Types Of Larger Lifting Gear, Jib & Mobile Gantry cranes

Lifting gear also referred to as lifting equipment is a broad expression given to items used for lifting, lowering and moving heavy loads and also often incorporates safety devices used in lifting or when working at high levels. Any lifting gear products must have test certification, declarations of conformity and should be issued with safety guidelines for use, a good business will provide all this as standard.

Whilst considering Lifting gear the very first thing that springs to mind in many people is a crane; cranes come in all manner of shapes and sizes, from the huge cranes you may observe in dockyards which are used for loading containers on ships, as well as for ship building and repair, you would also expect to see these large cranes on construction sites where they're frequently used to lift heavy materials up to the height required, to provide an example, roof trusses.

A kind of crane seen less often yet widely used is the mobile gantry crane or lifting gantry and sometimes called an A frame gantry. These cranes as the name suggests are moveable often via means of extremely heavy duty castors. As a result of their portability they are often utilised in smaller factories where a fixed crane just isn't appropriate, but also in many other industrial areas where heavy items need lifting in different areas. The lifting gantry consists of 2 "A" shape steel end frames which has a steel "H" shape cross beam to where a further lifting device like a trolley and hoist are fitted to lift the load.

A further kind of large lifting gear is a Jib crane, occasionally called a swing jib. Unlike the mobile lifting gantry the jib crane is fixed, either to a column, wall or floor, providing the foundations or structure to which they are mounted are stable and sufficient to take the strain of the crane and also the load to be lifted. The jib's arm which can be called a boom is welded to the vertical structure with either an under or over brace for extra strength; overbraced jib cranes offer extra space below the jib arm, and an underbraced crane provides more room over the arm so therefore great where headroom is restricted. The jib arm or boom may rotate up to 360 degrees depending on the type of jib crane, this rotation (also called slewing) in often done manually by hand but you can have power fitted to the arm making it motorised and therefore much easier to manage, though at extra cost. A jib crane is utilised to lift a load in one place and set it down in another, inside its slewing range, this makes them perfect in warehouses, car garages for removing engines etc. and at the dockside, they are also widespread within manufacturing industries.

With regard of the above information we can deduce that it is not always necessary to have a fixed structure for lifting and moving heavy and awkward loads,but supplementary devices like hoists or chain blocks might be necessary to do the actual lifting.