On any construction project, the size of your margins is of critical importance. One of the biggest threats to your bottom line is construction downtime, which tends to occur when equipment failures strike. That is why you must follow a crane maintenance guide to keep your most important tool, your crane, in perfect working order.

Proper crane maintenance means knowing how to spot an equipment problem before it becomes serious. This means knowing the telltale signs that you need to order and install a new crane part. If you’re wondering, “does my crane need repairs?” read this essential guide to find out. 

1. Crane Part Corrosion

One of the most significant signs you need a new crane is the appearance of corrosion. If you can see corrosion, even if it is just a small amount of rust, the problem likely goes much deeper. When rust appears on the crane parts’ surface, the corrosion may be already deep inside the crane. Corroded crane parts are likely to break at the worst possible moments, potentially causing catastrophic damage. If crane parts are corroded, replace them immediately. 

2. Worn Out Pads

The outrigger, slider, and stabilizer pads are essential crane parts that workers often ignore. The pads are designed to take the crane’s blunt force’s movements and lift, an absorbing force so that the rest of the crane does not feel the pressure. If these begin to wear and tear, the entire structure of the crane becomes vulnerable. Check your pads to see if they are still in good condition and replace them if they are not. 

3. Dry Ropes and Slings

The ropes and the crane slings describe the moving parts that allow the rest of the crane to lift and expand as needed. These require regular, almost daily maintenance. They also need to be oiled constantly so that they do not dry out. If the ropes and slings dry out, the fibers will begin to fray and then snap. That is why you should keep them oiled and replace them if they begin to look worse for wear. 

4. Broken Chain Links

If your crane uses chain-based hoist systems, it is crucial that everyone on your team can spot a broken chain link as soon as it appears. All it takes is for one single chain link to snap for the whole structure to come crashing down. Maintain your chain links and always replace them when they begin to fray. You can order chain crane parts online for a very modest price.

5. Cracked Hooks 

The hook of the crane is an essential component. The hook is the tool that holds every item that needs to be lifted and is designed to help put everything neatly into place. If the hook begins to crack or bend in the wrong direction, the consequences can be catastrophic. Check the hook every day and make sure that it is in perfect condition before you begin construction. 

Keep Your Crane In Working Order 

If you need a new crane part, you have come to the right place. Check out our online store to order any new crane parts that you need to keep your construction project running smoothly. 

No matter your construction project’s size and scale, you need the right tools to complete the job to the highest standard at the best possible price. One of the most important tools in your chest is the crane. Knowing the right type of cranes for your construction project is essential if you want to complete the construction on time.

When asking “which crane is best for my job?” there are many crucial factors to consider, such as the terrain, lot size, and building materials you plan to use. With that in mind, put aside those complicated crane buying guides and instead read this essential explainer on the right types of cranes you need for your project. 

1. Factors to Consider When Choosing the Right Type of Cranes

If you are wondering how to know what crane to buy, it is essential to assess your construction needs. No two building sites are the same, with each one requiring precise tools and equipment to get the job done. When shopping for crane types, these are the main factors that you need to keep in mind: 

• The building site’s size: If you have a large site that requires a lot of driving, then a mobile crane is essential. 

• The loads to be lifted: Depending on the construction job, you could need a reinforced crane to lift titanium and steel. 

• The building site’s terrain: Different cranes are built to move on different terrain, be it sand, concrete, or mud. 

• The lifting height: How tall is your construction project? You will need to make sure your crane can reach the top. 

• The on-site safety needs: Safety is essential, which is why you need a crane that can navigate on-site hazards such as trees, pedestrians, and power lines. 

2. The Most Common Types of Cranes Explained 

Once you have assessed the needs of your construction site, you are ready to choose your crane. Here are the main options for you to consider: 

• Rough terrain crane: As you might have guessed, these are mobile cranes mounted to trucks that can drive in all-terrain environments. 

• Floating crane: This is a crane that is mounted on a vessel to allow construction at sea. 

• Truck-mounted crane: These are compact, and lightweight cranes attached to standard trucks and are often used for maintenance. 

• Overhead crane: Also known are bridge cranes, these are massive structures used for hefty overhead lifting, often in shipyards. 

• Hammerhead crane: These are large construction cranes that swivel on a fixed tower. 

• Tower crane: These are very high, slender cranes that are most commonly used in constructing urban tower blocks, and they are usually built up alongside the building itself. 

Other types of cranes may be better suited for your project, but these are the most popular options.

Upgrade Your Crane Today 

Now that you know the right type of cranes you need for your next construction project, it is time to ensure that you have the crane upgrades that you need to future-proof your investment. Make sure to consult our crane upgrades guides to determine how we can make sure your crane delivers everything you need. 

