A crane for a tricky job
Prangl lifted the building materials up the hillside using a AC 200-1 all terrain crane.
Prangl lifted the building materials up the hillside using a AC 200-1 all terrain crane.
A Terex AC 200-1 crane was used by an Austrian lift company on a tricky hillside job, following heavy rain that caused a landslide, cutting off one of the most important traffic links between Austria and Italy.
Before hundreds of cubic meters of earth and wood could be removed to clear the road, the hillside had to be secured. Crane service provider Prangl arranged to lift the necessary building materials, including the required machines, to the very top of the hillside, using a Terex AC 200-1 all terrain crane.
“We chose the AC 200-1 for this project because its various configurations make it an extremely versatile all terrain crane. It is also ideal for work that is carried out in these lifting capacity classes,” said Oliver Thum, who is part of Prangl’s technical field staff.
Thum was responsible, among other things, for inspecting the jobsite in advance and choosing the right crane for the project.
The Prangl team used the AC 200-1 crane with 42.6 t counterweight in order to lift the various materials involved. These materials included steel props and rockfall barriers that weighed up to two tonnes.
“Due to the crane capacity, we did not have to use the full 68.5 tonne counterweight. We only needed two trucks to transport the base plates and the counterweight,” said the crane operator Frank Schimpf.
The crane was set up right on the highway, reducing jobsite preparation. The team faced two challenges at the jobsite. The first challenge was that the road sloped down. The Prangle team had to jack up the crane’s front end in order to compensate for the sloped gradient and to ensure that the crane would be in a stable, horizontal position.
“The AC 200-1’s hydropneumatic suspension system came in extremely handy at that point. It made it possible to balance the crane perfectly without any problems,” said Thum.
The second challenge was that it was too narrow to fully deploy the crane’s outriggers. The Prangl assembly team delivered a solution: “As this crane enables us to use different stabilizer spreads, we did not extend the outriggers fully on the side over which only the counterweight was swung,” said Schimpf. The Terex crane’s small slewing radius proved to be yet another advantage when dealing with the highway’s tight space conditions.
Once everything was set up, the lifts went smoothly for the crane operator and his machine. All the materials were placed where needed after a mere three days. After this, the team could start to secure the hillside to prevent another landslide.
