Removing overhead lifting equipment from a building is usually a job we can take in our stride. In most cases, we lift the cranes out from above, lower them onto a low loader, and take them away.
However, this one was different because the difficulty was built into the structure itself.
The customer needed an entire bay of overhead travelling cranes, sixteen of them, removed from a working site on a tight commercial deadline, with the building, floor, and cranes all left undamaged.
There was a lot to move. Sixteen overhead travelling crane bridges, each one spanning fourteen metres, with capacities from 500kg up to 10 tonnes safe working load, plus 180 tonnes of long-travel gantry rail standing almost a metre high.
Normally, we would bring in a mobile crane for something like this, or one of the high-capacity lorry-mounted cranes from our sister company, Lloyds Beal, and simply lift each bridge out from overhead. However, here we couldn’t, because the building had been put up around the cranes after they were installed. This meant that there was no way in from above, so everything had to come out at floor level instead.
On top of all that, we had fourteen days to quote the job, get to the site, and finish it.
With lifting from above ruled out, the only realistic way to do it was to bring all sixteen bridges down to one end of the long-travel rails and work from there. Getting them there took time in itself, because each crane’s anti-collision system had to be safely overridden before it would move.
With the bridges parked up, we decommissioned and isolated the 300-amp power supply, then took the hoists and ancillary equipment off each one to bring the weights down to something we could handle.
From there, we worked our way back along the rails, lifting out each section with two 7.5-tonne forklift trucks in a controlled tandem lift. Tandem lifting on forklifts isn’t something we take lightly, so the whole thing ran off a detailed lift plan with a clean, well-managed area to work in, and that’s what let us get through more than thirty lifts without a single one going wrong.
Then came the bridges. Same two forklifts, same carefully worked-out sequence, and all sixteen came out without incident and without so much as a scratch to the paintwork.
We finished on schedule, stayed within the client’s budget, and completed the entire job without a single safety incident.
It worked because everyone involved stayed in step throughout, and by the end, the supplier, the client and the landlord were all happy with how it had gone. A genuinely awkward job, done properly and on time, with nothing left damaged behind us.
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