PROJECT OF THE MONTH | MARCH 2021


manufacturing company’s 21-metre span double-girder electric overhead travelling crane, it will be used to move and position injection moulding heads. It follows a delivery to the same customer of three similar cranes over several years for various applications. Due to a confidentiality agreement the name of the client cannot be disclosed, but Marc Kleiner, MD, Condra, said: “All of South Africa’s main crane suppliers competed for this contract. The customer was meticulous in selecting the proposal that precisely met what he needed. This, plus his experience with the reliability and low maintenance costs of his three existing Condra cranes, clinched the order for us.” Kleiner added, the design was the main challenge because of the tight space constraints caused by a large installed moulding machine. “The factory is not much bigger than the machine itself, and this was why we carried out a site scan and then designed the gantry around what the scan told us – we had to fit it in between the building and the machine. Installation of the completed crane will be challenging for the same reason: the building exists and the machine exists, and we will be building the gantry and then installing the crane in the remaining space. Additionally, despite the fact that our own design is from the ground up, when the frame of the gantry is complete it will further reduce the available space for installing the crane itself.” The order for the previous three


cranes came about because the client was dissatisfied with its current machine, belonging to a competitor and was experiencing long periods of downtime and having to wait up to two months for the arrival of spare parts from Europe. Condra manufactures locally within


South Africa and delivers parts anywhere in the country by overnight courier. The result of overly tight design among foreign crane manufacturers, while sometimes achieving a lower selling price, can result in a higher overall lifetime cost, because even slight over-stressing of the machine results in breakdown and having to wait a long time for spare parts to arrive. The manufacturing customer’s


70 ton crane will be a dimensionally large machine with comparatively nimble operating speeds. Cross-travel speeds of up to 12,5 metres per minute


will be possible, with 25 metres per minute achieved on the long-travel. The main and auxiliary hoists will have lifting heights of 9 and 10,73 metres respectively, with frequency drives delivering lifting speeds of 1,5 and 6 metres per minute. An interesting decision taken during the design phase was to place increased focus on precise positioning. A frequency drive was incorporated in the main hoist to deliver absolute accuracy at very slow speed. The auxiliary drive, which will do most of the fetching and carrying, will lift at a higher speed of 6 metres per minute. Talking about current market conditions within the industry, Kleiner said there has been less movement than normal because of the uncertainty caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and changes in global politics. “People don’t know if Brexit is going


to work, and they don’t know what the dollar is going to do with the change of president in the USA. Europe seems to be printing money, which has to make everything more expensive in the long term. So there’s a lot of uncertainty and there is the possibility of price shocks from the supplier side. That said, we are seeing more enquiries from further afield – Ukraine, Russia and so on. We


are hoping to develop stronger ties with the UK because of changes in the market brought about by Brexit,” he said. “In Europe we understand that,


generally speaking, it continues to be difficult to differentiate ourselves because our cranes are designed for African conditions. Condra cranes are tougher machines because of that, whereas the Europeans tend to be more sophisticated with their product. However, in terms of the overall lifetime cost of a crane, I think we have the Europeans beaten. Also, there are niches such as high-lift crane applications where our equipment is likely to be more successful than many European competitors because of our experience – for example headgear cranes and maintenance cranes for dams. At the moment, we are working with an Austrian company that is tapping into Condra’s high-lift expertise for work in the dams arena worldwide, but Covid has made progress here more difficult because of travel restrictions on visits to potential customers and their sites. We also have experience with very fast cranes – as high as 140 metres per minute on the long-travel in copper-leaching applications, and we have a lot of experience in corrosive environments.” ●


www.hoistmagazine.com | March 2021 | 11


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