Crane Breakdown & Repair

When a crane stops, the first job is information, including what happened, what the crane was doing, and what the symptoms are now.

That call shapes what the engineer brings, and it’s often the difference between a first-visit fix and a second trip for parts. Customers on our crane maintenance contracts have the added advantage that we already have the machine’s history, so the diagnosis often starts before the van does.

For contract customers, the call-out service carries a 2-hour response target. The attending engineer makes the crane safe first, diagnoses the failure, and either completes the repair on the spot or gives you a straight answer on parts, cost and time, so you can plan around the outage rather than wonder about it.

Most crane failures cluster around a familiar set:

• hoist motors and gearboxes
• brakes that no longer hold or release cleanly
• contactors and control faults
• limit switches
• festoon and radio systems
• wire ropes or chains reaching the end of their life.

We repair all of them, across overhead travelling cranes, gantries, semi-gantries and swing jibs of any manufacture.

Beyond the electrical and mechanical, we handle the damage that shock loads and collisions leave in the steel, from bent end carriages to runway misalignment, with our group’s fabrication capability behind any structural repair. Where a failure has a story behind it, we tell you what caused it, because a repair that ignores the cause is just a deposit on the next breakdown.

Plenty of sound cranes outlive their manufacturers, and their owners are then told the machine is unsupportable. It usually is not. Our engineers repair cranes whose makers have long since gone, sourcing compatible parts from the market, re-engineering assemblies where no compatible parts exist, and upgrading obsolete controls to current equivalents that improve the crane rather than merely reviving it.

The honest limit is economics rather than possibility, and we will tell you when a repair bill is buying less than it costs. At that point, the conversation becomes modernisation or replacement through our crane manufacture and installation service, with the numbers for each side by side.

A repaired crane is not a working crane until it has been proven. After any repair that could affect the crane’s safety, the machine is functionally tested, proof load tested where the repair demands it, and put in front of a competent person for thorough examination before it returns to service, in line with the duties covered by our LOLER inspections.

The repair, the parts fitted and the testing are all documented into the crane’s history, so the machine comes back not just running but certified, and its records show an unbroken story when the next examination or audit reads them.