Our customer needed a lifting and handling solution that could be used for general maintenance of the helicopters within their aircraft hangar. The solution ideally needed to cover a large working area to allow the customer's operatives to work on any of the vehicles within the hangar.
To fulfil the customer’s requirements, the lifting solution would need to exceed the height of our most standard "off the shelf" mobile gantries as they wanted an actual lift height of 5.5 metres.
An ideal solution for this lifting height would be an overhead crane suspended from the building steelwork, however due to the large working area and freedom of movement that was needed, this was not economically viable.
Our technical sales team worked with the customer to specify a steel mobile gantry as opposed to a fixed crane system as this would allow full freedom of movement within the working area.
As the operators only ever needed to work on one vehicle at a time, the operator is able to move and position the gantry into the required area.
Following a design review and a formalised approval process with the customer, the gantry was specified with a 5 metre span between wheel centres and a height to underside of beam of 6 metres which gave the approximate lifting height of 5.5 metres that was requested.
The steel mobile gantry was supplied with a load capacity of 1600 kg and was fitted with 4 swivel castors.
The gantry was supplied with a dual-speed electric chain hoist with push travel trolley for traversing the hoist and loads left to right along the bridge beam manually.
Whilst we do offer "moveable under load" gantries within our range, this was not required on this occasion as once the gantry had been positioned over a vehicle, that was where it remained for the duration of the maintenance procedures.
"Having our own in-house technical design team, coupled with UK based manufacturing capabilities puts us in a very strong position to offer all of our existing and prospective customers technically correct lifting and handling solutions.
The steel mobile gantry on this project was specified and designed to suit the customer's individual requirements."