Frankfurt, Germany
A Terex AC 500-2 was used to position Max Bill’s 66t sculpture Continuity onto three concrete bases in a trapezoidal pool in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It was the 200th unit of the AC 500-2 delivered from the Terex Cranes facility in Zweibrücken.
In its various stages of completion, the sculpture had already made several journeys before being installed outside Deutsche Bank’s Frankfurt office in September 1986. Initially quarried from a 300t block of granite in Sardinia, it was shipped to Carrara, Italy, where the artist carved an "endless loop" form from the solid rock. Following completion in 1986, the striking monolith was transported by ship to Rotterdam in the Netherlands, loaded onto a barge and shipped to Frankfurt. For the last few miles it traveled through Frankfurt on a flatbed trailer, prior to installation in front of Deutsche Bank. Then in 2008, the artwork was obstructing renovation at Deutsche Bank’s headquarters, so once again it had to move. Since then, it has stood next to the historical site Taunusanlage, until it was brought to its new destination in the Deutsche Bank park.
Due to its extensive travels, the sculpture was already showing very fine cracks. "To rule out any damage, we used a sophisticated lifting frame to protect the sculpture during transportation and lifting. It encased the artwork like a steel cage. This enabled us to distribute the forces evenly and avoid dangerous load peaks," says Thomas Zöller, CEO of Zöller Transport GmbH.
Yet a certain degree of risk was bound to remain, so for the crane operator, precision and reliability were particularly important. With its high-precision IC-1 crane controls, the Terex AC 500-2 proved the right choice, able to gently position the load with millimetre precision.
Frankfurt, Germany
Contractors Max Bögl Bauservice and Wiesbauer have used two Sennebogen cranes on a new €30m logistics centre in Mönchhof, near Frankfurt Airport, for retail and tourism firm REWE. Having only just purchased the new 300t Sennebogen 7700, Wiesbauer had the crane delivered straight to site from Sennebogen’s Straubing assembly plant, to lift a range of construction materials from purlins and joists to girders.
Rigged with a 24.3m main boom and a 35.5m fly jib, the crane was used for 2,857 lifts of materials weighing up to 42t over a four-month period. It was joined on the site of the 51,000m2 development by a Sennebogen 5500 ‘Starlifter’, configured with 24.3m of main boom and a 29.9m fly jib, owned by German privately owned contractor Max Bögl Bauservice. Johann Simon of Max Bögl, who is responsible for technical services finished parts at the company, said: "The new 7700 is a great machine. It offers outstanding lifting performance and has extremely good loads. A reliable and robust machine, which did a perfect job on the construction site."
Mensinghausen, Germany
Franz Bracht drove a Grove GSK55 trailer-mounted crane to a remote mountain village in Germany for a recent job. The crane hirer said the GSK55 negotiated the mountainous roads with ease, and that the same journey with a normal all-terrain crane would have been much slower.
The 5 t capacity GSK55 is a trailer-mounted AT on a carrier that can be towed by any standard truck. In this instance it was an Iveco Stralis truck with 4 x 2 drive and powered by a 309 kW engine. The crane journeyed to a sintering plant in Mensinghausen to make a series of lifts as part of a repair project. Mensinghausen is a small village in the Rothaargebirge mountain range, where the summit reaches 843 m above sea level.
Dirk Bracht, managing director of Franz Bracht KG, which supplied the GSK55 to the job, said his company chose the crane because its design does not require special permits to travel to the job, unlike other cranes.
"For this job, the difficult part was not necessarily the lifting, but getting a crane to the job site in the fastest and most cost effective way," he said. "We took the crane up winding, narrow roads that an all-terrain would struggle to cover and would also require a special permit. Because the GSK55 can travel as a normal truck, we reached the site with no problem, and it easily performed the job."
Oberstdorf, Germany
Tadano Faun’s new flagship mobile crane was used on one of its first jobs by Burgberg-based Mayer, as the company replaced the starting ramps from a ski jump in Oberstdorf, a town in the Bavarian Alps.
The journey to the jobsite was a challenge, through narrow alleyways of Oberstdorf and hairpin bends up the steep mountain, but, Tadano says, the chassis handled as smoothly as a sports car.
Once on site and rigged up, the lifts went perfectly. The job was to work with two other cranes in the 200-220t class, and lift the ski jumps at the Erdinger Arena. When one of the 200t cranes broke down, the Tadano Faun team on site was reassured to see that its replacement was a Tadano ATF 220G-5 from crane rental company Glass Bau, based not far away in Mindelheim. The two Tadano cranes took the weight of the new ski ramps at the top end, while the third crane acted as tailing crane. The calculated load was 100t. The ATF 400G06 was positioned at a radius of 28m and lifted its part of the load with 35.2m of main boom extended. In this configuration, the ATF 400G-6 has a lifting capacity of 36.9t, comfortably within the margins required for the job.
