Lists and tables always make fascinating reading, we figured, so Cranes Today has decided to risk incurring the wrath of the manufacturers by presenting a list of “the world’s biggest lifting mobile cranes” – wheeled versions and crawler-tracked versions.
Clearly any such list is open to manipulation and is ever changing. Cranes can be configured in ever-more imaginative ways to increase their capacity. And what percentage of actual lift-till-you-collapse capacity does the given safe-working capacity represent? Blithely ignoring all such protestations and ploughing on regardless, we have taken as our initial source the information submitted by the manufacturers to the 1997 Cranes Today Handbook and ranked them according to maximum load moment, rather than capacity. We have then gone back to the manufacturers which figured in the two top 10 lists, for wheeled-mobiles and crawlers, to update that information. In other words, if you don’t like what you see, we have done all that we can to avoid it being our fault! Of course, we may get a call from the Van Seumeren family asking why we have not listed their Platform Twin Ring HD machine, which does indeed lift an awful lot. But on the basis that clear rules were needed, we have chosen to list only those standard production models listed by original equipment manufacturers. Thus Liebherr’s LTM 1800 tops the all-terrain list, rather than the heavy duty version of that same machine, the so-called LTM 11000. We ran it by Liebherr, and they seemed okay with it.
And as an added caveat, we would like to say that although the information does come from the manufacturers, this list should still be regarded as strictly unofficial.
