By: Kelly Holdaway On: June 22, 2012 In: Blog Comments: 0

Proving that sometimes two cranes are better than one, a lifting job at London’s Olympia Exhibition Centre required two Unic mini spider cranes to team up and install heavy steel beams for a new floor with their combined strength.

A pair of 3 tonne capacity Unic URW-506 mini cranes was hired to help out on the West Kensington venue’s redevelopment project. The Olympia Exhibition Centre was built in 1886 and is celebrating its 125 year anniversary this year.

The two compact spider cranes were lifted up onto a first floor level landing deck and moved through a double doorway to where the steelwork needed to be installed on this restricted access site.

With the cranes in position alongside each other, they could work in tandem to lift the 15 metre long steel beams, which weighed 4 tonnes each, up to a 5.5 metre height. The working area limitation feature of the URW-506 model meant that the cranes could work safely in synchronisation.

This isn’t the only time that a double act or trio of compact cranes have been used to take on a challenging lift – three Unic URW-376 mini cranes were used to construct a steel dome structure for a shopping centre’s Santa’s Grotto, three spider cranes installed an amusement ride in an Icelandic shopping mall and a Unic URW-095 and a Galizia G70 pick and carry crane helped get machinery through a tight spot at Scalby Mills wastewater treatment plant.

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