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Doppelmayr® Garaventa was brought in as the main contractor on the project. Based in Austria, Te Doppelmayr Garaventa Group is an Austrian-Swiss company known as the world’s leading manufacturer of ropeways, cable cars, and ski lifts.


Putting a Proper Plan in Place But before the assortment of experts could start, some pre-planning had to be done—part of a measured effort by Taxwood and his team. “We did close some of the resort, but the equipment came in the same way everyone else does—even while parts of the resort were still open,” he explained. “So we had to figure it out so we didn’t clog things up at the wrong time of day, obviously. To do this job, we had to pick a time of year when we were going to have decent weather, we’d have the least impact on business levels, and we could actually have enough time to accomplish the job. Te spring is typically the slowest time for us.” Tey also picked a time when a proper level of snow


was present. “Yes, we needed the snow so we could build roads to all the towers—in order to use a snowmobile or snowcat. Tat also allowed us to avoid having to use the helicopter for human transport—though we did use it to transport tools. But in the summer time, there’s no roads to these towers—they’re totally isolated.” Te project essentially involved pulling the Tram


system’s old cable and installing the new cable—a bit easier said than done. “Basically, we used the old cables to pull the new ones up the mountain,” said Taxwood. “Each of those spools weighed fifty-four tons. We used the cables just like any other wire rope pulling project; we used a device called a milking machine—two hydraulic hoist clamps—which were pulled together with several parts of rigging. We’d pull fifty meters, reset the clamps, and so on. We were spooling off between one thousand and twelve hundred feet, and then cutting it into coils that were later trucked off the mountain for recycling.” As far as the new cable went, the crew just had to bring the spool right up behind the base of the tram and set it off with a crane. “Ten we jacked them hydraulically onto a pool stand and fed the cable through the building and out onto the lift.”


Taxwood pointed out that the new cable came


from a company in Switzerland called FATZER®—a division of the BRUGG Group. “We’ve been buying cable from FATZER for as long as I’ve worked here; we’ve had the best results with them. I’m also not aware of anyone in the U.S. that makes a locked coil cable that’s used for this type of application. Tere’s some other European companies that make it, but FATZER is an industry leader.” Snowbird actually took delivery of the product in


May of 2015 because their inspections were starting to get to the point where they weren’t sure how many more summers they could go. “We picked April 2016 for the project, but wanted to have the cables on hand in case we didn’t pass our July 2015 inspection,” he said. “And that was another driving factor in why we did it this spring—based on our inspection, on history around the world with similar installations, and then the lead time on the cable and business levels at Snowbird. But it’s been in the planning for the last five years.”


As far as this latest cable replacement compared


to how it was done in 1971? “It was pretty similar, truthfully,” Taxwood noted. “It’s easier to remove old cable now. We used to spool nine thousand feet and deal with it as a whole, but again, we were cutting it up into thousand-foot coils, which you can deal with relatively easy with a large excavator and a big articulated truck.” Cranes were definitely used on the job, as well, but mainly at the bottom of the hill. “Tey’ve come up with this way of horizontally spooling up cable into a coil that will fit on the back of a standard scrap truck,” he added. “So you’re dealing with sizes that are legal loads for the road. Compare that to the spools that came here—which required special trucks, special permitting, and a whole lot of hoops to jump through.” Taxwood also imagines the new cable will last


every bit of fifty years. “I can’t say for sure if it will last longer—this can be a tough environment up here—but given the technology these days and improvements in longevity and efficiency, one would think that it certainly has the potential to.” y


WIRE ROPE EXCHANGE JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 33


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