NOVEMBER 2022 Ӏ CRANE HISTORY
ANNIVERSARY
Linden-Alimak on the cover of the April 1981 issue of Cranes Today. Swedish hoist manufacturer Alimak acquired the rights to Sweden’s Linden Cranes in 1973
crane hire (rental) application. Accordingly, Europe became the industry’s battleground contested by about 100 manufacturers from around the world.
1981: THE PIVOTAL YEAR While most of Europe started the 1980s in recession, demand remained very strong in North America, Japan, Asia and Latin America and was again growing in Africa and the Middle East. During the heady days of 1980,
j compliance. Fortunately,
Europe was well served with local manufacturers of crane carrier truck chassis, most notably Faun, Mol, Foden and CVS. Using these as a base for their cranes became an established and easy way for American and Japanese crane makers to comply with European road regulations. Meeting stringent road regulations became a key factor in achieving European truck crane sales. At the upper end of size classes, the use of Faun carriers became a critical factor. At that time Mannesmann- Demag employed Faun carriers on its large cranes including the very- successful 250-tonne TC 1200 lattice introduced in 1973. The late 1970s and early 1980s
saw the market recognise the benefits of large crawler cranes of 250 to 800-tonnes capacity over lattice truck cranes of similar size. This especially benefitted the new Demag which found a ready market in the USSR where 11 300-tonne CC 2000s and 7 800-tonne CC 4000s were purchased for nuclear power plant construction. Rough terrains had largely
failed to catch-on in Europe which looked to develop the more versatile, all terrain cranes and which leant themselves to
54 CRANES TODAY
the world’s crane and construction machinery manufacturers prepared for the upcoming Conexpo ’81 to be held in Houston, Texas. Grove dominated the show with a giant outdoor display which featured no less than 70 cranes and aerial lifts and introduced the new TM 2500 telescopic truck crane at 250-tons capacity, the world’s largest. Also in the Houston Astrodome,
P&H displayed it’s innovate new Alpha 100, 100-ton light-weight truck crane. The show was a spectacular success but within 30 days of its closing, the US economy plunged into what would become the deepest recession since the 1930s. By 1982, US domestic mobile crane demand had fallen by 80% of 1991 levels. The 1980s also saw Tadano,
Kato and Komatsu introducing their new rough terrains to the North American market. The mid-1980s
had seen the first entry into the US market of the Japanese telescopic crane makers – Tadano, Kato and (briefly) Komatsu. By this time, the Japanese crane industry had developed a hybrid variety of the rough terrain crane, which offered limited road travel performance sufficient for domestic Japanese demand to begin to switch from truck cranes to these new rough terrains. However, attempts to export this new variety of rough terrain had, at best, mixed results and only Tadano persisted in its North American marketing efforts with a more conventional rough terrain crane concept. By the mid-1970s the ‘new’
markets of SE Asia including Singapore were being approached by Potain. Alimak, the Swedish hoist manufacturer, having acquired the rights to Sweden’s Linden Cranes in 1973, introduced the ground- breaking 8000 series of super-large flat top tower cranes in 1974. At the same time Demag
introduced its 800-ton capacity lattice truck crane while Liebherr also introduced its new 200-tonne telescopic truck crane which would go on to significantly outsell the big Grove TM, a harbinger of things to come in the heavy lift segment of the market.
The US economy was drawn Coles on the
front cover of the March 1981 issue of Cranes Today claiming to be ‘way ahead’. Three years later the company was acquired by Grove
into recession by the continuing oil crisis, political uncertainty over Iran, and record high interest rates which proved a double- edged sword for US capital goods manufacturers – diminishing domestic capital investment at the same time as making US exports very expensive. Even worse, the artificially low foreign exchange value of the Japanese Yen made their products very cheap to US buyers causing, for the first time, a flood of construction machinery imports from the Far East. This economic turmoil had the effect of bringing about
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