Will knuckle booms ever break into the USA?

Of the roughly 55,000 knuckleboom cranes sold worldwide last year, sales in Europe were over 30,000 units while the United States, Canada and Mexico were a mere 3,500-plus units, according to Palfinger North America.

"Traditionally, the North American market has been dominated by stiff-boom manufacturers," says Palfinger North America area product manager (cranes) Charles Letford. "The 'acceptable' crane in North America was perceived as a long boom equipped with a winch."

The North American market, with wider streets and more space to move a large truck and swing a boom, with less restriction on the size of trucks, has not had the same incentive to move away from the stiff booms, boom trucks and telescoping cranes. Producers of stiff booms are well entrenched with customers.

Nowadays, however, "companies are realising the benefits of having a truck that not only has a clear deck for payload, but also has the ability to load or unload itself," Letford says. "This makes for a more efficient and more versatile piece of equipment in their fleet."

While knuckleboom crane sales in North America today seem small compared to Europe, they are large compared to just a few years ago and continue to grow as the market matures.

Knuckleboom sales by the Italian manufacturer PM Group, averaging 700-800 units annually, were half that just five to ten years ago, according to Stefano Ghesini, sales director for PM North America. PM North America was established just four years ago, according to Ghesini, with Italian engineers and spare parts now abundantly available through its Chicago office.

"Before five years ago, we were just selling through Italy but there was no branch here in the US," Ghesini says. "Companies started to follow us and trust us for service, and that's been the key for growth in the last five years. Now we have a moment where the economy is slowing a bit, but we have more and more customers interested in this kind of product than in the past."

Service, or the lack of it, was a factor in slow sales when companies started selling knucklebooms in the US market in the 1960s and 1970s, according to John Cheshier, director of material handling sales for Iowa Mold Tooling Co., or IMT, which has the North American territory as exclusive importer for HMF cranes made in Denmark.

"Some of the European cranes early on got a bad rep as far as parts availability and trying to support products from European manufacturers," says Cheshier. An end user might complain about needing a part and not getting it from Europe for six weeks while losing money because a crane was standing idle, he says. Today, he adds, more European crane companies have good distribution networks in North America. "At IMT, for example, we have 80 dealers nationwide and a good infrastructure in place."

The acceptance level for knucklebooms has increased significantly in the last ten years, Cheshier says. "Even just in the last five years or so, in every trade journal you see all sorts of truck equipment companies advertising knucklebooms now, where they previously did not advertise. There are a lot more brands that we didn't see ten years ago. There are dozens of European manufacturers, if not more, many of which have their sights on the US market. You see a lot more distribution of European cranes and a lot more truck equipment houses actively promoting them."

Now with reach

In competition with stiff booms, knucklebooms have also in recent years outgrown much of their previous limitations in how far they could extend, and that too has yet to sink into consumer perspectives.

"People aren't aware that articulating cranes come with the reach they do today," says Jim Darr, product specialist for material handling systems at IMT. "They're used to the idea that if they want something with an 80ft reach, they're going to have to use a telescopic crane."

Knuckleboom cranes in the US started out with short reaches, functioning just to get materials like precast concrete or bricks off a truck and onto the ground, says Cheshier. "Contractors eventually figured out that instead of putting material on the ground, they could stage it in the windows of the construction site or put shingles on the roof."

This began opening the eyes of contractors to the value of longer reaches, as longer reaches began coming into availability. It was little more than ten years ago that knuckleboom cranes really started getting longer and more efficient and able to take on more of the jobs of telescoping cranes, says John Bannes, sales associate for Fischer Crane Co., Bolingbrook, Illinois, which imports Amco Veba knucklebooms from Italy.

"It's continued to progress, and has continued even in the last few years. It's the first time we've had articulating cranes with a 90ft reach, and we sell one that actually reaches 100ft. We're constantly finding new market segments that are interested in looking at us. It is sometimes difficult to convince somebody to do something in a different way, but we are having more responsive ears as time goes by."

Go to Europe, and you'll see a knuckleboom on every corner, but the US market just hasn't caught on yet, says D.W. Flenker, sales manager for American PM Crane Imports Inc. in Orlando, Florida. People are starting to catch on, but they have to be introduced to it. "When you're spending a quarter of a million dollars for a crane and a truck, they tend to want to use what they normally use," he says. "It's up to me and others to convince them to try something different."

American dealers new to knuckleboom cranes tend to shy away from them, say some manufacturers and distributors, because when they see a knuckleboom folded up, it looks complicated.

"One of the hurdles when trying to introduce a knuckleboom to a stick boom user," says John Cheshier, "is education. Once you show them and demonstrate, you can see the light bulb go on."

In recent years, more companies have found success by allowing potential knuckleboom customers to use demonstration units.

"Canada has a lot more knucklebooms, but people in the US have a tendency to use more stick booms," says D. W. Flenker. "It's the old mentality, 'We've always done it that way.' It's just a case of getting the product into their hands and letting them try it, which everybody is doing more now. If you can get the guy to use it, he'll usually buy it because he'll see it can do a lot more things than a stick boom can."

