Normal thinking is that a truck crane built in 1989 is well past its ‘use by’ date. However, a 275t capacity Grove TM-3000 bought new by Mt. Newman iron ore mine in Western Australia had worked only 4,000 hours, much of that driving around the mine site for maintenance work.
As crane work goes, it was an easy life: the potential losses from a breakdown at a remote mine were sufficient to justify having a large crane on standby to minimise delays in getting the plant operating again.
Crane rental and heavy transport firm Lampson Australia is familiar with operating older cranes that have clocked up relatively few operating hours, and saw potential for the TM-3000 in assisting with the rigging of large crawler cranes.
The company is also adept at rebuilding and modernising older cranes, and it has a successful programme of remanufacturing Manitowoc 4100s with fibreglass cabs and housings, hydraulic controls, and modern features including self-erection capabilities, hydraulic removable tracks and new counterweights for ease of transport (see Cranes Today December 2004, pp22-3). The first remanufactured Manitowoc 4100 with hydraulic controls is on its way to the USA, where it will be the benchmark for a rebuild of Lampson 4100s there, using the Australian-developed rebuild specifications.
The TM-3000 crane now has fibreglass cabs for the carrier and upper, slide-out stainless steel catwalks with drop-in stainless steel rails, stainless steel trim in other areas and a stainless steel machinery cover on the carrier deck, which doubles as a platform for counterweight sections when the crane is erecting or dismantling itself. The aim of using fibreglass and stainless steel is to ensure that these components remain maintenance-free in a harsh operating environment that takes its toll on steel.
A single-piece counterweight set has been constructed, and this counterweight is picked up with the boom and placed on the machinery cover. The crane then slews 180° and picks up the counterweight hydraulically.
The carrier is being set up to tow a multi-axle dolly that will carry the boom and all counterweight. The boom itself has been rebuilt and now incorporates an automatic pinning mechanism similar to a modern all terrain crane. Lampson Australia managing director Phil Lunn said that the design of this mechanism was one of the most demanding aspects of the project.
The work that has been done to the TM-3000 is so extensive that one of the crane’s designers did not recognise the Lampson machine as a Grove when he saw it recently.
The Grove’s first six months of work is already assigned: it will work with a Manitowoc 4600 crawler crane on a refinery upgrade project.
Lampson Australia’s Grove TM-3000 rebuild Lampson Australia’s Grove TM-3000 rebuild
