Having bought three of the famous giant Linden 8992 tower cranes, Lambertssons is making a name for itself in the global tower crane rental market. The Swedish company is one of the leading North-European crane rental companies with about 300 cranes of all sizes, including 236 tower cranes from 8tm to 900tm and telescopic boom mobile cranes up to 250t capacity. Among these are the 8992s, originally designed for boiler house construction in Poland, and with a free standing under hook height of 135m and a lifting capacity of 50t.
In Sweden Lambertssons operate branches throughout the country, from Skelleftes in the north to Malmö in the south. International operations take place mainly in Finland and Norway, although the trading section of the company operates worldwide, selling mainly used Linden cranes and spare parts. Christer Klemets, managing director of Lambertssons Kran AB, pointed out during a visit by Cranes Today to the company’s headquarters in Ullevivagen that many customers buy the cranes or hoists with a buy-back guarantee. When the project is finished they then decide whether they want to keep the machine, or send it back to Lambertssons. In this way Lambertssons cranes find their way to Asia as well as South America and the USA.
Pillars of success
Lambertssons is part of the Peab construction and civil engineering group, but Peab accounts for only 30% of its sales. A healthy 70% is external sales. Developing the external market means providing the best technical and economical lifting solutions. Without exaggeration competent and service-minded personnel is crucial to the success.
Also important are well equipped workshops and well maintained machinery. For example, Lambertssons is perhaps the world’s only crane rental company that has a test tower where simulations of 100% load on all winch machinery is possible. A new paint shop is under construction to give a fresh finish to crane sections.
The second pillar of the company’s success is its business concept: ‘Top quality at low cost’. Following this idea, original Linden and Potain cranes that comprise the majority of Lambertssons’ tower crane fleet are constantly upgraded.
Christer Klemets entered the crane hire business in 1967 with Pada Kran, run by Ingemar Pada, considered by some to be the godfather of tower crane rental. The construction market was declining in Sweden, but by buying up Linden and Betox tower cranes the company was well positioned when recovery came. Thanks to the long-lasting rigid crane design of the Linden cranes produced in Sweden, these still provide the backbone of Lambertssons’ fleet of tower cranes over 400tm.
After Linden ceased production in 1983, Lambertssons took on former Linden engineers and gathered the necessary hardware and engineering capacity to continue developing the fleet. By the mid 1980s the company was offering Linden spare parts in competition with the Spanish manufacturer Comansa, which had acquired the Linden name and designs.
Pada Kran was taken over by Lambertssons in 1987. Pada himself left the company but Klemets, by then one of three shareholders in Pada, stayed on at the helm under the new owners.
Klemets says that constant improvements, sometimes requiring only ‘micky mouse money’ he says, are essential to provide modern, efficient and operator-friendly cranes.
One good example is the spacious cab, developed by Lambertssons and built by a Finnish speedboat yard. Step by step, all of Lambertssons’ Linden 8000 models have had their traditional small Linden cabs replaced by this larger, more comfortable cab made of fibreglass. Inside the cab are a microwave oven, a fridge, a toilet and air conditioning. The driver’s seat is raised to give the best possible field of view. For ease of rigging, only three bolts are needed to fix the cab.
Another example is a new hoisting unit developed by Lambertssons, called 75N12. Thanks to a frequency regulated drive modification, the original Linden 5000 series hoisting winch with a motor output of 75kW provides the same lifting speed as a conventional 125kW unit. The hoist gear with frequency converter offers a stepless range of hoist speeds. It is like the traditional electrohydraulic hoisting machinery run in the Lambertssons’ Linden 8000 series cranes but uses less power, an increasingly important selling point. After intensive in house testing on the company’s test ground, the new frequency regulated drive will now be tried under construction conditions.
Engineering innovation
A third major pillar of the company’s success is focused in the company philosophy ‘the sky’s the limit’. A large stock of special components indicates the ability to cope with extraordinary customer requirements. Examples are a unique Potain tower crane upper with telescopic saddle jib, a crawler mounted undercarriage for top slewing Potain and Betox tower cranes, rail-mounted portals, internal climbing tower sections, guide rope attachments for ultra high free standing heights (as used on cooling tower projects) and jib dismantling equipment for shortening the jib on a standing crane for Linden 8000 cranes.
The jib dismantling equipment was first used in 1980 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, where a 159m high Linden 8000 had to be climbed down inside a cooling tower. For passing through the narrow section of the hyperbolic shaped cooling tower the 64m long jib had to be reduced by 30m.
To accelerate rigging, Lambertssons developed a compact 6m x 6m cross frame for cranes in the 350tm class. For example a Linden 8852 with 4t capacity at 80m jib end was rigged on the cross frame with 52m under hook height.
Now on the drawing board is a giant 12.5m x 12.5m cross section called ‘City cross’ for the massive 5.5m x 5.5m mast. Originally the Linden 8952 was installed in Poland on concrete foundations by foundation anchors. This device was suitable for long power plant contracts but no longer for today’s short construction times. The ‘City cross’ is being promoted as an economic alternative. With high capacity cranes and ultra high free standing heights being a growing niche, this unique tower is also suitable for carrying the massive Linden 8952 (maximum capacity of 50t at 18.5m radius) as well as original smaller Linden 8000 cranes reaching extraordinarily high free standing conditions.
The width of the square mast sections is exactly twice that of the standard 8000 series. Each 4m high mast section is made up of a series of connecting triangular panels which can be stacked to give a transport width of just 3.5m. This means that they can readily be transported by rail or flatbed trailer. The hydraulic climbing equipment comprises four pistons with a stroke length of 4.5m capable of lifting a maximum weight of 180t at 0.4m/min. The tower sections can be put to work in the alternative heavy lift industry, for instance by combining four towers to raise or lower a heavy prefabricated module.
