Cranes come in all shapes and sizes, but the limb-like outriggers and dramatic unfolding setup of the humble mini crawler crane is always an impressive sight.
Conrad Bem speaks to Maxilift Australia managing director Bob Davis to get a distributor’s perspective of where the local market’s at for the smallest class of mobile cranes.Cranes and Lifting asked Davis about the current state of the market; he said it had been better, but in some states it was still “very buoyant”.
“New South Wales has a really good, strong, buoyant market at the moment, Victoria’s good, and our sales are really very satisfactory given tighter market conditions,” he explained.
He said the tighter conditions were due to the global economy’s current weakness.
“Our mining industry’s diminished, our manufacturing industry, our jobs have gone to China, and so the economy is not as strong nationally as it was maybe a few years ago,” he said.
It’s not all mediocre news though. Davis said bauma had been “a good highlight display for all of our products and certainly Unic were very well-featured and represented”.
“We had a lot of interest as a result of Australian visitors seeing the Unic display at bauma and coming back and talking to us about opportunities they are looking for,” he outlined.
Lifting’s an art
Over in Western Australia, All Terrain Services lent a spidery hand to Harrisdale Secondary College. Cranes and Lifting spoke to Todd Jackson about the project, which made use of a Maeda MC285 CRM cheerfully nicknamed
Arachnid. The Little Rhino Designs artwork was created by artists Jason Hirst and Tim Macfarlane Reid, which had to be lifted into place over freshly laid untrafficable pavers; Jackson said this was the main concern of the client. As to the sculpture itself, Jackson said it consisted of fragile, awkward pieces with precise positioning required.
Arachnid was picked for the job over All Terrain Services’ other mini crawler cranes, like the Maeda MC405CRM dubbed Black Widow or the UNIC URW-706 named Goliath, due to its low weight and compact dimensions. Jackson said this allowed it to complete the intricate work without causing any damage to the paved area.