September 17 - Crane service provider Fricke-Schmidbauer Schwerlast has used a Terex CC 2400-1 lattice boom crawler crane to move two overhead cranes that had been removed from service at a steel mill in Germany.
"The job was anything but usual," said project manager, Dirk Zocher. "We had to bring the components of two dismantled ladle handling overhead cranes safely to the ground from a height of 38 m. These components weighed up to 105 tonnes."
Due to the way that Salzgitter Flachstahl's steel mill was laid out, with a maze of pipe bridges and cooling towers, there was an area measuring only 15 m x 22 m available for the crane to work on.
A train shed and several bumper blocks also had to be removed, as well as the freed-up space levelled with track ballast.
The crane was delivered to the site using a total of 20 trucks. The basic machine and crawler tracks were assembled at the working area, using a Terex AC 100 all terrain crane.
To ensure that the CC 2400-1 crane would be able to lift the loads at the required working radius of 34 m, it was set up with a SWSL configuration, a 36 m main boom and a 36 m fly jib. In addition, the company used a 160-tonne Superlift counterweight and 160 tonnes of ballast on the basic unit.
In order to be able to take down the 400-tonne overhead cranes, they were first dismantled into parts weighing 25 to 105 tonnes. These individual components were then lifted through a 9 m x 9 m opening in the mill's roof.
Terex explained that there was one problem: only the smaller parts fit through the roof, while there was no way to get the larger components - which weighed from 76 to 105 tonnes - through.
The CC 2400-1 crane started by picking up the smaller components below the ceiling, lifting them through the opening, and then, after a 90 degree turn, loading them onto the heavy goods vehicles that were already waiting in front of the mill.
When it came to the heavy lifts, the crane picked up the components and put them down on the floor inside the mill, where they were dismantled further so that they would be ready for transportation.
The two overhead cranes were moved in a total of 30 lifts, which took the Fricke-Schmidbauer team a total of 15 days of 24-hour non-stop shift work.
