The crane industry is rife with jargon and much of it can be confusing – a city crane to one person is a type of mobile crane, but to someone else it is a type of tower crane. This may not seem important, but this is an industry governed by standards and writing standards requires precise, unambiguous language.
The difficulty for the standards bodies, however, is that the industry does not stand still. Take for example the British Standard BS 7121 Part 4 Safe Use of Loader Cranes. It was only in 1997 that it was written and already it has needed clarifying. The committee that produced the standard intended it to apply only to those machines whose prime purpose is to transport goods but happen to be fitted with a crane to load and unload it.
To quote Peter Oram, chairman of the committee: ‘This means that the capacity of the crane should be commensurate with the load carrying capacity of the vehicle to which they are fitted and the reach of the crane should only enable the load to be placed in the close proximity of the vehicle’.
However, since 1997 the reach and capacity of loader cranes has got bigger and bigger, lifting 25t or more at 3m, or 1t at 25m. They are often used not just for unloading the truck, but also in place of a small mobile crane or perhaps a telehandler.
Oram says that cranes that take up the majority of the vehicle’s load carrying capacity and whose reach far exceeds that required to just unload the vehicle, are outside of the scope of Part 4 of BS 7121.
According to British Standards, therefore, they are mobile cranes and subject to Part 3 of BS 7121. This means that their lifting operations must have a written plan, be supervised and have slingers and signallers.Just because it looks like a loader crane, therefore, doesn’t mean that it is a loader crane. It is a perfectly valid point, but some firmer guidance might be useful clarifying at precisely what stage a truck loader crane becomes a truck-mounted crane. It sounds an impossible task to me.
Call that a crane market?
A Chinese friend of mine has the job of trying to find international markets for a tower cranes manufacturer – one of dozens in China, but one of the few with international ambitions. He recently undertook an extensive fact-finding tour of the USA, coast to coast, and north to south. It speaks volumes for the frenetic construction activity in urban China today that he was surprised not see more construction activity in the USA. ‘I suppose it’s already built,’ was his quite reasonable conclusion.