Cranes play an essential role within the construction industry, providing enormous lifting and moving capabilities on a wide variety of projects. The first cranes were used in modern-day Iraq around 5,000 years ago. Known as a shadouf, this simple crane was used to lift water for irrigation; it is still used in parts of the world today.

Today, modern crane brands such as Demag and Liebherr are sophisticated machines capable of lifting hundreds of tonnes. Here we will take a closer look at four notable brands on the market today, as well as some of the different types of cranes. Check out our cranes and hoists page for more information on our line of equipment.

Demag

Demag is a German heavy equipment manufacturer that was formally founded in 1910. For more than 100 years, it has built a reputation as a provider of powerful and reliable industrial cranes. Demag cranes are typically adept at handling loads smoothly, with high load capacity against minimum deadweight and reduced load sway.

Liebherr

Liebherr is a massive organization consisting of more than 130 different companies in total. Based in Switzerland, Liebherr manufactures a wide range of crawler, wheeled mobile, marine, and port cranes utilized by a myriad of industries around the world. Liebherr emphasizes operators’ comfort and safety.

Cargotec

This popular Finland-based crane manufacturer is well-known throughout the construction, forestry, transport, and distribution industries. Cargotec’s cranes are used worldwide and are effective in improving productivity as well as efficiency. Durably built, they are reliable machines that offer excellent safety standards.

Palfinger

Palfinger is an Austrian crane manufacturer known for its hydraulic loading, lifting, and handling systems. Palfinger has more than 150 models, notably the hydraulic loader crane, highly regarded as a user-friendly and efficient machine suitable for a range of projects.

Different Types of Crane

There is a wide range of different crane types available, depending on the industry and its requirements. Tower cranes are commonly seen within urban environments and where skyscrapers are being constructed. Given their height and lifting capacity, tower cranes are an essential feature of large-scale construction projects.

Other common crane types include mobile cranes, telescopic cranes, static cranes, gantry cranes, giant cantilever cranes, crawler cranes, and flying cranes. Mobile cranes, such as vehicle-mounted and self-erecting, make them a flexible, convenient, and efficient piece of equipment for a range of projects.

Find Great Crane Brands

As a leading manufacturer and distributor of equipment for a range of essential industries, we believe in providing high-quality products at competitive prices.

Speak to our team today about the crane brands, products, or parts you are interested in. You can also request a quote for more information. Contact us today through this form.

Be sure to check out our other blog posts on a range of topics.

According to a recent study by Market Research Future, predictive maintenance tools will save companies $6.3b by 2025.

By investing in tools, companies can reduce downtime and unexpected operating costs that may negatively impact their bottom line in the future.

Do you want to learn how to save your business valuable time and funds?

Keep reading if you want to find out what tools you need to keep your cranes operating.

What Are Predictive Maintenance Tools?

Predictive maintenance is the use of technology to intercept potential machinery failures. It focuses on the early observation of changes, which is more reliable than preventative maintenance. These issues can be fixed before the machine breaks.

Therefore, predictive maintenance is very valuable for safe working conditions and reducing downtime. 

Tools To Implement

There are a few types of technologies we can implement. These include sensors to gather data and tools to analyze this data. It may also be important to invest in scheduling tools to organize these processes.

Sensors

Sensors enable the detection of small changes in your machinery. They use multiple sensors and specific analytics so that you can detect a greater range of issues. This allows you to get a holistic understanding of how your machine works.

Sensors for vibration analysis detect indications of stress and wear through frequencies. If machines deviate from their usual vibration, this may indicate potential failure. These changes occur because a machine’s parts have reached the end of their lifespan.

Thermal imaging sensors check for excessive heat in interacting machine components. Catching these abnormalities early reduces one of the biggest threats to electric motors. This reduces costs, but it also prevents potentially dangerous working conditions.

Oil and lubricant sensors can expose potential leaks, excess metal, dirt, or sludge. This is important to examine how well your machine prevents moisture, dilution, or oxidization. It may also reveal grinding parts if metal shards are found in the oil.

Analytics

Now that we have sensor data, we need comprehensive analysis and machine learning. Predictive maintenance occurs as these algorithms analyze patterns against past trends. Through advanced algorithms, they can detect potential failures before they happen.

You will then have to understand whether the part is a repairable or replaceable system. This is easier when using analytic software because it can identify trends. It can then suggest the best course of servicing.

Scheduling

It is also important to use tools to schedule predictive maintenance. This is important if you intend to use it in conjunction with preventative maintenance. That is, where you undergo regular, scheduled inspections of equipment. 

How We Can Help

At Kor-Pak, we provide crane inspections and equipment repair services. These can be used as predictive maintenance tools to catch potential issues early.

