ABUS assists with award winning structure

5 single girder EOT cranes at a specialist steel fabricator

One might feel like the Lilliputians in Jonathan Swift's novel "Gulliver's Travels" when he approaches the modern art sculpture "Exposure" designed by British Artist Antony Gormly. This sculpture stands 25.6 m high, weighs 60 tonnes and is situated in Lelystad on the Zuiderzee coast east of Amsterdam, Netherlands. The company Had Fab Steel Fabricators (www.hadfab.co.uk), located in Tranent near Edinburgh and a specialist steel fabricator for the electrical supply industry, were commissioned to manufacture this sculpture, and was assisted in this ambitious project by ABUS Crane Systems Ltd. (www.abuscranes.co.uk) who supplied and installed five single girder overhead cranes to Had Fab. The structure of the sculpture is composed entirely of rolled steel angles and has recently not only won the under 150 tonnes section of the Annual TEKLA design competition, but also the TEKLA Global BIM contest, TEKLA being the software to calculate and design the sculpture.

To assist with the creation of ‘Exposure’ ABUS Crane Systems Ltd. were asked to supply one of the five single girder cranes with an outdoor specification including weather protection covers on the hoist, motors and panels and a height of lift of 30m, this crane was an ABUS ELK (welded box girder) type crane with a SWL of 5t and a span of 18.5m. The crane was installed onto a gantry with a rail height of 25m, the gantry itself is a very special construction and a feat of engineering in its own right which was designed and built by Had Fab Ltd themselves specifically for this project. The other 4 ABUS single girder cranes with a span of 14.5m and an SWL of 5t were installed in an adjacent building which had 2 bays, each bay with two cranes. In addition to the new overhead cranes ABUS also supplied radio control systems for all 5 new cranes and facilitated the extension of two existing outdoor gantries upon which run two existing ABUS outdoor cranes.