COMPANY PROFILE Ӏ CRAWLER CRANES
main boom for the LR 1750/2 together with a 7m longer derrick boom of 38.5m and with hydraulic drive to the ballast wagon. 2017 saw a further development with the SX system for the LR 1750/2 which in areas took the crane’s capacities near to 1,000 tonne class cranes! It allowed the LR 1750/2 to erect turbines to 166m height and to 127 tonnes weight. Wasel took delivery of a crane with this new SX configuration. It employed two or three 3.5m wide or 6m x 14m sections added to the lower section of the boom. These wide boom sections each consisted of two halves bolted together at the centre. In 2021 Wasel employed their
new 1,000 tonne capacity Liebherr LR 11000 with SL 10DF2BV with 168m boom plus 24m fixed offset jib offering 192m height. Its job was to lift 136 tonnes (including hook block and rigging) to hub heights of 170m at 29m radius. It was set-up with 162m boom, 12m jib, 250-tonne of superstructure ballast, 90 tonnes of carbody counterweight and 450 tonnes of derrick ballast. There is no doubt that the LR 11000 has hands- down won the crown in the wind power crane stakes. In large part this is due to the success of Doug Williams’ Buckner Heavy Cranes. From a fleet of seven LR 11000s in 2018, the fleet has been expanded to 17 at the start of 2021, now reached 20 and Williams claims will reach 30 units this year – making it by far the world’s largest.
It's long been widely recognised
that ‘maximum’ ballasting (counterweighting) on long-boom cranes is only required to lift the booms from the ground and beyond ‘mid-radius’. As cranes counterweights have inexorably got heavier with ever-longer booms, this has become an increasingly pressing issue. Both Terex-Demag
Liebher's LR 1800.1.0 V Frame
and Liebherr adopted similar solutions i.e. split tray for Demag and Vario-Tray for Liebherr. Vario Tray consists of a removable ballast frame for the derrick boom which is unbolted from the suspended ballast frame and can be used separately with up to 125 t of ballast. For heavy lifts and long radii the removable ballast frame can be simply bolted in place before lowering the boom so as to avoid the time-consuming stacking and unstacking of ballast. However, by no means are the benefits of Vario-Tray limited to wind applications. In 2018 the device proved invaluable for MaxiKraft using their LR 1750/2 to place a 242 tonne arched bridge in Nobitz, Thuringia. By reducing operating radius during the lift from 32m to 18m the crane significantly reduced the ballast on the derrick boom instead of removing ballast slabs with an assist crane as had been normal practice. Now the majority of the suspended ballast was simply unbolted and disconnected. Only the centre stack of the ballast pallet, weighing 340 t, was left as ballast on the derrick boom until the load was finally lowered into position. As it turned out, the bridge was 20 tonnes heavier than planned. MaxiKraft crane operator Ralf Ludwig calmly adjusted the derrick radius from 18m to 20m. On site Bart van den Belt, project
manager for Wagenborg-Nedlift, who had rented the crane, said, “An auxiliary crane would have taken ages to do the work. We saved lots of time using Vario-Tray.” The next customer to employ
a LR 1750/2 SX was Huffermann who erected three Enercon E-101 turbines with hub heights of 135m. Meanwhile in September 2017 Sarens delivered a new Liebherr LG 1750SX truck crane to the Sapphire wind turbine project in Glenn Innes, NSW, Australia where it met up with another one of Sarens’ LG 1750s. The project involved the erection of 75 new Vestas V126-3.6mw turbines weighing 65 t to heights of up to 137m – the tallest to date in Australia. The project extended to November 2018 and somewhat surprisingly (to non-natives) involved working in temperatures as low as -30 degrees C. In 2018 Liebherr increased its
‘arsenal’ of windpower features with the introduction of the single line guiding system (SLGS) for the installation of individual turbine blades. With its own power supply it can be used with rotor blade yokes from various manufacturers. Crane operators can retrofit SLGSs on all conventional wind power booms including the new SX systems on the LR 1750/2 and LG 1750 with the tensioning winch installed instead of the luffing jib adjustment winch and existing f
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