Mobile Cranes

 There was a time when mobile cranes were identified with the United States and taker cranes with Europe, but the globalized modern market for all cranes now transcends regions and borders, blurring these differences.

The original author of this book liked to recall a yam told by a Danish engineer, a tale that summed up a common European view of Americans, expressed in terms of crane practices. The Dane offered the view that the modem descendent of the Old West six-shooter is the American mobile crane with the gunslinger spirit living on among its operators. Whether one agrees or not with its underlying derision, this yam reflected a genuine difference in crane design philosophy that existed at the time it was told, a difference that persists to this day. Muscular mobile cranes, like muscle cars, have their origins in the open spaces of the American heartland. The mobility and unfettered power of these machines-at odds with European sensibilities that favor constraint-fall in line with the American ethos. For better or worse, traditional American mobile cranes put the operator in full control.

The European approach, established first with tower cranes but now applied at large, is to take that discretion away from the operator by modulating power and building in automated limits to the crane controls. In the European Union itself, the attitude is codified in the Machinery Directive, a broad-based safety standard-applied to cranes among a wide variety of machines-that demands manufacturers eliminate risks and take into account foreseeable misuse.

Though American attitudes have not much changed, the prominent position of European manufacturers and the need to satisfy the Machinery Directive for sales in the EU gives the more restrained European approach acceptance in many of the world markets.

Aided by technology that integrates sensors, software, and control systems, mobile cranes are following the path of tower cranes by becoming more automated and less reliant on "seat of the pants" skills. Nonetheless, they have more freedom of movement than tower cranes, and thus operator skill, though somewhat changed in character, is far from obsolete. While still keeping a sharp eye out the cab window and giving the signalman rapt attention, today's mobile- crane operator also needs to interface with the rich array of information presented on a computer console. The old skill set that favored guts over brains has been reversed.