The Mobile Tower Crane – Cheaper, Quicker, Better

The mobile tower crane has to be the saviour of the modern construction company. Tower cranes are used where intense heavy lifting is required – they are, usually, the things you see bristling all over the London skyline, whacking great lumps of concrete hanging worryingly off their back ends to balance out the lift. A traditional tower crane like this takes days to assemble, more days to check; and needs an inordinate amount of space to work properly. That can require whole weeks of a project being given over just to installing, checking and maintaining cranes: all ground work stopped while the crane is unloaded, put together and examined for potential faults.

A mobile tower crane performs exactly the same job as a static one – only on wheels. Usually, the mobile version is an exceptionally long wheel-based truck bed with multiple turning axles. The truck is capable, once its stabilisers are down, of supporting lifts comparable to the loads borne by static tower cranes – and, unlike its static cousin, it can manoeuvre into the most awkward of spaces thanks to its several turning axles. There have been instances where a mobile unit has taken its lifting arm into central city side streets, allowing major construction to take place in areas where it would previously have been a logistical nightmare.

The mobile tower crane is driven in when needed, set up (it takes around 15 minutes to set up a mobile unit) and used – then taken straight out again. Doing the same job with a static crane requires finding a suitable site close by (usually a square a few streets over) where the thing can be put together; and that means trying to make a lift from a long way away. It’s expensive, poorly-controlled and liable to put large areas of pedestrian and vehicular access out of action for months.

It’s not just a question of efficiency – though of course increased efficiency is always nice. The static crane is stratospherically expensive, even to hire – requiring constant upkeep and checking, as well as representing money lost by having a huge area of dead space on a construction site. A mobile tower crane, because it’s so much easier to maintain (and doesn’t need to be built on site) is a lot cheaper to hire. A company only pays for a mobile unit when it needs to use one. With a static tower crane, the same company has to pay hire charges for every day it stays on site – and on a big job, that could be years. Bear in mind, too, that increased efficiency actually represents decreased spending: the quicker, and better, equipment does a job, the less that job costs to do – in terms of man hours, wages, hire fees and time freed up to do other things.

A mobile tower crane, as well as giving easier access to difficult locations, represents another kind of freedom – the freedom to take on jobs where the hire of a static crane might have made doing the work too expensive. In a market where every job counts, that’s incredibly important.

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