Dismantling of a Crane
Last weekend they took down a stationary crane that had been working on a building for the last year. This meant of course that they needed another big crane to do so. I stood around in the cold for one hour in order to take these pictures, so you'd better appreciate them! (interesting note: from my observations, I can tell you that crane dismantling spectatorship is an activity practised equally by men and women)
These first pics make our city look like it might be bigger, grittier and more generally city-like than it actually is. Note that it was actually about 11AM when I took these, not, say, dawn or dusk or any time that is supposed to be particularly dark.
This is the crane doing all the work. Handily it has written on it that it has a 72m main boom, so there you go. It also says it has 32m HYD tilt - but I don't know what that bit means...
So the boom of the stationary crane is being supported by the truck-crane, and this guy and his colleague appeared to be using a giant hammer to smack out a couple of bolts that held the boom to the vertical section. That's right, the whole thing seemed to have been held together with only two (giant) bolts, but I may have missed something as later photos show there may have been another two bolts at the top, making four. They had already removed some pulley cables at this point.
And there - he's done it. The boom is now only supported by the other crane and this guy's steadying arm. Actually, there are big ropes hanging from each end of the boom that guys on the ground will use to stop it swinging round and ending up, amusingly but inconveniently, resting on top of the buildings on either side of the street, straddling the street. Let me make clearer that that did not happen or even come close to happening, I just like imagining it.
Woohoo! Let me explain again that I'd been here nearly an hour by this stage, and there were a bunch of people who reckoned they'd been there at least 30 minutes before I got there. So we were pretty relieved that something was happening and we could go soon without worrying we were going to miss something.
Maybe you can see the steadying ropes?
I assume the guys who do this job think we're insane standing around watching this. The local news station was there too.
Don't we have some nice buildings here?
Wait - what's this in the super, movie-like, zoom-in? It's a small piece of wood; I'm guessing it's there to stop the metal bits, which are no longer under tension, from crushing each other. Wood features a lot with cranes.
And that's all, there are no more good pictures of this one. What happens next is that they spend a lot of time maneuvering it back and forwards slightly to line it up to land on the wood they've positioned. And then they lower it down and lift it back up again and someone moves the wood to a better position and repeat several times until it's finally down.
I'm starting a new "industrial" tag for stuff like this.
These first pics make our city look like it might be bigger, grittier and more generally city-like than it actually is. Note that it was actually about 11AM when I took these, not, say, dawn or dusk or any time that is supposed to be particularly dark.
This is the crane doing all the work. Handily it has written on it that it has a 72m main boom, so there you go. It also says it has 32m HYD tilt - but I don't know what that bit means...
So the boom of the stationary crane is being supported by the truck-crane, and this guy and his colleague appeared to be using a giant hammer to smack out a couple of bolts that held the boom to the vertical section. That's right, the whole thing seemed to have been held together with only two (giant) bolts, but I may have missed something as later photos show there may have been another two bolts at the top, making four. They had already removed some pulley cables at this point.
And there - he's done it. The boom is now only supported by the other crane and this guy's steadying arm. Actually, there are big ropes hanging from each end of the boom that guys on the ground will use to stop it swinging round and ending up, amusingly but inconveniently, resting on top of the buildings on either side of the street, straddling the street. Let me make clearer that that did not happen or even come close to happening, I just like imagining it.
Woohoo! Let me explain again that I'd been here nearly an hour by this stage, and there were a bunch of people who reckoned they'd been there at least 30 minutes before I got there. So we were pretty relieved that something was happening and we could go soon without worrying we were going to miss something.
Maybe you can see the steadying ropes?
I assume the guys who do this job think we're insane standing around watching this. The local news station was there too.
Don't we have some nice buildings here?
Wait - what's this in the super, movie-like, zoom-in? It's a small piece of wood; I'm guessing it's there to stop the metal bits, which are no longer under tension, from crushing each other. Wood features a lot with cranes.
And that's all, there are no more good pictures of this one. What happens next is that they spend a lot of time maneuvering it back and forwards slightly to line it up to land on the wood they've positioned. And then they lower it down and lift it back up again and someone moves the wood to a better position and repeat several times until it's finally down.
I'm starting a new "industrial" tag for stuff like this.
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