Capital Equipment News December 2016

JOBSITE REPORT

The manual turning of the slewing turret facilitates lifting the counter jib and having the slew turret in the correct position.

• Overall height reduced with the crane having no top tower (topless crane) • The design allows it to overfly other cranes on congested sites • Jib can be erected/dismantled in 5 and 10 m pieces; the full jib does not have to be lifted as one piece • All the components of the crane can be containerised in standard containers for easy shipping and transporting from site to site • Comes with a 40LVF13 hoist winch reaching lift speeds of up to 81,5 m per minute with a new power control function • The winch can be adjusted to power sources using either 50 Hz or 60 Hz, protecting components and simplifying set up • New power control function allows the crane to work on job sites where power supply is limited KEY FEATURES/BENEFITS OF THE POTAIN MCT85F5

the other topless crane with SA French. A month after we had placed that order, SA French came to us with the opportunity to purchase the Potain MCT85F5 at a very good price,” says Simmonds. “It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime deals.” Space challenges From a coordination planning point of view, the contractor faces major constraints with the footprint of the building in relation to the available laydown area. “So, material handling and delivery is quite a headache,” says Simmonds. “It all comes down to planning and we have since overcome that with the arrival of our MCT85F5 topless crane.” “Getting materials vertically in a timeous manner to all the various floors is of essence to the workflow processes on site. We have now introduced the second crane which is purely for wet trades, such as brickwork,” says Simmonds, adding that from a critical path point of view, a total of 3,5 million bricks have to go up to the various floor levels. “From a supply point of view, as the main contractor we have to provide our sub- contractors with sufficient material every day to meet the production timeline, hence the arrival of the second crane on site.”

“The reason Probuild opted for a flat top tower crane on this site is because of the limited available space between the jib of the existing Potain MD310B tower crane and the top of the building,” says Louw Smit, sales manager at SA French. Crane establishment and disestablish- ment generally contributes heavily on the cost of the contract, and this is one of the key issues that the flat top design of the MCT85F5 addresses. One of the crane’s key features is that it offers the luxury to erect or dismantle it in 5 and 10 m piec- es; the full jib doesn’t need to be lifted as one piece. Capital Equipment News witnessed the erection of the Potain

MCT85F5 at Probuild’s building site in Sandton, which was a unique experience in the sense that it steered clear of the nor- mal erecting standards of a tower crane. The existing Potain MD310B tower crane on site was used to erect the new MCT85F5 tower crane. It is most unusual to erect a tower crane in this manner as it is usually assembled along with a mobile crane. This saved a lot of time and space constraints to deploy a mobile crane. Quentin van Breda, managing director of SA French, says the unique erection method circumvented the need for the nearby road to be cordoned off to traffic. “Using a mobile crane would have called for a partial, probably one-

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