THE PROJECT Uesco Cranes
OCH reports on the benefits and challenges involved with Uesco Cranes' work for Bingham & Taylor's latest project...
T
he unveiling of a new electric melt system at Bingham & Taylor's Culpeper, Virginia, foundry has marked a new phase of collaboration between the company and Uesco Cranes. Established in 1849, Bingham & Taylor serves
the water and natural gas industries by providing safe and secure access to underground utilities. Transforming to a modern, environmentally and safety-sound facility required tens of millions of dollars’ worth of investment.
“A major portion of the transformation was converting from an old-style coke-fired furnace into a state-of-the-art electric induction melt furnace system,” explains Stephen McGuff, chief of manufacturing, Bingham & Taylor. “So that was the heart of the whole process, and that process required not only in-feed materials which required crane support, but then the molten metal process required a monorail hoist system to deliver from the furnaces to the moulding area.”
An important choice made by Bingham & Taylor was for crane equipment – but in this case, McGuff says that the selection was easy, inviting overhead crane manufacturer Uesco Cranes to handle this side of the project.
“Uesco Cranes had done a project for us years
before in our plastics plant,” says McGuff. “They did an outstanding job with the design, build and customer service. We didn't even pursue any others for the new
The building housing the new cranes dates back to the 1900s.
project. I just picked up the phone, called and said, 'Here's this project – will you start work on it?'” Thinking back to the first project, McGuff recalls when he bought a used crane from an auction in Chicago. “I had never even heard of Uesco Cranes before buying the crane. When I looked on the label after buying the crane, I looked them up online, called and said: 'Well I bought this, now what do I do with it?'
Ryan D Marks, president, Uesco Cranes Industries Inc., and his team quickly jumped in “and designed the structure for that crane system and did an outstanding job in the injection moulding plant for us. It's lasted ten years now,” says McGuff. Discussing the latest project Marks explains that
there were quite a few challenges. “The building is very old – around 1900s – it's mostly a wood structure in the lower half of the building, and then, where they’ve put on additions and stuff, there are very high ceilings. So we had very high ceilings and very low ceilings to deal with. “We operated under the assumption that we
could directly hang from the lower part of the building's joist network, and then realised pretty late into the project that actually, that was not going to be able to happen.”
Marks says that there were essentially two parts The double-girder crane. 12 | Spring 2024 |
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to this new project. One was getting the material to the furnaces where his team installed a 10-ton Magni Crane. “The other challenge was to design a monorail loop with a safety track for functions like maintenance – to be able to transfer from the electric melt into the big ladle coming off the 3.0-ton Yale monorail and then getting it over to the smaller ladles and doing that transfer. I would say the whole project took about 18 to 19 months – and that was probably from initial discussions to commissioning.” “That was part of the other challenge in that
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