000 — Direktlink
23.05.2008, 11:14 Uhr
Menzitowoc
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Hello @All,
Hello to our South American Collegues,
for this subject, I write in english, because the topic needs the international support, especially from our south american friends.
In the March 2003 issue of Cranes Today Magazine a article appeared about the so called "Athey Crane".
This crane was purpose-build by Balfour Beatty Power Networks in the UK for their contractor Transener in Argentinia, who installs the poles for the power lines in difficult terrains.
The concept of the crane is has something of a Mini-Lampson or the old Letourneau scraper-cranes. It consists of a set of no-driven crawlers at the end of a trailer-like chassis, which is pulled and pushed at the side from a Caterpillar crawler dozer.
The non-slewable latticeboom is mounted at end of the crawler trailer. The winch system is diesel-hydraulic driven by a independed power unit mounted on the trailer.
On the internet side of the marketing asssociation DMA, which promotes Brevini´s engineering part on this crane development project, you could see two small pictures.
The main task with this crane is the erection of special power line poles, which consist of two parallel masts with a bridge at the top, which are guyed by wireropes to the ground. The poles are assembled laying on the ground and are lift up with the Athey crane. With this setup procedure, it is not nesseccary to slew with the crane boom. If it is still nesseccery, the crawler dozer has to navigate with the trailer crane. Advantage of the crane is its simplicity and its good mobility over difficult terrains in the argentinien pampa or comparable regions with soft ground conditions.
The name Athey as nothing to do with the crane itself, but is comes from the Athey crawler dump trailers which were manufactured in the fourties and fifties of the former century in the US. These dumptrailers were also pulled by crawler tractors (Caterpillar or similar) and had olso only non-driven crawlers.
The athey crane discribed in the Cranes Today article is a new crane, but I think, there may be existed similar older cranes. Tor example, during the fire fighting in Kuwait after the first Golf-war they used comparable types of equipment. And also Balfour Beatty Power Networks probably used such a crane earlier.
My questions:
Does anybody know something more about this crane and its history?
Has somebody pictures of the crane in service in Argentinia or elsewere?
Has anybody information on the predessessor crane?
Many Thanks to all contributions,
Christoph
--
Mal was ganz Anderes: Marion Walking Dragline aus Constructor (Holzbaukasten)
Dieser Post wurde am 23.05.2008 um 11:15 Uhr von Menzitowoc editiert. |
