The lead item in news in this issue was the closure of Coles Cranes Glazebury factory, home to the company’s Speedcrane industrial mobiles and Starlift access platforms. Production of the equipment was moved to Sunderland.
Morrow, of Salem USA, announced another closure in the UK, of its UK hire operation. The company had only been in the UK for a few weeks, and, Cranes Today speculated, had not been able to secure UK rights for distribution of Liebherr’s tower cranes (which it held in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand).
Tim Scott, of Scott Greenham, looked back over the last decade, and marveled at how, in 1972, ‘we looked at photographs of 70t telescopics on multi-axle carriers as if they had been designed for another world, rather than the crane hire industry’. As capacities rose to as high as 400t, Scott saw new crane prices soaring too, from £50,000 in the early 1970s to £1m in the early 1980s.
Richard Glover, product marketing and development manager at Coles Cranes called the all terrain concept ‘the crane for the eighties’.
Since Gottwald’s launch of the AMK 55-31 more than ten years previously, the all terrain had been slow to take on, selling only 1% of the European market in 1976. By 1978, in a depressed market, it was taking 10% of that market, or around 200 cranes.
Malcolm Baldwin, sales manager for Sparrows Contract Services, noted another novelty: the growth of the international heavy rigging company.
Cranes over 1,000t were finally, he said, allowing oil-related companies to perfom lifts for maintenance on ‘live’ sites.
That innovation had, Baldwin said, been paralleled by the development of technology required to plan, coordinate and supervise major lifts.
This, in turn, had left to the development of international rigging companies, able to manage these sort of jobs around the world.
