FAVCO CRAWLERS SECURE ANSI CERTIFICATION

Favelle Favco Cranes (USA) has completed load tests and secured ANSI (American National Standards Institute) certification for its full range of crawler and mobile cranes.

The company exhibited its range at the Conexpo show in Las Vegas in March but had at that stage not completed its testing programme. No cranes required de-rating as a result of testing, the company said.

FFC (USA) is a subsidiary of Muhibbah Engineering of Malaysia, which also owns the Australian manufacturer of tower cranes, Favelle Favco. Its strategy is to outsource as much as possible, primarily to Caterpillar Industrial Products, which supplies power trains for FFC (USA)’s telescopic and lattice boom crawler cranes.

Since attracting much attention at Conexpo, FFC (USA) has been subject to various industry rumours suggesting that it has run into problems. President Daniel Davis put this down to the distributors of rival manufacturers. Speaking to Cranes Today in May, he said that he had a production schedule to build all 58 machines that were on order by the end of the year. He squashed other potentially damaging rumours by asserting that boom truck manufacturer Manitex was continuing to honour its contract to supply booms for Favco’s telescopic crawlers, in spite of rumblings this may have caused at Manitex’s sister company Manitowoc. Davis worked for Manitowoc for many years. And Favelle Favco in Asia also built Manitowoc’s smaller West models under licence until this agreement lapsed.

Among projects where FFC (USA) telescopic boom crawlers can be seen in action, Davis said, are: a Pemex project in Villahermosa, Tabasco, in Mexico, where an FFC 28T is being used by Laney Directional Drilling; and the deepening of the Houston Ship Channel in Texas, USA, where Troy Construction is using a 38t-capacity FFC 38T for re-laying pipelines.

FFC (USA) is exhibiting an FFC 28T at the Conet show in Tokyo, Japan this month. Davis said he planned to market his equipment in Japan. Uppers and lowers of Favelle Favco crawlers are manufactured by Caterpillar in Japan; booms would be shipped from the USA.