Machinery Manufacturers and Heavy Lifting Companies

Working with machinery manufacturers for the past thirty odd years, I’ve had the same (somewhat frustrating) conversation with countless number of them. As heavy lifting specialists, we’ve worked with machinery manufactures everywhere from Italy to China and Dubai to Glasgow … and the same conversation has been had. We’re asked to relocate, install, or otherwise move machines, now although we move anything up to about 500 tonnes, a lot of machines we’re asked to move are just a few tonnes, say 4 or 5 tonnes – and that’s great, we’re more than happy to do it, the issue is often about the method of movement. All too often there are fork slots at the base of a machine – very thoughtful – to enable the correct positioning of the fork truck that’s going to lift the machine. Yet, time after time, due to the weight of the machine or the balance points, a different fork truck, such as a Hoist FR series or Versalift, needs to be used ... only the forks on these trucks are wider and don’t fit in the 'designed in' fork slots. Now what do we do? Perhaps we could to a suspended lift? What, no method of lifting that doesn’t create adverse swing? Now what? It sounds like I’m whinging … well, OK, yes, I am a bit, but the reason being is that, with a little more by way of options, we can save the manufacturer, or the machine owner, time and money on relocating their machinery. From our perspective, there’d be far fewer incidences of ‘air turning blue’, we are engineers after all said and done. So, designers and manufacturers, I really do appreciate that the cost of these things are a real consideration, but often the cost could be reduced, seriously. So, if you design or manufacture machines in the c.4-6 tonne weight range and you’d like the perspective of a company that lovingly move your kit, just give me a call and I’ll be happy to discuss it with you.