CRAWLER CRANES Ӏ SECTOR REPORT


LoNG LIvE THE KING


The crawler crane is king, ubiquitous on almost every infrastructure job site. The reason is simple: they rule at what they do. Julian Champkin reports.


Look, no diesel


– the Liebherr LR1160 unplugged


There are rough-terrain cranes; there are all-terrain cranes; but for heavy lifting and moving on rough ground for large infrastructure projects and the like, the crawler has been and remains the king. The reason for its dominance is simple: tracks are better than tyres at moving around off-road. They spread the load. Nor do they need outriggers, and the 360 degree travel of the slew gives easier pick-up with less manoeuvring. The size of a crawler is almost infinitely scalable, from small mini-cranes and glazing robots on rubber tracks controlled by an operator walking beside them to the very largest of heavy-lift cranes with hook heights of 200m and more and capacities in the thousands of tonnes. A pedant might say that a rubber-tracked machine is not a crawler. I could dispute that - it certainly does not run on pneumatic tyres so what else would you call it? – but for the purposes of this article I will let the pedant have his way and limit the term ‘crawler’ to something that is mounted on metal caterpillar tracks rather than rubber ones. The boom of a crawler can be lattice or telescopic. As a technology the lattice crawler has been around for a long time, with geometries and basic shapes that


60 CRANES TODAY


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