Contractors World UK & Ireland Vol 4 No 4

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Tight squeeze for
Grove crane in
London
City Lifting has completed its first job with
its new Grove GMK6300L, which arrived
in September 2014. The 300 t capacity all-
terrain crane carefully manoeuvred into a
tight, downtown job site in London, to
perform a series of lifts that few other
cranes could have completed without
rigging a fly jib.
The job was at Great Ormond Street
Hospital, where five air handling units
had to be installed on the roof of a nine-
story building. Each unit weighed up to
4 t and was lifted at a radius of up to 54
m – a relatively simple task.
However, the job site’s central Lon-
don location meant there was no space to rig a fly
jib, so all lifts had to be completed using only the
crane’s main boom.
To add to the complications, the team arrived
on site to discover a large hole had been dug in the
small access road directly outside the courtyard.
Trevor Jepson, owner of City Lifting said:
“Cranes and holes do not mix but the
GMK6300L has a relatively small footprint
and all-wheel steering, which allowed us
to manoeuvre the crane into the smallest
of spaces with the narrowest of margins.
It then completed all of the lifts in a single
day.“
•
MV Kelly Put
Trust in Hitachi
Excavators
Contractor, MV Kelly, will take delivery of more than
130 new Hitachi mini and medium excavators in
2014 in response to rising demand from the house
building sector
The company is investing more than £8 million
in a wide range of mini and medium Zaxis models –
ranging from the ZX29U-3 to the ZX250LC-5 – that
will increase the total size of its Hitachi fleet to 250
machines.
Almost 1,200 Hitachi excavators
Vince and John Kelly founded the civil engineering
and building company 19 years ago in Birmingham.
Since then, the company has purchased almost
1,200 excavators from HCMUK to carry out
residential groundworks, roads and sewers, and
associated infrastructure work for the UK’s major
housebuilders.
Approximately 75% of the new Zaxis machines
are direct replacements for the existing fleet that
has reached the end of MV Kelly’s strict three-year
replenishment cycle. The remaining 25% represent
the need to manage the increased workload and
will replace rented machines that were temporarily
drafted in to meet demand.
•
Page 8 Contractors World UK & Ireland Vol 4 No 4
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