The first job was swapping out a series of transformers from the 15th floor of a high-rise.

A fall weekend in downtown Columbus, Ohio, looked like an all-terrain crane takeover as two Liebherr LTM 1450 ATs were hard at work on two separate projects on the same street. Both cranes were provided by ALL Crane Rental Corp., a member of the ALL Family of Companies.

The first job was swapping out a series of transformers from the 15th floor of a high-rise. The second was disassembling a tower crane that had been on a job site for 18 months.

For the transformer job, ALL's customer was Atlas Industrial Contractors.

"We were replacing transformers that had been in place for decades," said Hunter Edwards, project manager of Atlas.

Work crews actually removed some precast concrete sections to open a hole in the exterior wall of the building so the crane could access the transformers from the building's service floor. Once work was completed, the wall was sealed up.

The Liebherr LTM 1450 was configured with 120 ft. of main boom, 180 ft. of luffer and 295,400 lbs. of counterweight. Each transformer weighed in at approximately 20,000 lbs. with dimensions of 7 ft. high, 4 ft. wide and 6 ft. deep.

Replacement transformers had roughly the same dimensions and weighed 17,000 lbs. each.

The crane was set up on High Street, one of the busiest streets in downtown Columbus. "There's a saying in Columbus, ‘you never get High Street,' meaning the city will never authorize closing any lanes of traffic on that street," said Edwards.

In this instance, the city did authorize the closures, and the crane was taking up three-quarters of High Street. The work had to be completed in a single weekend. The Liebherr LTM 1450 was assembled on Friday night, the four old transformers were removed and four new ones were installed in a single Saturday, then the crane was disassembled and trucked away on Sunday.

Disassembling a tower crane

Meanwhile, at the intersection of High Street and Broad Street, ALL had a second Liebherr LTM 1450 AT set up to aid in the removal of a tower crane that had been in place for a year and a half for customer Urban Five Construction. The AT was configured with 138 ft. of luffer and 295,400 lbs. of counterweight. A smaller AT, a Liebherr LTM 1060, was used as an assist crane for the 1450 and helped load out the sections of the Potain 368 tower crane.

The second 1450 also was assembled Friday night and worked through the weekend to complete the tower crane removal. By Monday morning, High Street was back to bustling as normal, and downtown workers made their commutes unimpeded.

For more information, visit www.allcrane.com.

This story also appears on Crane Equipment Guide.

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