North America projects round up

New York, NY

A Manitowoc 18000 crawler crane is being used to construct the foundations at a 28- acre mixed-use development project in New York City.

The 12-year Hudson Yards project will incorporate 16 skyscrapers and office, residential and retail space.

The foundations for the development are a combination framework and platform being built directly over the West Side Yard, a train hub and storage site for the Long Island Railroad and 34th Street subway station. The Manitowoc 18000 is being used to place columns, girders and other steel components in the spaces between the existing railyard tracks, to create a framework on which a platform will be built.

The project involves moving loads up to 220USt, including installing caisson cores weighing up to 80USt and columns weighing up to 140USt, and assembling a tower crane.

The crane, stationed on a temporary reinforced concrete foundation, was leased to main contractor Tutor Perini from Pennsylvania-based Lomma Crane & Rigging. The lack of a wagon has meant that the company has not required crane mats and steel reinforcements on the platform.

The 18000 is rigged with a 200ft boom, 100ft fixed mast, and is set up with a full 264USt of upper counterweight and 160USt of carbody counterweight.

Charleston, SC

Florida-based Crane Rental Corporation has moved equipment components from Charleston, South Carolina, to a power plant project at Port Everglades, Florida.

The company moved 14 components weighing a total of almost 6m lb, including a 675,000lb generator, a 338,000lb K-turbine, and a 655,000lb gas turbine.

The components were moved on a barge from Charleston, offloaded at Port Everglades, and transported to the power plant site. To complete the project Crane Rental Corporation used its 110t-capacity Grove 9000E hydraulic truck crane to lift mats and 55ft-long barge ramps into place, and hydraulic modular Goldhofer trailers.

Hallandale Beach, FL

Allegiance Crane of Florida used a 400t Liebherr LTM 1400-7.1 to install a bronze sculpture in the form of the legendary flying horse Pegasus, and a dragon measuring 33m high and 63m long, at Gulfstream Park in Florida last year.

Stark Ingenieure, an engineering agency based in Ludwigsburg and Miami, a team which specialises in special support structures and one-off engineering projects, was charged with developing the technical design, planning the erection work and producing the engineering solutions.

An LTM 1400-7.1 operated by Allegiance Crane took on the erection of the various bronze components in Florida.

Michael Stark, owner of Stark Ingenieure and Günter Czasny deputy CEO, said, "Adam Cote, the manager of engineering at Allegiance Crane, and his team were extremely professional on the site. We worked extremely well and closely with each other.

And the crane produced an absolutely amazing performance. It has a compact design and has excellent setup processes coupled with enormous load capacities which meant we didn't even have to move it between the various hoists. This saved us around half the time which was very important to us."

The LTM 1400-7.1 was equipped with Y-guying and full ballast for this job. The crane set-up was completed entirely by self-assembly. The left wing of the Pegasus was the heaviest single component, weighing in at 58t. The Liebherr crane had to move this component to a radius of 22.3m.

Stark and his team were able to simulate all the processes in advance using the 3-D data for the LTM 1400-7.1 provided by Liebherr so that they could find the best way of proceeding. They knew about all the problem edges which they managed to bypass or eliminated in advance.