TRUCK CRANES Ӏ SECTOR REPORT
TR KEEp oNuCKING When is a truck crane not a truck crane? Julian Champkin is slightly baffled.
A truck crane is a crane that is mounted on a truck. Clear. Easy. Simple. And that is what this writer used to believe...
Indeed, long ago in my distant and innocent youth, I wrote an article to that effect in this very magazine (the December 2020 edition, if you are collecting). 'Take a truck that is made by Volvo,' I wrote, 'or by Scania, or by MAN: stick a crane on the back of it; and you have a truck crane'. And nobody complained: not the (then) editor, not the crane makers, not the readers. But I am older now, if not necessarily wiser;
Link-Belt Crane’s
four-axle 120 TTLB truck terrain crane, launched this September
and life is not as simple as it was; and truck cranes, it seems, do not have to be cranes that are mounted on trucks after all. Yes, they can be mounted
on trucks: on any commercial chassis, from a manufacturer of your choice; but they can also be mounted on chassis that are specially made for them by the crane manufacturer: that is what Link-Belt Cranes does with what it calls its 'telescopic truck cranes'. They also make a TTLB series, which it calls 'truck terrain cranes'. These machines – a crane on a chassis, and both of them made by Link-Belt, both specially designed around each other - might begin to look like an all-terrain crane, which Link-Belt also makes. Link-Belt's all-terrain and telescopic truck crane product manager, Andrew Soper explains what distinguishes them: “Our all-terrain crane has the same
purpose-built chassis as the telescopic truck crane, but with steerable drive axles in the rear. TT versions are different from an all-terrain crane in that TT cranes have a conventional truck suspension and lack the hydro- pneumatic suspension typically found on all-terrains. All-terrain cranes typically have driven steer axles on the front of the crane; that is not found on our TT models.” Link-Belt’s 120/TTLB telescopic
truck crane was unveiled last year, at Bauma. As well as its steerable rear axle it has four steering modes (independent front, independent rear, combination and crab), a seven-section 11.7 metre to 50 metre boom, 120-ton capacity and a maximum tipping height of 79.7 metres. Oh, and typically in North America, cranes mounted on commercial truck chassis are referred to as boom trucks, says Soper.
The advantage of a specially- designed and proprietary chassis such as this is clear. As Link-Belt puts it, “it means we can integrate the lifting performance of a truck crane into the transportation performance of the crane. When we design a truck crane we are building a crane from the ground up. We are able to position axles or change the frame design in order to get the best transport and lift performance.”
44 CRANES TODAY
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