While tower cranes are the most visually dominant pieces of equipment on a job site, they can also be one of the most important to the success and efficiency of a job. Maxim’s Vice President of Towers shares an overview of tower cranes and what makes them so versatile on a job site.
Usually, if there’s a tower crane on the sites that are suited for a tower crane, that is the main lifeline for the whole job site. It’s feeding materials to all the subcontractors out there.
You can’t miss it on the job site. It dominates the visual site itself.
My name’s Matt Hyden. I’m the Vice President of the Tower Crane Division at Maxim. I’ve been here 27 years.
Tower cranes are used on pretty much any type of job in the U.S. now. Historically, they were predominantly used on mid to high-rise jobs, especially in urban areas, but with the expansion of the range of tower cranes and lifting capacity in the more modern tower cranes, you could see a tower crane on a hydroelectric dam, building a bridge, building a high-rise, building a small multi-family apartment complex.
Really, there is no limit to what you can do with a tower crane.
Lifting capacity for a tower crane can range from as low as two tons maximum up to over 100 tons.
Our tower crane fleet currently consists of over 300 units. Majority of them are hammerhead cranes, in the 3 to 400 ton-meter range, which is typically the most popular in North America.
The easiest way to know if you need a tower crane is to contact a sales rep. and let them figure it out for you. Some jobs are going to be more suited to a tower crane versus a crawler, but that’s really unique to each site.
The support equipment you’d need for a tower crane job ranges from just the over-the-road trucks to haul the loads in and out, to any number of assist cranes, mobile cranes, to erect and dismantle it.
I think the most common surprises for customers when renting tower cranes is the amount of planning that goes into it ahead of time, whether it’s coordinating traffic control to get the crane in and out, it’s the engineering of the foundation, maybe engineering of the tie-backs.
It’s much more of a project than it is just a crane rental.
