Odin and Thor, the two big knuckle boom cranes launched by Danish manufacturer HMF at the IAA show in Hannover last year, have been added to the Iowa Mold Tooling (IMT) product line in the USA. IMT has given them the more prosaic names of 52/830 and 72/516.
The 52/830 (or Odin, to HMF customers) has a 52tm rating, lifting a maximum of 11.72t at 4.45m, and the 72/516 (Thor) is rated at 72tm, lifting a maximum of 16.06t at 4.37t. They are nearly twice the size of anything else in IMT’s range. ‘The market is taking us there,’ said IMT product specialist Jim Darr.
‘The requirements for handling heavy equipment components, such as dozer blades and loader buckets, has gotten heavy enough and were beyond our capabilities to handle them. We believe we now have a solid response,’ Darr added.
IMT manufactures its own line of stiff boom service cranes, often mounted on field service trucks. In 1999 its signed a badging alliance to source knuckle boom cranes from HMF.
Features of the new models include continuous rotation, oil cooler fitted as standard and overbending jib. This means that the outerboom can bend backwards by 15°, which helps in horizontal boom applications such as feeding loads through a doorway. Both crane and auxiliary stabilisers – hydraulic out and down – are fully operated by the remote controller. To speed up crane movements when it is unloaded, these models have an electronic oil regeneration system. The Electronic Vehicle Stability (EVS) system is offered as an extra.
Both models have a maximum of eight hydraulic extensions to give a horizontal reach of 20.6m and a vertical reach of 23.5m.
IMT sales and marketing vice president Mark Whaley said: ‘We are primarily targeting four markets: pre-cast concrete producers, poured wall contractors, machinery dealers and utilities.’
