Grove at Australian wind farm
14 January 2020Australian crane specialist RAR Group has put a new Grove GMK6400 crane to work on one of the largest wind farms in New South Wales.
The Capital Wind Farm job saw the crane used to maintain gearboxes on a number of the 67 turbines at the 140.7MW facility. RAR Group received a Grove GMK6400 all terrain crane, the biggest crane in its fleet, at the start of this year.
The 400t capacity GMK6400 has a 60m main boom and up to 79m of luffing jib available, giving it a maximum possible tip height of 136m. It can handle loads out to a maximum radius of 96m and comes with the optional self-rigging Mega Wing Lift attachment for additional capacity.
“The GMK6400 was the perfect choice for this project because it has the best lifting capacity of any six-axle crane, combined with small outrigger dimensions and a fast set-up,” said Andrew Bodman, director, RAR Group.
On the Capital Wind Farm project, RAR Group configured the crane with 49m of main boom and 43m of luffing jib together with the Mega Wing Lift attachment. The GMK6400 was used for five lifts per day replacing the 24t gearboxes on turbines at a height of 85m.
In addition to the wind farm project, RAR has used the GMK6400 in a variety of other applications, including erecting and dismantling tower cranes, installing precast concrete panels, and placing 11t precast concrete panels at 60m radius on a data centre construction project in Canberra.
