REPAIR AND REFURBISHMENT Ӏ SECTOR FOCUS
NEW CRANES oR oLD?
When your crane is ageing it is time to get a new one… or is it? Refurbishment can bring older machines back to as new and may be a more economical and environmentally-friendly option. Julian Champkin reports.
Micha Gouweleeuw is director and owner of the of Netherlands- based company bearing his name. It specialises in repair and refurbishment and repainting of all types of lifting equipment – ‘vertical transport equipment’ is the phase that the company uses. A recent project includes the restoration of a Goldhofer THP/ST special transport trailer for client Allelys (see box on p23). Mobiles, tower cranes, all terrains and crawlers are all within its remit. “Delivery times for a new crane can be up to two years,” Gouweleeuw outlines. “The cost of a new crane has risen 25% over the same time period. A crane that might have cost one million euros back then will be 1.2 or 1.3 million today. “So an owner with a crane that is six or eight or ten years old will ask: ‘is this crane finished as a useful lifting machine?’ And the answer is: 'No: it is not.’” Cars quickly lose their value with age; cranes not so much. “Depreciation on a crane after the first few years is almost zero,” Gouweleeuw says. “A crane that is ten years old can sell at the same price as a crane that is 50 years old: the value depends on whether they are in good working order, not on their age.”
18 CRANES TODAY A complete restoration of a
crane, he says, can take up to five months depending, of course, on the crane’s condition; but after that the crane is as new: “We take the cab off, we take all the electrics out, we completely dismantle the entire machine.” Spare parts, or parts that need
replacing, do not have to be back- engineered: “OEM manufactured parts are not a problem: we have good relationships with Manitowoc, Liebherr, Tadano – we do work for them, painting their new machines pre-delivery to customers - and supply lines are very short; we can consult their technical guys at any time if we need to.” A recent project was a Terex
Demag TC 2800-1 restoration for Global Crane Services in Aberdeen, Scotland. “The crane had been six years working on the North Sea coast,” explained Gouweleeuw. “Everything was shot; we gave it a complete restoration.” The crane was fully stripped down and dismantled. Just lifting the crane body from the chassis was a 50-tonne lifting job, handled by one of Gouweleeuw’s two overhead cranes. That was one of the five-month jobs. At the end of it the restoration
the crane was shipped back to Scotland in its bright-orange new- painted-by-Gouweleeuw livery. But even a paint job on a crane can be no small matter – indeed Gouweleeuw describes it as ‘a profession in itself’. The company has a 35-metre mast hall, where mast sections can be extended; their two overhead cranes, with heavy-lift forklifts, enables it to paint cranes of up to 1000 tonnes.
WORKING RELATIONSHIP Repair and restoration specialist Crowland Cranes is based in East Anglia, UK. It is an insurance- approved repairer for both the crane and plant industry. It also carries a stock of parts
from manufacturers that are no longer in existence. Avezaat Cranes is a Dutch
company with similar specialist skills. It is known in the industry for its structural and boom repairs and has a talented skill base and the necessary infrastructure to ensure work can be completed in-house.
In December 2022 Crowland
Cranes and Avezaat joined forces; they are now officially ‘joint service partners’. “This is, to my knowledge,
the first time this has happened in this field,” says managing
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