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Cranes are flying, and other Russian oddities

2K views 6 replies 5 participants last post by  HeliconSteamer 
#1 ·
During our cruise of the Baltic, Scandinavia and Great Britain, our cruise ship, Holland America's brand-new Eurodam, overnighted in St Petersburg, where after touring the Hermitage (one of the world's greatest art museums) we amused ourselves by watching Russian dockworkers move huge stacks of humongous steel plates from one pile to another, before finally selecting a few that were loaded aboard a rickety freighter by one of these cranes.

Now I've seen numerous Western-world cranes that look nothing like this one, which seems to have an inordinate number of bellcranks, pull rods and such. Perhaps one of our comrades on MLS could 'splain why this Zil 117 (I just made that up) is better than its German- or Finnish-made counterparts. :confused:
 
#3 ·
Ah, yes.
The counterweighted, cantilevered, adjustable fulcrum Murmansk multi-purpose crane.
Did you notice there are three of them in the photo?

That's so they have a better certainty that ONE will work, or that the other two can provide spare parts for the first.
The "yellow" one is probably the "demo" crane for visiting cruise ships, the "orange" onse are backup or for parts.

Whatreya, new?
 
#4 ·
TOC, I figured you'd weigh in on the subject. Anyway, they've got lots of these cranes all over their many docks, not just these three demos. Not to sound too jingoistic, but some of the folks we met were great--especially our little Hermitage tour guide, a local from St Pete (no, not the Florida one) who really knew her art and gave us a great, albeit whirlwind tour of the museum, which was once the Winter (Summer?) Palace in Czarist times. But the guys on the docks...

See, they have these huge forklift trucks that look like they could lift 20 tons, and they use them to pick up about three of these giagantic steel plates which gotta weigh about that, and then deposit them on these rolling skid-like devices, which are then towed (dragged?)over to the loading area, which is about 100 feet away. Then the crane loads them aboard said ship, way down in the hold. Someone suggested they are ballast, but I dunno. Anyway, these guys spent a lot of time sorting these plates, which are marked according to size and thickness. Meanwhile, a smaller forklift kind of skulked around with nothing to do, until it was driven behind one of the piles. I thought maybe the guy was cooping, until I noticed that the immigration building seemed to have an employee lounge, so maybe he was on break.

On Sunday, when the port appeared to be idled, I very officious, blond-haired boss lady with a hardhat and clipboard, was checking the stacks and speaking with a couple of the male dockworkers. And, no, she was not wearing combat boots and a brown uniform. Actually, she looked more like a tourist who had wandered onto the docks.

That idea about using one of these cranes as a thirrl ride isn't so far fetched. In Stockholm, there's a waterfront amusement park, where two of these cranes have been turned into what appears to be huge lawn ornaments (we didn't go into the park to check).

Ain't life fascinating?

BTW, I'm still waiting to hear how these things work. There's gotta be some reason they have all those parts.
 
#5 ·
Well...

Looking at it from the point of view of; "The Triangle of Forces" -it's shape makes perfect sense.

The two beams, the lower one is under compressive forces and the top one is under tensile forces. As the nose of the crane moves outwards the top beam then pulls on the offset counterweight and raises it -thus keeping the whole thing in balance. Pushing the lower beam away from the tower moves the end of the crane towards the ship. The only real power requirement would be in lifting the cargo on and off the ship.

A very neat piece of design -I like it!!!

regards

ralph
 
#7 ·
Those appear to be some sort of rail mounted or stationary general purpose harbor cranes. All of the structural mishmash looks to me to be the means by which the boom lifting radius is altered and thus the load distance. These are, well, a bit archaic. Modern harbor cranes that do the same job typically have a very large hydraulic ram to alter the angle of the boom. If you look to the left of the cables on the left hand crane, you will see a lattice like boom rising beyond the ridge. That looks like the boom section of a more modern counterpart.
 
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