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Lift Engineering

History

1965-85

Lift Engineering was founded by Jan Kunczynski, a Polish immigrant and former ski racer who initially worked at Poma. He left Poma in 1965 and founded Lift Engineering to build his own ski lifts. One of his first customers was Squaw Valley. The name "Yan" is the English spelling of his first name, and the brand under which Mr. Kunczynski sold his lifts.

The company grew through the 1970s and 1980s. Mr. Kunczynski was known for dining with prospective clients (aprs-ski) instead of just simple negotiating, and would sketch plans out on paper napkins. Another attractive feature to buyers was the price. Mr. Kunczynski sold his lifts at prices well below those of larger manufacturers. Mr. Kunczynski is also credited with being the first manufacturer of ski lifts to incorporate aesthetics into the design of his equipment, creating sleek designs that were popular with ski resorts.

The company is most noted for its achievements in designing fixed-grip chairlifts[citation needed]. Mr. Kunczynski created a standard system that served the company well. The design was simple and easy to operate and maintain. For example, rather than put all the control panels in the operator's booth, and thus potentially confuse whoever is operating the lift, Yan operator booths contain only two switches: a switch that stops and starts the lift, and one that selects its speed. The main controls were placed in the standard shipping crate-reminiscent machine room. Lift Engineering was the first (and only) company to design and build a DC motor control tailored solely to the ski lift industry. From the company's beginnings, it always designed and built its own low voltage controls. Finally, besides being easy to operate, Yan lifts are also easy maintain the setup is allegedly foolproof. Yan's tower designs were also always overbuilt, meaning that it is possible to turn one of his triple chairs into a fixed quad merely by changing the chairs, something that was actually done at Killington, Vermont.

An example of a Yan fixed-grip chairlift;

the Catskinner triple chair at Blackcomb, B.C.

198595

Lift Engineering plunged headfirst into a new market in 1986, the high-speed detachable quad lift. Whereas the European ski lift firms spent upwards of two years developing these lifts, Yan installed its first in 1987, at Mammoth Mountain in California.

By the late 1980s, Lift Engineering was one of the largest suppliers of ski lifts based in North America. POL-X West developed a new version of the YAN-7 detachable grip, the one that was used on the majority of the high-speed lifts, replacing the marshmallow springs with high-tension springs. The redesign was ordered by a group of British Columbia and Alberta ski resorts that included Silver Star and Lake Louise. This grip also proved unsatisfactory.

Lift Engineering also moved into the funitel market in the early 1990s. The quad mono cable, or QMC funitel, was invented by Mr. Kunczynski (US Patent 4,848,241). The lift consisted of four separate loops of cable, strung between the upper and lower stations. Two cables were run in the uphill direction, and two were run in the downhill direction. The cabins would be mounted between the cables. But, because the cables were looped, once the cabins reached the upper station, the cables would loop back downhill not carrying a load. Only one of these lifts was ever built, at June Mountain, California. Apparently, the owners had difficulty getting the cables to run in synchronism. The lift also developed the grip problems that occurred on the Yan high-speed quads, and was removed in 1997.

Lift Engineering technology in Europe

Some lift builders in France are still using Yan parts, especially the fixed grip. So Skirail (Annecy, France) and Montaval (Val d'Isre, France) still use Yan grips for quad fixed chairlifts. Upper and bottom station design looks like Yan lifts.

Controversies and accidents

Despite questions about safety, Yan managed to sell a total of 31 high-speed quads in the United States and Canada. Many of the lifts have been retrofitted by companies such as Poma and Doppelmayr.

Keystone, Colorado accident (1985)

Potential problems with Yan lifts began to surface as early as 1985, when the upper bullwheel on the Teller lift at Keystone, Colorado disconnected from the main gearbox shaft. Faulty welding was blamed. Two people were killed and 47 injured. The lift was rebuilt by Yan as the Ruby lift, free of charge. During the late 1980s, the Colorado Tramway Board began to question the safety of Yan lifts. They learned that Mr. Kunczynski, in his drive to build affordable ski lifts, regularly sent steel parts to be welded together in ski area parking lots. The Board alleged that Mr. Kunczynski lifts were unsafe. The ski industry blasted the Board and continued to install Yan lifts.

Whistler, British Columbia accident (1995)

Yan detachable lifts were subject to a series of accidents, most notably the Quicksilver lift at Whistler Mountain in British Columbia, Canada. The Quicksilver accident killed two and injured eight on December 23, 1995.. The accident occurred when the emergency stop was used repeatedly. A chair started sliding downhill and struck the next chair which got stuck on a tower. This continued several times before a total of four chairs fell. The main problems with the Yan high-speed lifts were the chair grips. These were designed so that in order to stay connected to the cable, the chair had to be subject to gravity. The grips, unlike most operating today, did not have high-tension coil springs, but rather rubber "marshmallow" springs that exerted much less force on the cable. The repeated emergency brake application was enough to shake the chairs free of the cable. The majority of government safety inspectors failed to detect these problems.

The Quicksilver chairlift, which served the Whistler Creekside base area, was replaced by the Creekside Gondola in 1997, built by Poma.

New horizons (1998)

Mr Kunczynski's intense interest in renewable energy technologies results in his establishing real-world test facility in Mexico. Several new patents for his new technology are pending.

Angels Flight accident (2001)

In 2001 one of the cars of the Angels Flight funicular in Los Angeles suddenly lost cable tension - the result of a stripped spline connection. Standard design is to have emergency brakes in the cars themselves clamp to the rails in the event of a cable failure, but Angel's Flight had no such emergency braking system. This allowed one car to collide with another car, killing one and injuring seven.

Notes

^ Markels, Alex (1997-01-16). "The Rise, Fall and Return of a Ski-Lift Entrepreneur". The Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones & Company). http://www.coloradoskihistory.com/chairlift/yan1.html. Retrieved 2008-02-29. 

^ a b "Faulty Weld Is Blamed For Ski Lift Accident". The New York Times (The New York Times Company). 1985-12-18. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E00E7DB153BF93BA25751C1A963948260. Retrieved 2008-02-29. 

^ Nixon, Emily Disaster and Emergency Management: The Quicksilver Chairlift Incident, University of Victoria, Geography Dept., April 2004

^ Pyn, Larry (2008-02-09). "Minimizing the risks on B.C.'s ski lifts". The Vancouver Sun (Canwest Interactive). http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=60e7f2b3-fad4-4b5e-ab6d-85b4248c69f6&k=68164&p=2. Retrieved 2008-02-29. 

See also

Chairlift

Gondola lift

List of aerial lift manufacturers

External links

ColoradoSkiHistory.com - A History of Yan Lifts

skilifts.org

Categories: Aerial lift manufacturers | Defunct manufacturing companies of the United States | Ski lifts | Companies based in NevadaHidden categories: All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements from January 2008

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