"With a stick boom, you might be able to put a pallet on the truck and take it to the jobsite, and then bring a trailer full of material and offload the trailer," he adds. "With a knuckleboom, we can take ten pallets on the truck because the crane folds up out of the way, and the knucklebooms are less weight than the stick booms. Often, the truck itself, with a stick boom, would weigh somewhere around 58,000lb, and if you only have a truck license to carry maybe 60,000lb, you have 2,000lb for payload. With a knuckleboom crane, I can weigh in at about 38,000lb and still have 22,000lb for payload."

"Another advantage is I don't have to be sticking up 110-130ft in the air to deliver my loads. The knuckleboom can be 8 to 12ft in the air and extend it all out horizontally to place my loads off the truck."

A philosophy of Flenker's company is to sell to big companies that buy many knucklebooms at a time, "and once you get them in there, the smaller companies take a look and start buying them to compete with the big boys," he says.

Bradco Building Supply, for example, an Avenel, New Jersey-based wholesale distributor of building and roofing materials primarily to contractors, with 156 locations in 31 states and sales of roughly $2 billion, has about 225 knuckleboom cranes as well as about 30 stick booms and some 300 piggyback forklifts, another market competitor of knucklebooms. Until the 1980s, Bradco had no knucklebooms, and the company began adding them significantly in the 1990s, says Kevin Tremmel, Bradco Supply corporate fleet manager.

"For what we're doing, the knuckleboom is one of the most flexible pieces, and overall that's why we've gravitated to it," he says. "The biggest thing for our business involves shingles, and they're heavy. You want to have the largest crane that you can put on a truck that also has payload capacity. You could get a larger crane, but you would have to buy another truck to carry the material."

Piggyback-or truck-mounted-fork lifts are another reason why knuckleboom cranes are not as popular in the US as in Europe. "The Europeans don't really use the truck mounted fork lift like we do," says an executive of one US knuckleboom crane distributor who asked not to be identified. "We're hearing that there are maybe 8,000 truck-mounted fork lifts in our market, and we know that's taken quite a bit of business away from us, especially in the wallboard market."

Use of truck-mounted fork lifts and other alternatives is in fact, part of another cultural phenomenon which works against knuckleboom penetration of the US market.

"The European customer demands a more diversified tool out of his crane, perhaps because market conditions have placed greater pressures on equipment owners to find efficiencies," says Darrell Messman, national sales manager (cranes), for Palfinger North America. "A variety of attachments for a single crane is more common to see in Europe, although the benefits are now being realized in the USA also. In the USA, it is common to see a crane, forklift, personnel lift, and a backhoe on the same job with an operator for each machine. Whereas in Europe one articulated crane with a pallet fork, personnel basket, and clamshell bucket at the same job site with a single operator can be quite common."

The wallboard market

One articulating crane category in which the North American market does excel is that of wallboard cranes, also known as drywall cranes. These typically differ from the knuckleboom articulated crane in characteristics that prevent the wallboard crane from folding like a knuckleboom. Instead, the crane is parked above the deck, still leaving most of the truck bed clear for stacking material. "Generally, these cranes are dedicated to one purpose – loading and unloading wallboard," according to Palfinger's Charles Letford, although that can vary. Palfinger's PW 400, for example, is essentially a wallboard crane but can also be used in lifting, loading and unloading other building materials as well as being used in the forming application.

Use of wallboard - and the wallboard crane - is more common in North America than in Europe, where plaster, block and brick are more common.

"They are using wallboard in Europe, but not like we do here where everything has gypsum-type interior walls," says IMT's John Cheshier.

HMF importer IMT has one of the largest pieces of the US wallboard-crane market, Cheshier says. "Fassi is probably the second largest provider, as they've been in this market with drywall booms longer than other European makers."

Where European builders do use drywall, says Letford, they seem to be more at home with a loader crane. "They are just as happy delivering wallboard using a knuckleboom equipped with a fly-jib and hydraulic forks, or in many cases will sling a drift of drywall and not use a fork at all."

Product evolution has a lot to do with it, he says. In North America, wallboard cranes seem to have "evolved from a style of domestically made logging cranes, where the booms were already inline and the cranes were controlled from a top seat," Letford says. "Whereas in Europe, wallboard delivery was seen as just one more job that a knuckleboom could perform. Now, with European manufacturers adapting the technology used in building knucklebooms to wallboard cranes, resulting in greater outreaches and lighter deadweights, we see a greater number of wallboard cranes from those manufacturers."

Use of knuckleboom cranes in general will continue to increase in North America; Palfinger estimates that growth will be roughly 3-5% per year.

"The end users in Europe have a better understanding and appreciation of what the entity is," says Stan Thornton, national sales manager for Fassi dealer Fascan International Inc. in Baltimore, Maryland. "Their market is so much more mature than ours. But I think that is the trend where the marketplace is going. A lot of the learning curve is on the customer base, and we have a lot of people going in the direction of knucklebooms where in the past they used boom truck units."

Yes, the numbers in North America are still much lower than those in Europe, "but that represents a tremendous potential future opportunity," Thornton says.