SECTOR REPORT Ӏ MINI CRANES
the outlook you are talking about,” he said. “It’s called Bubba. Bubbas are the big guys that want to have the big strong powerful stuff; and you could say that this outlook has been traditional in Texas. But the Bubba world is changing.” He gave three reasons for that.
One is familiarity: “In the ‘70s and ‘80s, Japanese cars entered the market. They needed to prove their capability, and they did, and the quality of Japanese manufacturing gradually became known. I think anyone would agree that Japanese engineering capability and quality is famous. It’s almost as though our machines are handcrafted.” A second thing that has changed in the Bubba world is the type of building that is going on and the regulation that has gone with it. “What's happening today is that there is a real directional change with architecture,” says Buck. “They are doing some marvellous things that require very strategic types of operating cranes; there are panel walls and hanging roofs where a traditional crane doesn’t work. "And the other piece of it is
there's a lot of indoor working in confined areas where emissions become important and where the government won't allow a more traditional diesel engine to be at
work. And OSHA is now really getting deeply into the spider crane – and that is because it is becoming a volume unit. They had not really regulated them separately before, but they are now identifying regulations in that category. And a consequence of this is that there
Duane Lloyd, Maeda America, demonstrating the MC285CB battery crane at ConExpo 2023
are people who may have been getting away with using other cranes who are no longer going to be able to do that.
“Size is one thing that people Jekko’s new
SPX 328 is available in the USA through its dealer Empire Crane
have to get over, just as they did with Japanese cars. There was the adjustment: ‘Oh my gosh, I need to have the big wide seats in my car’ but when they realise how easy-to-drive and manoeuvrable the smaller cars were, they bought them. It’s the same with cranes: the efficiency and the cost savings are talking. The people that are renting these cranes are not trying to appeal to Bubba any longer. They're talking about the bottom line: ‘What’s my cost? Hey, that’s a huge saving – I’ve got to have one!’. “The other piece of this is
transportation. How do you get your crane from location to location? A mini crane you can easily flatbed to those
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