Fixed Crane Loading Platforms Control Costs
Subcontractors on high rise projects are faced with the challenge of loading their products on the building. Mechanical contractors can load up pre-finished units, but they need the right decks to land them. Wall and partition contractors face the same. Plumbers and sprinkler fitters can ship out more completed work products to save on expensive labor on the job. But often they don’t have a good way to load this up. We can help with that.
Level with the Floor
Fixed Crane Loading Platforms have the advantage of no ramping. The decks are even with the floor. The result is items on castors or other rolling mechanisms easily transition to the working deck. If you have a ramp, you can pick up unwanted speed, have a hard time getting items back out, or can hang up depending on how you are bringing it in. Our retractable decks are pretty gentle on the ramping, but they aren’t as easy as being fully even with the floor.
Fixed Deck Drawing showing the structure hanging below to allow the decks to be even in elevation.
We offer our decks up to 11’-6” wide on the outside dimension. The interior of the deck is 10’-4” wide. This should be quite a bit wider than items trucked to the job, but you could come up with scenarios where you are wider. If going wider is a need, our Retractables go up to 13’-7” wide with 17’ of outboard reach. If we presume over 10’ wide is adequate for your needs, our fixed decks can work for you. If you have long items are you concern like a plumber or fire sprinkler fitter might have, our fixed decks come with 12’-9” of outboard reach with the end gates closed. If the end gates are opened, the limitation would find that 35’ or so is about as long as we can get into most buildings. It will vary based on obstacles above the loading deck. Given this allows bundles of long items to be fabricated at other locations, the savings to the job in keeping less labor on site and enabling faster installations can be a huge win for a contractor.
Offering Welded and Bolted Fixed Crane Loading Platforms
Our Fixed decks can be ordered as a welded structure up to 10’-6” wide on the outside. They start out at 7’-2” on the outside dimension. These limit the width of anything landed on them, but if length is your primary concern, these can help you get the job done and to respect the budget. Or we can go as wide as 11’-6” on the outside if we do it as a bolted deck. There are compromises to be had on all sides. A 7’ wide deck will slide right into a shipping container. We can easily stack 5 or 6 of them in a container to mitigate the shipping costs. If they are 8’-6” wide, we can put them in an open top HC and have no expensive costs in the shipping process. The next size is 10’-6” where we have a deck that will be taller than the container and lead to “Out of Gauge” costs. The result is this will only make sense if you are ordering 4 at a time. The shipping cost done this way hovers in the $25,000 range. For the ultimate width our build costs go up. We bolt the decks together. But the shipping costs go down as we can load it all in a single container. The result is that we do our best to manage shipping costs for the eventual tool you have.
Safety Benefits in the Eichinger Design
I see crane loading platforms that have open sides being used all of the time. I can’t help but think of the workers on top dropping items. Working with shackles, how many people drop a pin? If you lose one from 20 stories, it’s potentially deadly. One way to mitigate that is with solid sides like we have. The only place something could fall out in our design is at the gates at the very end. If someone shows up with something in a bolt bag that gets pulled out as one reaches for another tool, it’s most likely to fall inside of the platform and pose no personal hazards. And when one opens the end gates to accept longer items, there is a lift point built in to both sides of the platform that is more than capable of supporting 2200 lbs as a fall arrest point. And relative to decks that have nets built in, or poor fall prevention, our decks are compliant with all fall prevention standards. There are no open ends to manage unless you happen to need that condition for a particular lift.
Floor of fixed deck is non slip design with full enclosure so items dropped are unlikely to fall out.
More Capacity, More Safety, More Production
When it comes to getting work done and being safe, capacity is a huge factor. When you look at rental decks with capacities of 5500 lbs or even 8000 lbs, are your people pushing up to that capacity all of the time? When you have 11,000 lbs of capacity, you’ll be at the limit less. Not only that, but your margins leave more capacity too. The safety factors are not published. But if both designs were 1.5x, that leaves the rated capacity as spare capacity versus 5500 lb decks. Or a total of 2x on the 8000lb rating. The miscalculation problem has to be the size of a half ton truck. And if you can lift more with safety built in, you can get more work done too. Seriously, stop messing around with being near the limits all of the time and get an Eichinger Crane Loading Platform so you know that you are good to go.
Reach out at sales@cranegear.net to discuss what will serve you well. In the end, that’s all we care about. We want to manufacture and sell decks. Unlike rental companies, we are confident that we’ll do well enough for our clients that they’ll come back for the next one. And the next one. We don’t need to fabricate a rental business. We fabricate crane loading platforms. Once you have one of our capable decks, there won’t be anywhere else that you’ll want to go. We also do this quality work in crane attachments as well at cranegear.net . Come find us.
Enclosed sides Stop the Drop
