NORTH AMERICA Ӏ REGIONAL FOCUS
LINK-BELT CRANES Gary Rice, district manager for Link-Belt Cranes covering upper Midwest Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, and Iowa.
Lexington, Kentucky- headquartered crane manufacturer Link-Belt has a 812,000 sq. ft. manufacturing facility that produces a range of cranes including rough terrains, all terrains, telescopic truck cranes, lattice crawlers, truck terrain cranes and telescopic crawlers.
Where are you based? I’m based in Lexington, Kentucky. I started at the Link-Belt factory there in 1975.
What Link-Belt products are you seeing most demand for in North America? The truck crane and the rough terrain crane market is really strong, unbelievably strong at the moment. Telecrawlers have been very good in my market this year, along with crawler cranes. I’ve also sold a lot of lattice crawlers in the upper Midwest.
What are the reasons for this? Road construction is one. There’s a lot of road construction going on. There's also a lot of rework being done on refineries and major industrial projects. There are a lot of refineries in the upper Midwest and many of them are going through major changes. Bridge work is another big area at the moment.
Is all this construction work a direct result of Biden’s infrastructure bill? I don’t think that’s really kicked in for us yet. Infrastructure work can also be funded by the state budget. And if it’s a really big state project
30 CRANES TODAY
Gary Rice,
district manager for Link-Belt
– such as an Interstate or major highway – the state government budget can be matched by the federal government. I think the infrastructure bill will create more demand in time but we haven’t really seen this just yet.
What are the key challenges you see at the moment? think challenges are still within supply chain and transportation of supply chain items, it seems to be steadily improving but not as fast as I think some had hoped.
Spotted at ConExpo...
At ConExpo 2023 CraneWorks handed over the fi rst-ever Manitex TC85159 boom truck. The Manitex TC85159 is the fi rst model in the new Manitex TC850 Series. According to CraneWorks it is the largest truck-mounted crane you can buy in North America. It combines a 85 ton capacity (at 10ft radius) with a 159ft hydraulic boom and revised outriggers that eliminate the need for a front jack. The boom truck was handed over to Southern Lift and Hoisting, a long-time CraneWorks customer and a leading crane service in Texas and Oklahoma. Southern actually purchased two, with the second scheduled for delivery later in the year.
Fortunately we work to
keep much of our supply chain needs US-based. And our lattice attachments are all US built so shipping for us is not such a big problem. The last three years have taught a lot of people about supply chain. Our production system is a heavy equipment adjusted variation of the Toyota's production system, which is to say we took “the good” as it can apply and work for us. We have been improving on that system for over 25 years now.
f
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53
