Can anyone clarify why the mini cranes used for residential construction in Europe aren't popular here? They are so convenient and everything can be moved to anywhere on a small site so easily. Is there a regulatory reason? Or are they just more expensive than having workers carry materials around? I see trucks here, just cranes on trucks. Thanks for any input
Welcome to the Forums Cam! Glad to have you. The production framers here use shooting boom forklifts and manlifts. Cheap to rent and plentiful at all the national rental houses. I'm starting to see forklifts and manlifts on single home construction, I guess the residential guys have found out how convenient they are. Craneop does a fair amount of residential work hoisting beams and trusses. He would have some insight on the topic.
Thanks for the insight. So do you think the added expense of setting up the mini tower crane is too much to be able to place materials into each room from above? The boom forklifts are on most sites I've worked on, but in Europe the tile, flooring bundles, appliances, window and door assemblies, tubs and so forth were often dropped in as each floor was being finished. That was especially useful on second floors as the workers didn't need to carry up everything. The boom forklifts can't get to everywhere. How does the calculus work for balancing the great efficiency and versatility of a small crane vs the limited utility of a boom forklift?
Infrastructure is totally different from Europe to us. Europe sites are often tight, narrow streets, multi story. Right on the paved street. Jobsites here have yards and parking lots, and most of it is dirt and mud until the project is done. Doesn't matter if you have a cute little tower next to the building, if the delivery truck is 100yards away at the street. Telehandler can just drive right over there.
The small tower has its place, on a small congested city site, they are slow operating, and takes forever to move. I've been around the little towers and they just don't work well for the majority of the US work. I can't think of a job in the last six months, that I would have wanted one for.
This. Even in Seattle city proper, we do plenty of jobs with swing carriage 1056 telehandlers. You can sit back and get an angle on things with a swing carriage. In the UK where I have visited most often, the towns are so small that the street is narrower than an alley and a big telehandler is pretty much crippled by the lack of manuevering room. Add in the fact that there is often a small lot nearby to land and store material on, the telehandler is perfect for grabbing a load from a half block or block away and bringing it in.
In the US, with our generally larger worksites, this sentence becomes reversed. The boom forklifts have all the mobility and versatility that the small tower cranes lack.
Just making a guess but I'd say its the expense and training required. Just looked online and it looks like its a 3 year apprenticeship to become a certified crane operator in Alberta. Whereas any fresh out of highschool labourer can take a 1 or 2 day course and be certified to run a forklift or telehandler.
Is that certification needed here in the US?
Every one who runs a crane here in BC needs to be certified now. It is not simple to get now and the grandfathering window is long closed. The bigger the crane capacity, the higher the certification needed. Every time there is another accident involving a lift, there are more rules.
No idea, I do not work in the US.
You can have a crane certification after a written test and a practical test in the U. S. There are places holding classes and giving the tests, 4-5 day course if you know what you are doing.
That is needed here.
It depends on the state and how the crane is used. In WA I didn't have to be certified to run my crane and the crane didn't need to be certified. But I was self employed, working by myself, and was only using the crane on houses I was framing. I didn't use it to lift things for other people and couldn't have anyone on the jobsite that paid into L&I (workers comp). A few of the builders I worked with had reach forklifts. The main difference was that they had employees and crane certification would have been too costly
It's bad operators don't need certification but cranes not needing it is downright scary!
I learned a lot of useless information when I got certified, after 20 years of running un certed. I learned a lot about crawler cranes (don't have one) and things like how many broken stands per foot are allowed for various types of wires rope (none, in my book anyway), and didn't learn a single new solitary thing about the actual work I do, mostly setting trusses on residential construction and HVAC work, in a practical sense anyway. But that's OK, I'm legal now. Hey RocketScott, you sure about that? Thought it was a Fed requirement, more power to you if not! I've been asked 3 times, actually 2 as one job fell thru, to show my cert since I got it. I was surprised however, by how hard the cert test was, not the practical, which I got a 99 on, better than the guy who owned the crane used for the test (damn right I'm bragging....) but the "bookwork." Out of 5 of us, all ops for years if not decades, 3 flunked out, or maybe two, can't recall, point being, it's not a cakewalk.
Why? Currently other than cranes or forklifts we do not need certification to run our track hoes, dozers, CTL's, etc and I don't think we need the gov't to demand we have some 3rd party agency "approved" by them that probably has never been on an excavator on a job site "certify" us to operate what we've been doing for 25 plus years. Wife has a homebuilders license, never built a home but she passed the test. She has to take so many hours of "continuing education" yearly. This year she took a course on drones...it was part of the government's "approved list". It's all a joke.