Minor changes to the original design lead to efficient transport and rigging solutions. An example is lifting lugs on top of the Linden 8000 series machinery roof. Together with the topless crane design, they permit the rigging of one crane by an umbrella crane slewing only a short distance above the unit to be installed.
Originally all Linden mast sections were built up from four panels and fitted together with pins to save transport volume. As long as the 2.5m x 2.5m tower system is sufficient, Lambertssons welds together most pin-connected panels to produce mono-tower sections which are even more rigid and can be rigged much faster. According to Lambertssons, the Linden 8000 tower connection device, which just clamps around the mast joint connected by four bolts tightened with an ordinary torque wrench, have proved to be the safest and most reliable locking device. A time and cost saving feature is that the tower sections may be inserted or removed at any 90° angle when using the climbing cage.
In special cases a hybrid crane may be the most appropriate solution to meet customers’ requirements. For example, Lambertssons put a new lightweight Potain MDT 302 topless crane on a Linden 8000 tower by using an in-house designed adaptor frame. As well as the top slewing flagships, Lambertssons also runs a fleet of Potain self-erecting truck mounted cranes. As typical for the Swedish market these cranes are mainly large capacity units, suitable for lifting heavy prefabricated building modules. Generally these cranes are rented with Lambertssons crane operators. A typical example is the 8t capacity Potain GTMR 386 on a five-axle Faun chassis. The GTMR 360 and 386 self-erectors are displacing small top slewing models in the 100tm class due to their significantly lower rigging costs. While larger top slewing cranes are generally serving a construction site for four to eight months, the average utilisation time for self-erectors is about two to three months.
The Lambertssons product range is completed by 67 personnel and material hoists, delivered by Europakranar Svenska AB. Going along with principal of quality at low cost, the hoists are built in the Czech Republic by Stros with input from Lambertssons to adjust the machines to the Nordic environment.
During the economic downturn in Scandinavia during the 1990s the maintenance and service division became the backbone of the company. In times where the construction industry struggled to survive, Lambertssons gained expertise in the installation and maintenance of telecommunication masts. The flexible engineering team also designed and delivered one-off steel structures, like a movable bridge made from an old 130tm Linden 5101 crane. The modified crane upper structure is equipped with a platform with a maximum load capacity of 2t at the jib end. The whole crane top is fixed to standard bogies and moves along a 50m railway to connect a residential island in a lake near Stockholm with the shore. The inhabitants of the island use this bridge when the ice is too thin to walk on, but too thick to sail through. For environmental reasons a permanent bridge was not approved by the local authorities and the structure had to be designed as low as possible and painted green.
The tower crane rental service also offers a shop built illuminated sign for advertising, as well as full transport, installation, maintenance service and individual leasing arrangements.
As a modern crane rental company the customer service includes comprehensive lift planning with CAD simulations providing step by step drawings so that every phase and aspect of the crane utilisation is visualised. Thanks to the in-house engineering capacity, individual solutions to adapt the cranes to unique site conditions are developed. While Lambertssons supports its customers as a global player, some examples can be found just around the corner in the Stockholm area:
For a penthouse building project in the inner city of Stockholm, general contractor Peab Severige AB placed a Linden 8552 and a Linden 8450 on special foundations to cope with the permitted corner pressure on top of the existing building. The Linden 8450 standing 15m above floor level was equipped with a 40m jib, providing a capacity of 8t at 23.2m radius. Thanks to the Linden 8000 modular concept, the counterjib was also shortened, to correspond with the short jib. The tower base rested on a grid at the building edge. With the Linden 8552 umbrella crane, forces could only be transmitted through the building by a column in the centre of the tower, so the base tower section was fixed to a special cross shaped adaptor frame only resting on the central column. A frame tied the second tower section of the crane to the surrounding floor level. Towering 44.5m above the special adaptor frame, the crane was rigged with 66m boom to provide a maximum capacity of 6t. A third unit on top of the roof was a small Cadillon Chronoflash 13 self-erecting crane with a maximum capacity of 1t and a 13.4m jib, also supplied by Lambertssons.
The latest investment made in new cranes are two Potain MD 345 units equipped with all the new technology from Potain such as the LVF Optima winch that smoothly optimises the speed according to the load. Dialogue Pilote is another new Potain system – a diagnostic system that has a display in the cabin to show maintenance needs and guide service personnel to breakdowns. The information can be transmitted by GSM telephone to a computer in the service office. These cranes were delivered by barge to the Tranebergs bridge construction site in Stockholm where they are fixed to the bottom of the sea at 8m and 10m depths through a steel construction designed by Lambertssons and connected with steel bars driven into the ground.
For the construction company Strängbetong AB, Lambertssons delivered a Linden 8852 with 38.5m height under hook and 50m jib. This crane can lift a maximum of 18t all the way out to 31.6m radius, and at tip end still lifts 10.75t. The crane is already rigged with the new cabin and is based on a footing block foundation on solid rock into which 6m long post-tensioned anchors are driven. Removable base bolts are a cost-saving feature of the Linden 8000 tower system. Thanks to the capacity of the crane large prefabricated concrete modules can be lifted.
A really prestigious project was the Øresund bridge between Denmark and Sweden. Through Europakranar Svenska AB, Lambertssons sold eight Potain MD265 to the project’s contractors and rented them two MD285s. The two highest cranes were erected with a hook height of 70m on 6m x 6m travelling bases. One of them was equipped with a special 25m short jib. Due to the extreme hook height and the small bases needed, more than 1,000t of ballast for counterjib and bases had to be produced locally.
