Shuttlelift Provides Two Double-Beam Mobile Gantry Cranes

Shuttlelift has announced that Air Products has taken delivery of two Shuttlelift DB 70 double-beam mobile gantry cranes for its facilities in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and Palmetto, Florida. The first crane arrived in Pennsylvania in June, while the second arrived in Florida in July.

Founded in 1940, Air Products supplies customers in a variety of industries—from food/beverage, health and personal care to energy, transportation and semiconductors—with atmospheric gases, process and specialty gases, performance materials, equipment and services. The Shuttlelift mobile gantry cranes will be responsible for putting products on railcars or trucks and moving parts on site, both indoors and outdoors.

Due to Air Products’ need for increased capacity at its Pennsylvania facility, the company decided to replace its nearly 50-year-old, 60-ton crane with a Shuttlelift DB 70. But there was a twist: The buildings were old, with short, narrow doorways. To accommodate a standard 70-ton mobile gantry crane, Air Products would have to make its doorways bigger—an endeavor that could cost upward of $40,000. So the company approached Shuttlelift to see if its engineers could design a DB 70 that would be able to maneuver through the existing doorways.

A typical Shuttlelift DB 70 crane has a ground-to-hook height of 30 feet and an inside clear width of approximately 40 feet. The new crane would have to fit within a 20-by-20 space.

“It needed to be short and stout,” said Dan Reinholtz, Shuttlelift’s sales manager. “We knew this was going to be a unique challenge for our engineers, because the crane would have to fit the doorways and be able to lift the product.”

There was a second unique challenge for Shuttlelift’s engineering team. The Air Products’ facilities have equipment tracks in the floor; when the crane travels through these areas, it can’t hit the track. The company didn’t want to undertake the monumental task of moving all the tracks, so the engineers needed to find another way to solve the problem.

“We took our normal wheel frames and put a special cut in them to give us 20 inches of clearance off the ground,” Reinholtz said. “That was a big deal to the customer, and that’s just another example of the specialty work we can do—the value-added that we can bring to the table.”

Learn more about Air Products and Shuttlelift.