Infrastructure Projects - Construction Technology
A Practical Guide to Construction Techniques and Practice
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We're now going to switch topics and talk about tower cranes in heavy construction. We typically use conventional cranes, such as the crawler crane in the middle of this photo, but from time to time we do use tower cranes. However, I thought that it would be a good idea to at least cover the subject of tower cranes, whether they're applied at buildings -which is their typical use- or in heavy construction. It's something that you really should know about. People are always asking me how these cranes climb. In general, it's good information to have.
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The crawler crane is very useful on a building site. It has enough mobility to get around within that limited space and the crane has been used to you to begin the steel erection, but having reached a point where it's about at its limit, it's going to assemble a tower crane and the tower crane will take over from there.
Here's a good view of the tower cranes at the very beginning of their function. The crawler crane has already constructed the tower and then it lifts the crane and sits it on top of the tower. Of course, it's not all in one piece, that would be a very, very heavy lift. It lifts it in sections. The tower crane is actually joined together and assembled in the air.
After the crawler crane has assembled the tower crane, the tower crane turns around and disassembles the crawler crane. I'm not sure why this reminds me of a praying mantis. The female eventually turns around and bites the head off the male. Here we have a crawler crane with its head missing. It is, in fact, being stripped down to the simplest parts, so that it can be lifted out of the hole.
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