Condra is managing the installation of a 70/5-ton electric overhead travelling factory crane and the construction of its gantry crane, after winning a contract in South Africa, to be completed this month.
The order at the Johannesburg-based crane company is for the design and supply of the crane and the gantry from concrete slab up, as well as delivery, installation and commissioning of the crane to complete the project. It will also use a 50/20-ton Condra crane for moving and positioning injection moulding heads.
The company used its 3D site scan during the tender phase to give it an edge against its competitors, which can work from plans accurate to one millimeter in 50 000mm (50 metres), producing a design using the most cost-effective gantry possible.
After commissioning, the manufacturing company’s 21-metre span electric travelling double girder overhead crane will be used to move and position injection moulding heads. It follows delivery to the same customer of three similar cranes over several years for various applications.
Due to a confidentiality agreement, it cannot disclose the name of the client, but Marc Kleiner, MD, Condra, said: “All of South Africa’s main crane suppliers competed for this contract. The customer was meticulous in selecting the proposal that precisely met what he needed. This, plus his experience with the reliability and low maintenance costs of his three existing Condra cranes, clinched the order for us.
Kleiner added, the design was the main challenge because of the tight space constraints caused by a large installed moulding machine. “The factory is not much bigger than the machine itself, and this was why we carried out a site scan and then designed the gantry around what the scan told us – we had to fit it between the building and the machine. Installation of the completed crane will be challenging for the same reason: the building exists and the machine exists, and we will be building the gantry and then installing the crane in the remaining space. Additionally, despite the fact that our own design is from the ground up, when the frame of the gantry is complete it will further reduce the available space for installing the crane itself.”
The order for the previous three cranes was placed principally because of dissatisfaction with long periods of downtime experienced with a competitor’s machine, the result of having to wait up to two months for the arrival of spare parts from Europe.
Condra manufactures locally within South Africa and delivers parts anywhere in the country by overnight courier. The result of overly tight design among foreign crane manufacturers, while sometimes achieving a lower selling price, can result in a higher overall lifetime cost, because even slight over-stressing of the machine results in breakdown and a long wait for spare parts to arrive.
The manufacturing customer’s 70-ton crane will be a dimensionally large machine with comparatively nimble operating speeds. Cross-travel speeds of up to 12,5 metres per minute will be possible, with 25 metres per minute achieved on the long-travel. The main and auxiliary hoists will have lifting heights of 9 and 10,73 metres respectively, with frequency drives delivering lifting speeds of 1,5 and 6 metres per minute.
An interesting decision taken during the design phase was to place increased focus on precise positioning. A frequency drive was incorporated in the main hoist to deliver absolute accuracy at very slow speed. The auxiliary drive, which will do most of the fetching and carrying, will lift at a higher speed of 6 metres per minute.
Talking about the current market, Kleiner said there had been less movement than normal because of the uncertainty caused by the pandemic and by global politics.
“People don’t know if Brexit is going to work, and they don’t know what the dollar is going to do with the change of president in the USA. Europe seems to be printing money, which has to make everything more expensive in the long term. So there’s a lot of uncertainty and there is a possibility of price shocks from the supplier side. That said, we are seeing more enquiries from further afield – Ukraine, Russia and so on. We are hoping to develop stronger ties with the UK because of changes in the market brought about by Brexit,” he said.
“In Europe we understand that, generally speaking, it continues to be difficult to differentiate ourselves because our cranes are designed for African conditions. Condra cranes are tougher machines because of that, whereas the Europeans tend to be more sophisticated with their product. However, in terms of the overall lifetime cost of a crane, I think we have the Europeans beaten. Also, there are niches such as high-lift crane applications where our equipment is likely to be more successful than many European competitors because of our experience – for example headgear cranes and maintenance cranes for dams. At the moment, we are working with an Austrian company that is tapping into Condra’s high-lift expertise for work in the dams arena worldwide, but Covid has made progress here more difficult because of travel restrictions on visits to potential customers and their sites. We also have experience with very fast cranes – as high as 140 metres per minute on the long-travel in copper-leaching applications, for example, and we have a lot of experience in corrosive environments.”
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