If you want to understand more about implementing maintenance schedules, you can contact us. Don’t forget to share if you found this article useful.

If your business involves heavy lifting, having a crane provider you can trust is a big deal. On average, one crane “upset” happens every 10,000 machine hours of equipment usage.

While your crane falling over may not be the most common thing, conducting preventative maintenance should be. Only a qualified crane provider and maintenance specialist can service your crane the way it deserves.

This guide will give you all the tools you need to find the best crane provider for your crane services. Keep reading to learn more.

Inspections

There are many aspects of preventative maintenance for cranes. It all starts with a proper inspection. Getting an overhead crane inspection is an important part of keeping your crane safe and in good working order.

An inspection allows you to find problems before they become major issues. Cranes are complicated pieces of machinery with multiple moving parts. Every component has its maintenance regimes.

Preventative Maintenance 

Every part of your crane should be serviced and inspected regularly. This includes crane controls such as variable frequency drivelines. It also encompasses mechanical transmission components such as gearboxes.

Like your automobile, cranes need preventative maintenance to keep them from breaking down at inopportune times. Preventive maintenance also increases a crane’s equipment lifespan.

Rather than fix things retroactively, use preventative maintenance to stay ahead of the curve.

You can find the proper preventative maintenance regimes for your crane by contacting the manufacturer. Do not neglect regular preventive maintenance. Your crane’s safety and operational capacity will be affected as a result.

More than 5,000 fatal occupational injuries occurred at worksites in 2019 alone. To help avoid your employees becoming another statistic, you must conduct proper preventative maintenance. 

Find a Specialist for Crane Services

When selecting a specialist in crane services, you want to find a name you can trust. Pick a company that is known as a leader in the industry. Make sure that they have the full package of services that your organization needs.

This means that they can conduct inspections, provide crane services, conduct preventative maintenance. It also means they can carry out repairs and operate in all the sectors your company does business in.

Find a company that can do everything in-house. That way, you are not dealing with a patchwork of different crane services. Using a single company for your crane services needs increases accountability.

Additionally, you want to make sure the company you select has a specialization in dealing with your specific machinery types. 

There are many different makes and models of cranes. The worst thing that can happen is to hire a crane services specialist with little or no familiarity with your type of equipment.

Keep Your Cranes Serviced

A well-serviced crane is a safe and functional crane. Finding an organization that specializes in crane services can keep your workers safe and your equipment operational.

In the dangerous world of industrial machinery, this is what matters most. Contact us today to schedule a service estimate for your equipment. That way, you can have peace of mind knowing your cranes are in good hands.

Maintaining the integrity of your business equipment is something that cannot be overlooked. Not only does faulty equipment result in less efficient work, but it could also cause safety hazards for your employees and customers.

For this reason, predictive maintenance is a practice that business owners frequently implement. This is especially true with more complex equipment, such as cranes.

Let’s explore everything that you need to know.

So, What Exactly Is It?

As the name suggests, predictive maintenance is a proactive measure that involves estimating when certain equipment parts are likely to fail. Research and data are used to determine the average length of time before a failure will occur.

An automotive manufacturer might conclude that a particular vehicle part is likely to fail after 36 months. To prevent this scenario, the part is either replaced or repaired before this time.

Why Does It Matter?

As previously mentioned, predictive maintenance is essential to both productivity and overall safety. If a failure does occur, your business could easily experience a large handful of adverse consequences.

Faulty construction equipment, for example, could cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage. Or, it could result in a significant amount of injury to a large number of people.

In the latter scenario, it’s not uncommon for victims to file a lawsuit against the company responsible for handling the equipment.

Predictive maintenance will go a long way in protecting your company’s reputation. It will also allow you to prevent multiple issues that would otherwise arise.

How Can I Get Started?

Before you can implement predictive maintenance, you need to understand when your equipment is likely to require repair. This is accomplished through consistent research and analysis on the behavior and performance of the equipment.

For example, you could use an electronic sensor on a crane that details the stress that equipment experiences while under load. When this crosses a certain threshold, the equipment would be at risk of failure.

You could use this data to make the necessary repairs or replacements before this value is reached.

Without this type of monitoring, your only alternative would be to service the equipment at specific intervals. For instance, you might choose to repair parts of your equipment every six months to prevent mechanical failure.

The issue here is that problems are likely to arise early on in the process since you won’t know precisely when you should maintain your equipment. So, keep this in mind when developing a method to do so.

Predictive Maintenance Might Seem Complicated to Implement

But the above information will make the process far smoother. From here, you’ll be able to Predictive maintenance to ensure that your equipment operates exactly how it’s supposed to. 

Want to learn more about what we have to offer? Feel free to reach out to us today and see how we can help.

It is estimated that factories lose between 5% and 20% of productivity due to downtime. This can translate into millions of dollars worth of revenue loss.

