[extralego]

Thanks for sharing. This is helpful info.

If a tower crane did not need to be transported, how much would the design change? I’m guessing not much, but curious.

I was imagining there would be no counterweight but just opposing loads, then I realized that might be a safety hazard. But, I really don’t know about these things.

I just love the elegance of this solution and immediately obsessed. I think it just ruined my productivity for the day.

[jaclaz]

A normal tower crane must:

1) be easily transportable, which among other things means that the lighter it is the better it is AND that in most countries the girdles cannot exceed 2.40 meters in width

2) most would be self-erecting (there are two kinds of self erecting cranes, the one in [1] is a kind limeted to smaller/shorter/less load models and it is properly "self-erecting") but any tower crane is normally assembled on the ground (using a crane truck) up to a given size/height, usually up to 30-40 m height at the most, for taller cranes, the arm and the base is assembled on the ground, but later the crane is assembled using a self-erecting "cage" or "climber" see [2], this again calls for "the lighter, the better", and implies besides the truss design the use of high tensile strength steel (which as said before is very elastic, meaning that the operation of the cranes is not as easy as you may think, particularly when high loads are involved, it is not uncommon that the point of the arm has several cms oscillation when the load is lifted/released)

3)transport/assembly/erection/disassembly is done relatively often it is rare that a tower crane remains in the same place more than a few months, at the most a couple of years, so the points above are very relevant.

A "static" crane would resemble more than anything else a port crane, more or less like this one:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Port_crane_of_Mammoe...

[1] video of a self erecting crane:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqSFxZV6OvY

[2] video/animation of a climber crane assembly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB91Sm-kGJ8

[blattimwind]

> that might be a safety hazard.

You can get around that, and they probably have to anyway, by just having a perimeter around the system that must be cleared by humans before the system can go active.