Can we talk about how tight the turning radius is on that new job site in Austin?

I was on a site near South Congress last Thursday and the crane pad was barely 40 feet wide. The operator before me had to do a 3-point turn just to get the boom over the steel frame. Got me thinking, some of these architects don't leave enough room for us to work safely. Has anyone else run into a site where the layout felt like it was designed by someone who never ran a crane?

2 comments

2 Comments

christopher_craig11d ago

Ever seen a crane pad barely bigger than the truck itself?

joseph5298d ago

Did the architect measure that pad with a yardstick from their desk chair? I swear some of these sites feel like they were laid out by someone whose only experience with a crane was watching one on TV. I hit a spot near downtown last month where the turning radius was so bad I had to back the boom up and go forward again in a spot where you'd normally just swing it around. The concrete pad looked fine on paper but in real life there was like 2 feet of clearance on each side of the tracks. It's like these guys think we drive forklifts or something, not a 200 ton machine that needs room to breathe.