of a purpose-made drum strap tells you what the duty does to webbing. Drum handling slings on the market are built with a wear pad sewn inside the lifting strap so that neither the sling nor the drum is damaged, and with a tensioned band that grips below the first rib of the drum rather than on it. That is not decoration: the load is a drum, and a drum strap is designed around the two contacts that do the cutting.

Where the protection has to be a sleeve, this page does not repeat the material: sheaths, their thickness, loose sleeves against stitched ones, and the fact that a protection device never changes the rated capacity of the sling it is fitted to are all set out on the reinforced and sheathed lifting straps page. The one line worth carrying over is the one that catches people out on cable work: an edge does not have to feel sharp to cut webbing, and a drum flange that has been handling cable for ten years is exactly the kind of edge that has never felt sharp to anybody.

7. Binding a Cable: What the Strap May and May Not Do

Binding is the other half of this page and by far the larger half by volume: far more strap goes onto cable to hold it than to lift it. The rules are fewer than for a lift — nobody is under the load — but they are easier to break, because a binder is cheap, there is no certificate on it, and it is usually fitted by whoever is nearest to the tray. Four rules cover almost everything.

On the standards question — which is the question a buyer normally asks about a “cable binding strap” — this page deliberately says little, because it is answered in full on the polypropylene flat lifting strap page. The short version for a binder is that a holding strap is not made to a lifting standard at all, so there is no working load limit to quote and no colour code to read. What you specify instead is the length, the width, the ring and the duty. If the same order also contains slings, keep the two line items separate on the purchase order; a single line described as “cable straps, binding and lifting” tells the factory nothing about which one to make.

Two habits are worth building into a cable job, and both come out of the same fact — that the binder is the cheap part of the installation. First, bind often and lightly: more binders at closer intervals, each only as tight as it needs to be, hold a cable run better and damage it less than a few binders pulled hard. Second, keep the binder off the jacket where the jacket is weakest — never at a bend, never on a joint sleeve, never on a section that has already been marked by a tray edge. A binder is a support, and a support belongs where the cable is already strong.

8. Non-Conductive Is Not Insulation

This section exists because cable work is where the misunderstanding does the most damage. Synthetic webbing is routinely described, in manufacturers’ literature and in safety guidance alike, as non-conductive and non-sparking — one regulatory advisory puts it as plainly as “non-sparking, non-conductive and can be used safely in explosive atmospheres”, and a sling maker’s selection guide says synthetic slings “do not generate sparks and do not conduct electricity”. Every word of that is true, and none of it means what a reader on a cable job usually hopes it means.

The reason is that non-conductivity is a property of a clean, dry band and ceases to be one the moment it is not. The clearest statement of it in the industry comes from a crane manufacturer’s own safe operating practices, about the line that hangs from the load rather than about the sling itself: taglines should always be made of non-conductive material, and any tagline that is wet or dirty can conduct electricity. A cable job is the definition of wet and dirty. A webbing band that has been lying in a cable trench, or over a drum in a yard, or across a wet tray, has stopped being a dependable insulator whatever the fibre it was woven from.

And there is a second, more fundamental point: an insulation rating is a thing a product is designed and tested for, and a sling made to EN 1492-1 is not. The industry does make a sling for live-line work, and it is a different article — a guide for in-service application and electrical and mechanical testing covers an insulating flexible sling, with a core, attachments and an insulating sheath, for live line work at voltages up to 1000 kV alternating current and ±800 kV direct current. That is what an insulating sling looks like: a tested product with a defined construction and a defined electrical test. A woven webbing sling carries a working load limit and a colour code. It carries no insulation rating, it is not dielectric tested, and no part of EN 1492-1 makes it an insulating device.

9. Fibre, Width and Ply for Cable Duty

Three variables decide whether a cable sling does the job, and only one of them is usually discussed. The fibre sets how much the band stretches, what it survives chemically and — on this duty more than most — what happens to it when it gets wet. The band width sets how the load is spread over the jacket. The ply sets how much capacity a given width can carry. The fibre comparison below is deliberately short, because the full material work already exists on this site and is linked at the end of the section.

The white band with red sleeves at the loops, which is the second of our own product photographs on this page, is the form most often asked for where cable is handled indoors: white so that a mark shows, and sleeves so that the loop takes the wear instead of the jacket. White webbing has its own page on this site (the white polypropylene lifting belt page), and so do sleeves (the reinforced and sheathed lifting straps page).

