An unprecedented 14 projects were submitted in this year’s Specialised Carriers & Rigging Association’s rigging job of the year competition, which was held at the SC&RA’s annual convention in Destin, Florida in May. It was a long haul for audience and judges alike, but the standard of presentations (these days making full use of audio-visual technology) was high enough to keep delegates glued to their seats long after the bars and restaurants would otherwise have beckoned them.
Over $750,000 category
The winner of the category for jobs worth more than $750,000 was Alfred Scholpp of Germany.
Managing director Klaus Scholpp explained that the project involved replacing the base plate – the heart – of a huge forging press at Weber Metals in Paramount, California. The project also involved modifications during dismantling work, and complex logistics to transport the new cylinder to the site.
The German-designed, US-built press was installed in 1981 by a German company, Sauter, which also replaced a 215t column on the same press in 1987 and the other three columns in 1990 due to material damage. Sauter was subsequently acquired by Scholpp, which put Scholpp in the frame for the replacement contract.
The fully installed press weighed more than 2,021t. It was 17m high, of which 10m was below operating floor level. The heaviest single parts were the four columns, weighing 215t each, and the base plate, weighing 240t. This forging press is used to manufacture aluminium and titanium parts, mainly for the aerospace industry.
Cracks appeared in the base plate in April 1999. This meant no production for a prolonged period, with a huge loss of revenue and profit. The original manufacturer of the press no longer existed. Weber discovered that there were only four foundries in the world capable of making the cylinder, and chose the one located in France which guaranteed earliest delivery of this delicate part.
Scholpp was approached to see if it still had the personnel, lifting gear and attachments needed to do the job. In the event, all the special tools for this press had been lying in Scholpp’s yard more or less untouched for years.
Scholpp shipped 14 containers with 200t of equipment to California and its rigging team started work on-site in September 1999. The riggers had to dismantle practically the entire press. An 11m-high gantry was set up with a span of 15m to cover the 11m by 11m press pit. The dismantling process was so complicated – lifting out the four columns and the sideframe – it was February 2000 before the heart of the press was reached and the 240t base plate, or master cylinder, was removed. The cracked cylinder had to be lifted from underneath, using PSC strand jacks, to ensure it did not break up.
Scholpp was also responsible for shipping the new base plate from the production plant at Creusot-Loire Industrie in France, via the Panama Canal, to California, a journey which involved the deployment of floating cranes in Europe and the USA. To install the new base plate took from April to November.
Scholpp spent a total of 25,000 man-hours on the project. Total contract value was $2.15m, including $250,000 for the transport.
Other entrants in this competition category were Deep South Crane & Rigging, Process Mechanical Installations (PMI) and Lampson International. Deep South’s project, which took most of 2000 to execute, was the change-out of a 300t vacuum column on the Conoco Petrozuata Syncrude project. Deep South used its TC-36000 Versacrane, which had to be modified because the site was so congested.
PMI’s project was the replacement of a kiln during a 36 day shutdown at a Lafarge cement plant in Ontario, Canada. A significant rigging element of this project was carried out by Atlas Industrial Contractors under subcontract.
Lampson used one of its 1,500 US ton (1,360t) capacity LTL-1200 Series IIA Transi-Lift cranes for a series of lifts for ABB Lummus and Zachry Construction on the N-ROC project at the Fina refinery in Port Arthur, Texas. The largest lift was an 11m-diameter, 58m-high gasoline fractionator, weighing 1,129 tons (1,024t), which had to be set at a 24m radius. The accumulated total of the loads lifted by Lampson on the project was 6,024t.
Jobs between $100,000 and $750,000
The mid-size category was won by Deep South Crane & Rigging of Sulphur, Lousiana for the change-out of a 540 US ton (490t) brick-lined furnace at Dupont’s plant in Burnside, Louisiana during a 17 day turnaround in February 2000. Severe space constraints and ground bearing limits presented challenges, but central to this project was the arrangement of lifting beams for the 12 point vertical lift. No lug could exceed 60 tons. The rigging alone weighed 80 tons. Hydraulically adjustable links were set into one side of the rigging so that the spreader beam and hook could be adjusted over the centre of gravity by about 500mm in each direction. The crane used was Deep South’s TC-24000 Versacrane.
In a hotly contested category, the other entrants were JE Oswalt & Sons, Metro Machinery Rigging, Bigge Crane & Rigging, Barnhart Crane & Rigging, and Taylor Crane & Rigging.
