Tower Crane Projects

Overview

Every crane was a one-off. Sites came with their own problems, whether that was a footprint too tight for a standard base, an awkward tie-in to the building, or foundations that had to sit over existing structures. I worked with the crane contractor to design something that fit the site and still gave them the lifting capacity their program needed.

The clearest example is the TX Tower deconstruction in Sydney, delivered by the Robert Bird Group team I was part of, with Marr Contracting as the crane contractor we worked with on the solution. The 233 metre transmission tower at Willoughby could not take lateral supports, so the crane had to reach over the top of it without a temporary structure propping it up.

We landed on a freestanding Favelle Favco M310D on 193 metres of tower, guyed at 81 metres into four rock anchors set 41 metres out from the centreline. That gave an underhook height of 248 metres. Swapping to a 150 tonne heavy lift luffer partway down meant the tower came off in whole layers rather than pieces, cutting the job from 90 planned lifts to 36. It finished three months early with no incidents.

Each design was signed off against the local code for wherever the crane was going, so I worked across different national standards rather than one house method. Getting that right at the start mattered. A design that ignores the local code is a design the site cannot build.

I also ran the contracts with the crane contractor clients, worth AUD $10,000 to $100,000 per job. That covered scoping the work, agreeing what we would deliver, and being their point of contact through to the crane going up.