I don't think you read rocketscott very carefully. He could not run the crane with anyone else around. All crane operators per osha, need to be certified. If you are working for yourself, with no employees, osha has no jurisdiction over anything you might do. As soon as employees are involved, osha has jurisdiction. So you can buy a 400 ton crane and do whatever you want with it, by yourself. Certification of crane operators has had no effect on the number of crane accidents, there was a article about a study on it a while back, where they aggregated past numbers (pre certification) to present. What certification has done, is changed the liability exposure, now the insurance companies/lawyers can point at the operator and "its not our companies fault- he's a trained operator- he screwed up- sue him". Certification is a money grab for the certification companies. And its a protection racket for the insurance companies. Its not about safety. If certification made things safer, we would have seen a drastic decrease in accidents, since they started requiring certification. Unfortunately, that hasn't been the case. Its still dangerous work, that you don't get "do over's " for. You have to do it right, every single time. And humans really aren't cut out for that.
Spot on CO. I couldn't risk anyone that was part of WA's version of OSHA, L&I. They could care less what I did to myself. If the builder scheduled another trade to work on the site then I didn't run the crane with them there. Usually it wasn't an issue. Probably the biggest annoyance I had were bank inspectors (for the homeowner's construction loan) that would pull up and walk right in. They came by once a month without notice or regard for what was going on at the site. More than once they walked right under something I was lifting. "Gotta do my job and you can't stop me" After I bought my truck a good friend of mine that worked for Sicklesteel set me up with the study material that they train people with. Coincidentally, he had speced out my truck for McMillan when it got converted from being a dump truck. Seems like the crane world in the PNW is rather small. I studied it all and pulled out what applied to what I was doing. All of it should be common sense: stay well within the chart, don't swing a wrecking ball, don't fly a kite... My crane was ceritfied a month or two before I bought it. With the shape that it was in that 'certification' didn't mean much in my view. It caught fire not long after I got it, a worn through wire ignited the oil leaking from one of the cylinders. Fortunately it didn't do too much damage. Since then I've rewired maybe half the truck and cleaned up all the hacked in patch jobs they did just to get by
I get the money grab. I just hope a crane operator is competent enough to know what they're doing the same as anyone operating equipment. You hear stories of people showing up on a job and told to just figure it out and then thrown on dozer or other machine. I think the consequences of an inexperienced operator on a crane could be much worse, especially if they don't know how to read load charts and aren't familiar with the crane. Having to take a course could be sufficient. Here in order to have a class 3 or 1 license you're required to take a course on air brakes but farmers are exempt. A similar style course for cranes wouldn't be a bad idea.
Certification is NOT required, IF one has no employees, just a one man operation?? NOW you tell me....., I was under the impression it was a federal requirement, with hefty fines involved if they caught you. Now I feel like a sucker! That's a load off my mind as I understand they have to renewed every 5 years, I will blow that off. The couple of times I've been asked to show my op ticket would not break me if I just drove off.
Well, you technically couldn't fly those trusses or hvac units to anyone. Probably can't get any insurance either without being certified. You can set it up in your yard and play with it.
My insurance agent FWIW, has never asked if I was certified. I like being certified, like I like paying income tax, doing so is one less thing to worry about! Years ago, when still a carpenter, I was doing a demo on an old grain building, and a OSHA guy who was in town investigating the death of a worker at a phosphate plant 40 miles away and just happened to be driving by my site, stopped and asked me a few questions. As soon as he determined I had no employees he got back in his rental car and drove off. On that same job, I ended up getting sued by the EPA for $13,000,000.00 a few years later, for a very small amount of asbestos in the crawl space that was improperly removed and hauled off by the building's owner. When it was determined that my demo contract was from the roof down to the TOP of the foundation walls (a buddy who used to be a union carpenter with me years earlier, who went on to get his law degree, and knew the difference between a foundation wall and a footing, drew up my contract, as he knew the building owner was a notorious scammer and would cheat me anyway he could) that little detail got me off the hook. I paid $300.00 in filing fees and court costs to my buddy that was all, true story! I was onsite one day when another EPA guy stopped by after the issue arose, he was suited up in a Tyvek suit, knee high rubber boots, goggles, gloves, and a hard hat. 30 seconds on the job site, he stepped on a nail, and left for the day.
The general contractor's license, bond, and insurance for my construction business covered the crane on jobsites, same as if I rented a forklift or any other piece of equipement. Then there is seperate insurance for the truck itself that covers it when it's going down the road Correct about flying trusses to someone else. Builders couldn't hire me to lift trusses for them to build the roof. They could hire me to build the roof myself, and then I could use the crane to do that Check with your insurance for their requirements. I had a really good insurance agent that didn't mind all my 'what if' questions and found the right policy for what I was doing. Insurance companies seemed to care more about whether I worked in housing tracts than what tools I used to do the job