One caution that belongs to this page alone. On cable work a wet sling is not a detail, it is a change of state: nylon is hygroscopic, so it takes moisture on and gives it up slowly, and a band that has been in a trench overnight is not the same band it was the day before. The advice is the same as the advice for the cable: cap it, dry it, store it off the ground, and inspect it before it goes back into service. On a drum that is stored outdoors, that means the sling comes off the drum at the end of the shift — it is not left where the weather can reach it, and it is not left where the next person will find it and use it as rigging.

10. Inspection and Retirement after Cable Duty

A cable sling is inspected the way every synthetic sling is inspected — by a qualified person before each use, and periodically thereafter — but cable duty produces two injuries that other duties do not, and both of them are on the inside. The inspection interval follows the service, not the calendar: yearly is the guidance for normal use, monthly to quarterly where the conditions are severe, and a cable yard, a trench or a duct is severe by any reading.

• The inside face of the band, where a flange edge or a lagging nail bears. A cut here is hidden when the band is laid flat, which is exactly how it is laid on the next lift. Feel it as well as look at it.
• Grit and dust worked into the weave. Cable pits, concrete, cement dust and metal swarf all get into webbing and then abrade the jacket and the yarns from the inside out. A band that has been in a pit is cleaned and inspected rather than reused.
• Stiffening, glazing or a patchy change of colour. On cable duty this is usually chemical rather than thermal — something in the trench that the fibre does not like. Any of the three takes the band out of service.
• The sewn joints and the eyes, for broken or worn stitching, and the eyes for distortion after being pulled over a bore bar that was too wide for them (section 4).
• The label, for legibility. A sling whose working load limit can no longer be read cannot be used, whatever its condition, and that is a frequent finding on wet-duty slings.
• The band as a whole, for melting or charring, holes, tears, cuts and snags, excessive abrasive wear, knots, and brittle or discoloured areas — the removal criteria that apply to every synthetic web sling.

Two rules end the section, and they are the two that people argue about. A damaged sling is never repaired. Webbing is not stitched back into service, load-bearing splices are not repaired, and no temporary repair of webbing or fittings is acceptable; the sling is taken out of service and either replaced or returned to the maker for reconditioning and proof testing where the standard allows it. And storage is a service condition: slings have to be kept where mechanical, chemical and ultraviolet damage cannot reach them, because long exposure to sunlight degrades synthetic webbing and the maker’s own retirement criteria apply. A sling kept on the drum it lifts, in a yard, in the sun, is being retired by the weather instead of by a decision.

11. Marking, Packing and How to Order

A cable sling is read before it is used, and there are three things to read on it. The colour of the webbing reports the working load limit for a straight lift under the EN 1492-1 colour code. The black transverse stripes cross-check it, one stripe per tonne. And the colour of the label names the fibre the band was woven from — blue for polyester, green for polyamide, brown for polypropylene — with the working load limit, the material, the standard reference, the manufacturer, the length and a traceability code printed on it. Anything that cannot be read is not in service, which is why wet-duty cable slings fail inspection on the label more often than on the webbing.

Slings are supplied shrink-wrapped in export cartons on pallets, or in bulk on the pallet for large orders, with the batch identification on each bale, under HS code 630790. Bindings are supplied in bales by width and length. Where a job needs both, they are quoted, packed and marked as two products, because that is what they are.

Frequently Asked Questions

Contact us — cable slings and cable binding straps direct from the manufacturer

Tell us what the strap has to do — lift a drum, lift a coil, or hold a cable run — and give us the geometry and the environment, and we will come back with the specification and price for your cable sling or cable binding strap: fibre, band width, ply, length, ends and marking on one sheet, with the drum or coil dimensions worked through against the bend radius they allow. Volume discounts apply. We build to order in polyamide (nylon), polyester and polypropylene, single ply or duplex, from 25 mm to 450 mm wide and in any length from 1 m to 12 m and beyond, with the EN 1492-1 colour code, one black capacity stripe per tonne and the fibre named on the label as standard. Sheathed and sleeved slings for flange and tray edges, matched sets for two-leg and four-leg assemblies, white webbing for indoor cable work, and ring-ended bindings in the reach you need are all supplied to order.

• Contact: Wang Lili
• Phone: 18066002268
• E-mail: 702461526@qq.com
• Address: Lifute Industrial Park, Taizhou City, Jiangsu Province, China
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