Weighty Solutions

Volvo FH is one of the trucks used to move the new McLeod Cranes counterweight trailers.

Game-Changing Weight Solution

By Dave McLeod

WHEN MCLEOD CRANES PURCHASED THEIR NEW 300-TONNE

Tadano crane, they looked to Hamilton-based truck, crane, and trailer giant TRT (Tidd Ross Todd Ltd) for a game-changing new solution to an on-going counterweight issue.

With a head office in Mt Maunganui, McLeod Cranes, is a family-owned and run business which according to Managing Director Scott McLeod, is a combination of three companies. McLeod Cranes Ltd, McLeod Hiab and McLeod Transport Ltd all doing different functions under the McLeod umbrella.

“McLeod Cranes is a crane hire company in Bay of Plenty Waikato, with branches in Taupo, Hamilton, and Tauranga. They run 30 cranes around the region mainly in taxi crane work. So, it’s a customer-focused, service-focused business providing cranes from 3.2t up to 350t,” McLeod says.

McLeod Hiab runs just over 40 Hiab’s in the Bay of Plenty Waikato region and again they are a very customer-focused business that’s heavily involved in the construction sector moving frames and trusses.

“Like any Hiab company, we’re delivering via truck and loading and unloading by a Hiab. Anything from small buildings to palletised products.”

Lastly, he says that McLeod Transport has an ATF facility in Tauranga. It’s a transitional facility that de-vans containers and either stores the product onsite or delivers it. So, McLeod reckons that it does a fair bit of trucking to and from the port.

“It also supports the other businesses through moving drilling rigs and managing the logistics of moving drilling rigs, geothermal, oil, and gas. And they transport ad-hoc products for different companies. So, on the trucking side you might be transporting concrete in the form of precast or transporting other building or construction materials.”

He says that McLeod Transport supports their Hiab company too, providing the ability to move bulk products out of Auckland or between the different branches before the Hiab company does the last mile.

“Where it’s obviously more efficient to use a quad-quad to move frames or trusses or bricks between branches.”

According to McLeod, the catalyst for their four new TRT

McLeod Cranes’ new Tadano Demag 300t long boom crane requires up 100t of counterweight.

counterweight trailers began when they decided to purchase a new 300-tonne class crane to join their established 350 model. They had identified that they should have a long boom offering, (this machine comes with an 80-metre boom) which was missing out of their taxi crane fleet.

“We could see that there was a market for a long boom option for our customers with their jobs around the region. And this new crane also gave us a bit of redundancy for the 350, to take some of the pressure off of it.’”

He says that having an additional 300t unit would allow them to service their clients more efficiently, ‘without having to shuffle the deck to get the job done’.

“And this particular machine has a lot of capacity upstairs, so it’s also an ideal machine for our wind farm work. We do a lot of maintenance on wind farms and with an 80m boom, that gives us the capacity to do a lot of those lifts,” McLeod says.

Crucial to the operation of a crane is the counterweight that sits on the back of the crane, opposing the force of the cargo the crane is lifting.

“The larger the crane the more counterweight needed, so this 300-tonne crane has got roughly 100-tonnes hanging off the back of it,” McLeod says.

He explains the new crane means that a lot of counterweight needs to be moved around with it. In fact, five truckloads of counterweight, and that means they need the most efficient, most productive way of getting that counterweight to site.

“In crane hire you want to get the weight and all the ancillary items to a site in the least amount of loads to obviously provide

the best service to your clients and to ensure that they are only paying for the service that’s needed. So that led us to looking as to how we would achieve that, and that led to a conversation with TRT.”

McLeod says that they were already in a conversation with TRT as they are also a Grove crane dealer.

“I ended up buying a Tadano crane from a different company and I thought ‘now I’ve got to go and talk to them about counterweight trailers and maybe that would be a difficult conversation’ but they were awesome, really great to deal with.

“They could understand the decisions I made and were more than happy to solve the problems I had of how to get the counterweights to site with the least amount of trucks.”

McLeod says that the new crane requires around 93.8 tonnes of counterweight and that historically that would have sent them down the path of hunting for a second-hand trailer or maybe two.

“In the past what we would do is basically target second hand trailers with a heavy 20 position at maybe $30-40,000 a piece and convert it into a counterweight trailer, which would sort of be its retirement job.

“We’d strip it back and either make a frame that would fit onto the heavy 20 position with twist locks and put the counterweight on that (that’s another ten grand), or if it was a Skele, we might do it differently, but either way we would strip it back and make it a counterweight trailer.”

He says that they would incur so much money every year ($6000$7000) maintaining that trailer on the road ‘because obviously it would have already had a hard life before it got to us.’

Overall, it’s not a cheap solution but had served alright in the past.

