Utrecht, The Netherlands-headquartered international heavy lift and transport specialist Mammoet was commissioned by sign specialist Licht en Reclame Consultants BV to remove three logos, for the bank Rabobank, from a tall observation tower in Rotterdam.
The signs had been installed on the Euromast observation tower in Rotterdam’s Het Park since 2009. Since the advertisement contract between the bank and Euromast expired this year, however, the eight-metre-tall logo signage had to be removed from a height of 174 metres.
To do this Mammoet used a Tadano CC 38.650-1 lattice boom crawler crane.
“There were two main reasons why we decided on the CC 38.650-1 for this unusual job,” says Stefan Plugge, Netherlands project manager at Mammoet. “First, it would make the required height of 174 metres a breeze to handle. Second, the crane’s compact design meant that it would be able to manoeuvre without issue despite cramped conditions at the site.”
To transport its CC 38.650-1 from its Schiedam branch, which was located just a few kilometres away, the Mammoet team required a total of 38 transports. The crane’s main boom sections and jib sections were transported separately due to space restrictions on site. This also meant that the assist crane had, unusually, to be placed in front of the CC 38.650-1 crawler crane instead of next to it, as normally occurs.
The tight space conditions at the site, plus a tight schedule, required meticulously planned part logistics. More specifically, the work site had zero space for putting down any crane components, meaning that everything had to be delivered just in time.
The team’s five assembly technicians were able to set up the crane in just four days, although the boom had to be erected on the fifth day due to strong winds. To handle this last step, the CC 38.650-1 was set up with an SWSL 96-96 configuration with 250 tonnes of counterweight. For the lifts themselves, however, the crane was able to forego the use of its superlift system, using 215 tonnes of counterweight, since the logo signs only weighed 1.8 tonnes each.
The relatively lightweight nature of the three logo signs, however, did not mean that the lifts were straightforward. The Mammoet team had to work around two obstacles at the site: a tree and a lamppost that could not be removed and made things considerably more complicated by significantly restricting the available slewing radius.
“There was simply no crane position that would allow us to swivel from the place where we picked up the loads to the place where we set them down at a radius of 45 metres, so we had to continuously switch back and forth between swinging the loads and moving the crane,” explains Supervisor Lex Bosman.
The CC 38.650-1, however, was able to carefully move between the tree and the lamppost with precision without touching either obstacle.
The Mammoet team safely removed all three Rabobank logo signs between 6AM and 10AM. The last job was the disassembly of the CC 38.650-1 – which took four days.
