Pontáns Kranar’s Liebherr MK 88-4.1E transferred a protective roof between two six-storey blocks, working where a conventional mobile crane could not set up
Moving a temporary protective roof from one building to the next sounds simple. Between two six-storey residential blocks in Uppsala, Sweden, with trees and obstacles all around, it was not. The contractor, Pontáns Kranar, solved it with a Liebherr MK 88-4.1E mobile construction crane.
The job was to relocate nearly 20 aluminium canopy segments, up to 20 metres long and weighing around one tonne each, some still covered with fabric, from a newly renovated building to the block next door. About half of them went directly from roof to roof, with no intermediate storage. The rest were briefly set down on the lawn and picked up again once the crane had moved. By evening, the job was done.
“The direct transfer from one roof to the next saved us a lot of time,” said crane operator Henri Haandrikman.
Where a truck crane would not fit
The deciding factor came before the first lift. Trees and obstructions made it practically impossible to use a conventional mobile crane in the same capacity class. The MK 88-4.1E could be set up right next to the scaffolding of the renovated building and reach every segment from there.
“A conventional mobile crane would have had to be set up on the road some distance away and would have been correspondingly much larger,” Haandrikman explained.
The 15-degree trick
The required hook height was around 30 metres. With the jib luffed at 15 degrees, the crane placed the canopies precisely onto the prepared scaffolding of the target building. “This jib position reduces the reach only minimally, but gives me an extra ten metres of lifting height at the end of the jib,” said Haandrikman, who has worked with mobile and mobile construction cranes for more than 20 years. The height-adjustable cab gave him a direct view of the load and the fitters on the roof.
He also values the variable ballast system, the electric mode for quiet operation on site, and the extensive lighting, which extends working hours during the long Swedish winter.
A crane for tight sites
Beyond Uppsala, the crane works in Enköping and Stockholm, installing formwork, reinforcement and concrete buckets, supporting steel construction and erecting prefabricated timber houses. For a crane hire company working in dense residential areas, the combination of long reach, a small set-up footprint and quick repositioning is what wins jobs like this one.
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