Where a mobile crane could not stand: a PM 100SP and PM 150SP build a Ferris wheel to the millimetre
Access routes too narrow and a working area too small ruled out a conventional mobile crane, so Italian rental house Top Noleggio assembled a Ferris wheel with a pair of Tadano PM Series knuckle boom cranes working in tandem.
A site that ruled out the obvious answer
The job was to lift and position the structural components of a Ferris wheel. The constraint was not weight but geometry: restricted operating space and tight access meant a traditional mobile crane could not be set up in a position from which it could reach the work. Top Noleggio, an Italian rental company running a fleet of more than 500 units, went instead to two truck-mounted knuckle boom cranes from its lifting division — a Tadano PM 100SP and a PM 150SP.
“The main difficulty was the restricted jobsite. Access was tight and the overall setup did not allow us to operate with a traditional crane solution.”
— Top Noleggio operations team
Two machines instead of one
Working the two cranes together let the crew cover the whole assembly sequence from positions the site could actually accommodate. According to the team, a single machine would not have been able to operate efficiently under those conditions. Outreach and tip capacity were the two characteristics that made the pairing workable: a knuckle boom crane earns its place on jobs like this by putting capacity a long way from a short chassis, and by folding away into a footprint that a mobile crane cannot match.
Precision came from the remote
The critical phase was aligning anchor pins and structural members, work measured in millimetres rather than centimetres. Radio remote control was decisive here: it let the operators stand next to the structure and watch each movement at close range instead of judging it from a seat on the vehicle.
“The movements had to be extremely precise — almost millimetric — to ensure proper alignment of all structural components. The radio remote control was a key tool in achieving this level of accuracy.”
— Top Noleggio crane operators
The wheel was assembled and commissioned on schedule, with no reported issues during the lifting operations. For the rental company, the exercise settled the question of what to reach for next time a site refuses to accommodate a mobile crane.
Source: Tadano — Photos: Tadano