Berlin based crane company Brandt Krane Schwertransporte recently deployed its two biggest cranes for a tandem lift in Beeskow, a town southeast of Berlin near the German/Polish border.

The 28 July project involved lifting a rotary drier at a chipboard factory belonging to the company Hornitex.

The vessel weighed 300t, was 22m long and had a 6m diameter. For this job, Brandt needed to send its 650t-capacity Demag AC 650 telescopic crane and its 800t-capacity Demag TC 3200 lattice boom truck crane.

The AC 650 was rigged with 35m of main boom and 160t counterweight. The TC 3200 had 54m of boom, 149t counterweight fitted to the superstructure and 200t Superlift counterweight.

For both picking up the load and mounting it in place, the AC 650 worked at a radius of 12m. The TC 3200 was also at 12m for the pick up but at 32m for lifting it into position.

As the client did not know the exact weight of the load, correct distribution of the load between the cranes was the main challenge. For a time, the TC 3200 took more of the weight than the AC 650. But the lift, supervised by Brandt engineer Klaus Kalicki, was completed in three hours.

Brandt runs a fleet of more than 130 mobile cranes from 11 depots, but none are bigger than this pair. It took delivery of the AC 650 in May 1999. This crane, the biggest telescopic mobile in Dematic’s product line, has a 60m main boom and can lift 22.7t at maximum reach of 54m. With boom attachments it can achieve a maximum height under hook of 135m.The lattice boom TC 3200 is on a seven-axle carrier and has a maximum boom combination of 90m + 90m with 149t of counterweight. Bracht’s crane was originally delivered in 1994 to Breuer, the company from which Bracht later emerged, like so many others in Germany.

Altogether about 50 units of the TC 2600/TC 3200 series were produced by Dematic during the production run. The successor of these machines is the brand new TC 2800, which is basically the truck-mounted version of the CC 2800 crawler crane. The TC 2800 lifts 600t at 6m and 25t at 114m. Maximum height under hook is 162m.