Would you like to learn how to reduce downtime and increase productivity in the competitive crane market?

Keep reading to learn more about how downtime could be affecting your business and ways to improve crane efficiency.

What is Downtime?

Downtime causes inefficiency and monetary value loss for your business. This is because both the costs of labor and equipment costs are being paid without the equal output being created.

Often, companies don’t account for the different types of downtime. Unplanned downtime includes failures such as operator errors, hardware errors, or poor performance. This is compared to planned downtime such as upgrades or regular maintenance, which can be easily controlled.

Calculating the Cost of Downtime

One of the reasons why it is so difficult to negate the negative impacts of manufacturing industry downtime is because 80% of companies cannot accurately determine their downtime. Naturally, you can’t fix something that you aren’t aware of. Therefore, it is important first to calculate the dollar value loss of downtime to reduce it.

When calculating, include occurrences such as:

• Low staff productivity
• Rescheduling
• Unexpected repairs
• Customer relations

Reducing the Downtime of Machinery

Unplanned downtime can be reduced in part by ensuring the predictive maintenance of machinery. This will lower the number of unexpected breakdowns. In turn, unplanned downtime and lost production time will reduce.

Predictive maintenance may include booking regular crane inspections. We at Kor-Pak offer crane inspections as well as crane modernizations and upgrades.

It is also important to know that if you invest in cheaper machines initially, it may require more maintenance down the line. This can further increase downtime. Therefore, it may be worth investing more to increase long-run productivity.

Further, you can use tools such as risk audits to check the quality of your machinery.

Having explicit knowledge and budgeting for potential downtime will also help you avoid any unexpected production errors. It will also help you justify to stakeholders the importance of predictive maintenance and initial investment.

Reducing the Downtime of Labor

A large portion of downtime is a result of unproductive workers. For example, one of the leading causes of downtime is operator errors. 

If you can change workers’ mindsets, you can empower your employees to become incredibly effective and productive. Ultimately, these good operators will be able to diagnose and fix their own machinery. They will also be on top of maintenance schedules and documentation, allowing them to prevent future potential losses.

You can empower workers through company incentives or skills training. Another way is to include workers in the innovative process, making them feel like they are working toward a bigger vision.

How Kor-Pak Can Help

We at Kor-Pak have a range of maintenance, repair, and modernization services. These types of predictive maintenance can help you reduce millions of dollars worth of monetary losses due to the high cost of downtime. 

You might also be unsure about what service is right for your business. If this is the case, you can also contact us directly for more information.

In the third quarter of 2020, there were 257 cranes in active use across North American cities. Every time construction workers use one of these machines; they must complete a routine crane maintenance check. Sometimes, though, they’ll find problems that they cannot fix without the help of an inspection and repair service—like crane alignment issues. 

Even though this is one of the most common crane problems, it is dangerous, which is why you should be able to identify when it is happening to your machine. To learn about the symptoms of an unaligned crane and why you should get it inspected frequently, keep on reading. 

Crane Alignment Benefits

Cranes and their parts already cost a lot to produce, rent, and buy. By performing routine crane maintenance checks, your company is going to save a lot of money.

An unaligned crane could result in a derailment or an accident. The amount of downtime it could take to repair the crane alone isn’t cost-efficient, either.  

Fortunately, in 2017, crane-related injuries were at the lowest they had been in seven years. To contribute to this downward trend, you should be on the lookout for these issues, as you’ll want to have your crane serviced as soon as possible to ensure you and your worker’s safety. 

Lifespan Gains

The most prominent sign that you have an alignment issue has to do with the wheels on your crane. Listen for screeching or crashing noises when they move. These sounds indicate that the wheels are floating or slipping off the rails. 

Additionally, the wheel flanges can break if the crane is misaligned, even though they should keep it on track when the rails bend or the machine moves too fast. Wheels are expensive, and for this reason, you should invest in ones made of steel. They’re durable and can be reconditioned for further use to save you money in the long-run. 

Efficiency Gains

You should also pay attention to how much energy it takes to operate the crane. A standard electric tower crane usually uses about 800 amps. Knowing this baseline will make it easier to identify when something is wrong and saves you from paying a higher electricity bill. 

Another way you can create more efficiency gains for your company is to upgrade to an automated crane. These machines need less time to finish a project, allowing your company to complete more tasks than usual and reducing the amount of energy you need to run it. 

Get a Crane Inspection

If you’re having crane alignment issues and need an overhead inspection, look no further than Kor-Pak Corporations. We’ll look at all its components and devices to find the root of the problem. We’ll also give you a quote for the repairs. 

Contact us today to schedule an inspection date. We’ll get it back up and running on those rails in no time.