SECTOR REPORT Ӏ TRUCK CRANES
The advantage of an off-the-
shelf commercial chassis, on the other hand, is equally clear. Someone else – Volvo, Scania, MAN or whoever – has had all the headaches of designing the truck chassis, and of refining it, and they are absolute experts in doing those things; and the considerable cost of R&D has been passed on, not to crane makers and their customers, but to millions of ordinary truck- owners. And the mass-volume production of those chassis brings their cost down even more. So on-the-road costs will be far less. The customer gets, in effect, the bottom half the crane – the half with the wheels on it – at a discount. There is more. The standard
commercial truck chassis is intended to spend every moment of its working life on the move. It has been designed to drive many thousands of kilometres before it
wears out. With a crane mounted on its back, though, it will spend only a small fraction of that working life in travelling: it will drive to a job site, spend a fair part of the day more or less static at that jobsite, and then, most likely, drive home again. It is the crane that does the full days’ work and it is probable, therefore, that it is the crane that will wear out long before the truck. Even though it is far cheaper than a custom-designed chassis, the commercial truck chassis is severely overengineered for its crane-carrying job. It will therefore prove reliable, as well as fuel efficient – consumption on the road will be far less than a comparable all-terrain crane on the road - and, as we have seen, it is cheap to buy.
Liebherr also chooses its
own way of naming things: it is very definite that it makes, not truck cranes, but truck-mounted
Krösche-Kran of Holzminden have over 60 Liebherr LTF truck-mounted cranes
cranes. Liebherr started mounting telescopic boom cranes on a standard truck chassis in 1979. This was the birth of its first telescopic truck-mounted crane, and it called it an LTF. “Even today, LTF cranes are a low-cost alternative when cranes are mainly used as taxi cranes – in other words for short hoists and lots of road journeys,” says the company's spokesperson. “Their use on standard truck chassis make LTF series cranes ideal for driving long distances on the road. And it also provides the high level of comfort of a truck.”
Liebherr can supply crane configurations for all conventional truck chassis – and it can even fit longer cabs that have a bed for the driver in them; 'a comfortable operator is a happy operator' is no bad motto. And they have more to say in favour of truck (mounted)
CRANES TODAY 45
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