Self-building crane reaches Portland

Daily Journal of Commerce (Portland, OR), Feb 19, 2008 by Libby Tucker

Portland's building boom may have slowed, but tower cranes still clutter the skyline. And one crane, in particular, stands out from the crowd.

Tucked in behind bSide 6, a seven-story office building under construction at East Burnside Street and Southeast Sixth Avenue, a Potain self-erecting tower crane stands 100 feet high in an area not much bigger than a walk-in closet.

Portland equipment rental company Coast Crane Co. recently imported the crane from France. And Gray Purcell is the first contractor to rent it.

"It's new to this market, but it's big in Seattle and Northern California," said Brian Gurnett, rental manager for Coast Crane.

The relatively small cranes are "like light posts" in Europe, where they dominate the home building scene, Peter Telkins, a training director at Morrow Equipment Co. in Salem, said. Morrow for decades has rented the German version, Liebherr Cranes' self- erecting tower, to builders, he said.

But they're just starting to catch on among builders in the U.S, which are more apt to use a hydraulic crane for the same type of job, he said. On specialized jobs the self-erecting cranes offer some advantages over hydraulic cranes, which can't reach as far.

"The booms are flat so they reach horizontally further," Larry Sitz, president of Emerick Construction Co., said. "If you need a broad horizontal reach all around the crane location and not a lot of load then the (self-erecting cranes) can work really well. If you have a heavy load and not a number of picks then a hydraulic is probably your best choice."

Setup and tear down of the Euro-cranes is also fast and cheap compared to traditional tower cranes, Joe McCarthy, a tower crane superintendent for Campbell Crane & Rigging Service in Portland, said. Campbell Crane just bought a Liebherr mobile crane to use in its equipment yard, but the company doesn't plan to rent it.

Builders can pay upwards of $30,000 for a crew of ironworkers to spend an entire weekend assembling the big towers, using a smaller erector crane to move and stack the massive metal pieces, Sitz said.

Gray Purcell had the Potain crane up within a day, said Tom Cain, a superintendent on the Burnside project. The crane built itself, with the central tower emerging like a spy-glass toward the sky as the boom arm, pulled along by cables and an electric motor, unfolded like a blade from an army knife.

Gray Purcell's crane operators run it from a hand-held remote controller on the ground or from the air in a cab that climbs the tower like an elevator.

"For me, it (feels) way safer than any other crane," Mike Shepherd, an operator with Gray Purcell, said. "I typically don't like getting up in the cab."

Still in the early stages of the project, Shepherd and his rigging partner work side-by-side picking up loads of rubble from the site and dumping them in roadside bins. As the crew adds stories, Shepherd will start working from the cab with a view over the concrete building, while his partner radios instructions from the ground.

"I have to fly a 9,000-pound HVAC system up eight stories," Shepherd said. "So I'm going to have to get up there, eventually."