Well, we done a thing and are the new owners of a project. It’s a 1980 model Grove TMS 250 E. We know all of the basics about the machine but are having trouble finding the service and operators manuals. Any one have any suggestions?
the 250e is "gray market". Which means it was meant for overseas, but if the exchange rate was pretty good, it was cheaper to reimport those, as buy one made for domestic. The upper will correspond part number wise with a regular 250, for parts/ seal kits etc. The lowers were Deutz powered if I remember correctly. You have the bigger 3/4" winch, but with just a single drive motor. The regular 250's have a smaller winch. They used your winch on some RT's, and optional on the 250's, but you don't see many of them. Looks like they had another E in the barn, they should have books, and it would be worth paying them to get a copy store to make copies of it, books for a E are not going to be as easy to find. Ebay is where I've gotten books from before. The guy loading it had his hands full. Looks like they pulled jib and ctw. to load it and then hung that ctw. and jib back on. I used to own two 250's, and @Knepptune has been into them also. I'll give any help I can.
Actually there were two in the barn, but one was a 300 and the other was bigger than that. We are going back down there sometime in the next couple of weeks to get the blocks and pads for it and plan on spending some time picking the previous owners mind on several things. We also bought a spare chassis he had for parts we are going to have delivered after we get this one operating so we can off load it easier.
Looks like the spare chassis has been picked over pretty good. There's no reason to bring home the frame, Flip it over and cut them out, if you really want the rears, but I think you are going to find that anything that's shot on yours, is going to be shot on the spare also. I think with a torch and two/ three hours, you could have anything off of it that you might ever need, and don't even drag the rest home. Unless the trucking is free, and you've got plenty of room to stash it.
Any particular reason that they picked the crane up to get it on the lowboy? If it runs, they could have drove it on. If it didn't run, it would have been easier to drag it on or winch it on.
We never had the time to try to get it started while it was at the location we purchased it from. It had to be taken off of one lowboy and place on ours, which was a little shorter than the sellers. We wanted them to haul it to us but they didn’t have the right permits and couldn’t transport out of state. We did roll it off at our shop and had it running the next day. We are currently going through it and replacing hoses and repacking the stabilizer cylinders.
Here’s a better pic of the spare chassis. We might need the cab in the future.
That crane was local to me and spent the last 20 years at a friends dads shop. I've been in that one myself and it used to run good. It was used for lifting light but tall loads for tests. Spent most of it's time with the jib swung out. It's weird that the chart is all in KG. Ralph used to have an extra Cummins engine for that crane. Might see what he wants for it as well when you come back down. The operating books used to be in the crane itself behind the operators seat. Don't know if they had any parts books or service manuals.
That’s good to know. Thanks.
I'm glad to see someone putting some effort into fixing it up. I considered buying it myself but I already have a tms300 project and a 2892 manitex project.
We were rocking right along with it and I had an opportunity to obtain an HTC 50. Now I have 2 projects but we’re starting to make some headway.
We received some parts manuals from them but never thought about looking behind the seat. We’ll check that out.
All the folks down at Empire were super nice people who were great to deal with.
Yeah they are. You can see why they have done well in the crane rental business. They like most have struggled to get good help. Ralph is about 80 so he's getting pretty ready to head to the house. We still get them to help us on occasion. We had to take down some trees on a mountain here where I dont want to take my 40ton or 55 ton. We got them to take their 2892 manitex up there. They have also moved a bunch of machine shop equipment for me. I'm afraid shortly Ralph will retire and they'll close up shop.