Oswalt’s job was the relocation of a 680 ton (617t) steel swingbridge from Edenton, North Carolina to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina – a distance of 500km.
Metro’s project was the reassembly of the wings and tail section onto the HK-1 flying boat, better known as Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose. The plane was being installed at the Evergreen Aviation Educational Institute in Oregon. The challenges were the height restrictions (the job was indoors) and the fragility of the wings, which were between 3mm and 12mm thick, but weighed 21.3t. A steel frame was built for each wing and a jacking gantry was used to raise them into place.
Bigge’s entry in this category involved the use of a hydraulic strand jacking system to bring down a bridge crane which weighed 245t and was installed at a height of about 75m. The site was a disused air force base in California which Boeing had taken over in 1999. Boeing was modifying the plant to use it for launching satellites; Bigge was contracted to the demolition contractor, Cleveland Wrecking. A Liebherr LTM 1160/2, supplied by Specialty Crane, was used with full boom and jib to put the jacking system above the bridge cranes. It took five weeks to install the 4 x 136t jacking system and then 16 hours to jack the load down.
Barnhart entered a project which involved a complicated rigging system to install a turbine and generator in an old power station in Missouri. An eight beam gantry arrangement was devised and after 100 hours of engineering work, the $350,000 contract was completed by an eight-man crew in just nine working days.
Taylor’s bid was also a Missouri project. Subcontracted to Cherne Contracting, Taylor used a 400 US ton and a 600 US ton Riggers jacking system to install a combustion gas turbine, a steam turbine generator, a condenser shell, and a combustion turbine generator/excitor. ‘It was one of those jobs where you bid the job and then figure out how you’re going to do it,’ Jim Taylor confessed.
Jobs below $100,000
Nichols Construction of Baton Rouge, Lousiana picked up the trophy in the small contracts category for the erection of a 34m-high stripper column in a Conoco refinery in Louisiana. The challenge here was that there was no room for a tailing crane or a transporter and clearance all round was tight. A small tailing frame was devised, mounted on Goldhofer axle-lines. A Lift Systems gantry was used to transfer the 99,500lb (45t) vessel onto the tailing frame. A Demag HC 920 (a 300t-class all-terrain) was used for the lift. (Safety measures imposed in refineries include restricting cranes to 75% of their chart; Nichols calculated that this crane would be at 73.8% of its chart on this job.) Once the vessel was installed, the counterweight had to be removed from the crane before it could slew back as there was no room for it to move.
The other entrants in this category were Taylor Crane & Rigging, Bigge Crane & Rigging and Barnhart Crane & Rigging.
Taylor’s entry in this category was a project in its hometown of Coffeyville, Kansas over five days in September last year. Taylor removed a tube bundle from a generator at Texaco’s Farmland refinery, a nitrogen fertiliser plant. The bundle weighed 60,000lb (27.2t) and the vessel was 24m off the ground. The tube bundle was skidded out on rails and re-rigged before being lowered to the ground using a 140 US ton Lorain truck crane. The rails on which the load was skidded were supported by a pair of towers modified from a Pecco tower crane.
Bigge’s project in this category was a rescue mission. Having bid for and failed to win the original project, Bigge could be forgiven if it had felt a little smug when the call came from Stolt Comex Seaway to rescue the situation. The 3,450t Osprey offshore platform near Kenai, Alaska had been set into position but had ended up about 2.5m out of level and stuck in mud. For Bigge the challenge was one of mobilisation as much as engineering. Within five days the California-based company was on site with nine of its 850 US ton (771t) jacks and 730m of high pressure hydraulic hose. Bigge converted its jacks from the standard compression set-up to a standard rod jacking system where the rods are in tension.
Barnhart’s submission in the small contracts category was a project for Phillips Getschow of Kentucky installing a vessel in a live plant with tight clearances. The vessel to be lifted in place weighed 115,400lb (52.3t) and was 35m high and 3m in diameter. Since the client did not want a crawler crane on the site, Barnhart used its Liebherr LTM 1400, a 400t AT, as the primary lift crane, with a 180t Demag AC 435 as tailing crane.
Deciding the winner in these competitions always seems a daunting task, but the judges are given strict guidelines to help them reach their decisions. According to one of the judges this year, given the criteria before them, it was not as hard a task as he had at first feared it would be, and in each category the winners clearly stood out from the rest of the field.
