KNUCKLE BOOMS Ӏ WIDER PERSPECTIVE


KNUCKLE BOOMS UNFOLDED


Knuckle boom cranes can be much more than a small loader cranes on the back of trucks. Julian Champkin reports.


Knuckle booms are familiar to us; they are generally loader cranes. See a truck trundling down the road bearing bricks, roof trusses or forestry logs and the odds are that it will also have mounted on it (behind the cab if you are in the UK or Europe or at the rear of the truck bed if you are in the US) a crane to unload that cargo at the


Palfinger Marine’s PFM 2100


destination. And in the UK and Europe, at least, that crane will almost aways be a knuckle boom. (In the US operators, who have wider spaces and manoeuvring room at their disposal, tend to prefer straight-boom cranes for this purpose; we shall discuss these cranes in a later article.) So, on the east of the Atlantic,


the knuckle boom and the loader crane have come to be thought of as the same thing: they are more or less synonymous. The knuckle boom is well-suited for that purpose: it is compact, folding away neatly to take up very little room on the truck, as you would not want to reduce the space available for cargo. It is flexible


32 CRANES TODAY


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