Higino Bertoncini & Co, based in Resistencia, Argentina, had to figure out a way to demolish an 80-year-old chimney at a disused factory. It could not knock the crumbling structure down with explosives because of the risk to adjacent facilities, which were needed.
‘We had to demolish it from the inside with pneumatic hammers because the chimney was very degraded,’ says vice president Aldo Bertoncini.
The only trouble was, the biggest available crane was a 27t (30 US ton) capacity Link-Belt HTC 830, whose fully extended three-section boom with fly jib attachment could not reach the lip of the 45m-tall chimney.
This shortfall posed no problem for the intrepid company, which promptly designed and fabricated a boom extension and luffing jib and guy-wire rigging to extend the reach of the crane. The jib is 12m tubular section joined to 2.2m lattice luffing jib.
Rather than turn to Link-Belt or its Argentinian distributor Macrosa del Plata, Bertoncini used its own in-house engineering capability for the customisation. ‘Within our staff, we have a professional civil engineer and I am a technician in electromechanics,’ explains Aldo Bertoncini.
‘Together, we made the calculations based on Link-Belt’s capacity charts, and we also tested it with double the workload to verify.’
The company used the extended crane to hang a work platform inside the chimney. Crane adaptations were made during November 2003, and the demolition job was then carried out by three workers over two weeks.
