At the Amsterdam World Class Crane Management Seminar, Ainscough Crane Hire service director Steve Cooke described the valuable initiative of ESTA, the European association of heavy haulage, transport and mobile cranes. ESTA is working on harmonising the demands that buyers place on the mobile crane manufacturers. In this way, it seeks to work with the manufacturers to ensure that mobile cranes best meet the needs of the buyers. It is a thoroughly laudable initiative, and one that no doubt the manufacturers welcome.
At the seminar Cooke set out the shortcomings, as he saw it, of the manufacturers. All this is described in our feature on pp20-23. While there is a wider debate about whether buyers want high-tech carriers on their cranes which are costly to maintain and repair, the core issue is axle weight. ESTA is telling the manufacturers to make sure that cranes not only meet the 12t per axle limits, but do so with enough to spare so that users can carry all the rigging they need on board to actually use the crane. This is the major grievance of European buyers of mobile canes.
The problem is that no two crane buyers have identical needs. For example, even within Holland, parts of the country need steel mats, while parts with better ground find the lighter plastic mats adequate. Some use jib extensions all the time, some hardly ever. Given these differences, ESTA is unlikely to be able to specify exactly what equipment needs to be included within that 12t per axle weight. Instead it should provide manufacturers with the total weight below 12t per axle that they require each class of crane to be. If 12t gives no margin for extras, does ESTA want the basic crane to be 11t per axle instead, or maybe 11.5t? For their part, crane buyers need to understand that if manufacturers provide lighter machines, then the charts will inevitably be less impressive. So the message for crane buyers (in those countries where weight restrictions are taken seriously and not routinely ignored) is: when making purchasing decisions, don’t focus quite so strongly on the lifting charts. Focus instead on the extent to which the crane is road legal in its likely operating condition. If it doesn’t comply, don’t buy.
Phil Bishop Editor pbishop@wilmington.co.uk