McLeod adds that the (old) solution was never going to work with this crane’s 24-tonne counterweight requirement without going for a quad-quad type set up, which brings its own issues.

“That’s a lot more difficult when you’re trying to back up the long trailer to the crane on a construction site. Whereas, if you can achieve that in a smaller form factor, with a good payload then that has a lot of advantages for a crane company. Hence why the TRT trailers are a game changer for us. TRT was able to come up with a design that is a new trailer at a price point, with this system [VersaLock] that is able to adapt to different payloads.”

McLeod recalls that when they were in early discussions TRT described the Innovative Load Restraint Mount System ‘VersaLock’ as “the ability to change the configuration of the trailer for the different counterweight configuration after the fact.

“So, you’ve bought the trailer, and rather than building a fixed configuration into it, it would be a system that ‘plugged-in’. So, we could then use it for not only these counterweights on this crane, but potentially other cranes long term. That’s quite an attractive option because it means that in the future (13-15 years) if we sell this crane, we could repurpose these trailers for whatever crane we replace it with.”

According to TRT, the patented VersaLock system is a bolt-on device which can be moved up and down the trailer, allowing the trailer load to be reconfigured in 50mm increments through a clever saw tooth design. This enables the operator to ensure the axle loadings are exactly right and also able to repurpose the trailer for other crane models.

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Delivering counter weights to a McLeod Cranes job at Meridian’s Te Apiti wind farm near Ashurst.

And the dedicated trailer itself has a low tare weight, so payloads up to 30t can be achieved while special load restraint mounts allow the trailer to be loaded then unloaded quickly and safely without the use of chains and dogs. Special mounting modules are fitted to the frame, ensuring weights are loaded in the same place each time, with the trailer weighing out legally, with platforms and steps fitted for safe loading and unloading.

McLeod reckons that these ‘dedicated counterweight trailers’ hit a sweet spot that’s a much safer method to use and a better long-term solution.

“In my mind they’ve put a lot of effort into designing a trailer that can obviously take 24 tonnes but without going overboard. Because there is so much that you don’t need on a counterweight trailer.”

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The TRT dedicated counterweight trailers are a time saver for McLeod Cranes.

He says that when you’re thinking about your trailer you have to think about where the counterweight will be on it relative to the capacity of the crane and you also have to think about roadability, making it road legal, and not overloading the trailer.

“So somebody at TRT had to take all these numbers and work out what would be the best configuration of the trailer for the best outcome. So that when you back up and reach out to get your counterweight, you’ve got enough capacity to lift it,” McLeod says.

McLeod has gone for four trailers and although they have a consistency of set up, all come with three axles and for three of them the VersaLock system, they do have different roles.

“For all of the trailers we had a requirement that whatever we do we want to do it from the ground. The first trailer is a support trailer, so that one is slightly different from the other ones because it’s also carrying steel pads to go under outriggers, lifting equipment and the forklift to move that gear around on site so they can set up.”

Trailer two is carrying the hefty 24.4-tonne counterweight while trailer three is only carrying 12 or 14 tonnes so able to carry an auxiliary winch, fly jib, other hooks etc.

McLeod says that it’s the added versatility of the trailers that holds great appeal too.

“If we have a fleet of these VersaLock trailers, if trailer 2 had a breakdown we could potentially reconfigure trailer 6 to be trailer 2 and still be able to do the same job for our customers. And being such that we are carrying such big weights, whatever that configuration would be, the trailers are strong but light.

“We’ve found one trailer that can serve multiple cranes and is size appropriate for the crane industry.”

McLeod has bought four trailers so far but will undoubtedly not stop there.

“I would say that now we see how it works and how clever it is, we will start to look at our other cranes and go down that path with them. And as we retire the old trailers, we’ll start replacing them with this style of trailer. Because the guys can do everything from the ground, which makes it a hell of a lot safer for them and in doing so we’re ending up with a consistent trailer at the right price point, rather than going to a second-hand trailer with the frames.”

McLeod says that the biggest saving is what the client doesn’t see, the fact that they’re not loading the counterweights with a crane in the yard because they’re already loaded on a dedicated counterweight truck.

“So going down this path of having dedicated counterweight trucks that are specifically designed to go to site saves considerable time for McLeod Cranes.”

He says that you’d need a 60-tonner sitting in the yard loading counterweights in the past, so to put a dollar value on that is a little bit hard because it changes between jobs. But it’s substantial.

“And then on the other side, it’s quicker to get the counterweights off and on because the trailer is designed for it. So, you’re in and out from the customer’s site 10-15 mins quicker. So, it’s a pretty cool system and you’re doing it safer.”

McLeod is evidently impressed with the TRT solution but does have one complaint, however.

“The trailers themselves have been so busy that they haven’t had a chance to get them in to be sign written,” he says. T&D

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