Crane

Crane and its Background

While passing by the building in manufacturing you may have a chance to see a machine lowering, lifting, raising and moving objects from one place to another; this machine is called crane. Contrasted with the machines such as hoist and conveyors where the later tackle with the gigantic loads in an unremitting process and former machine is used to operate with the loads to move them vertically upward and downward, cranes are used to lift and move the objects horizontally and sideways. A crane is seen to be performing its function in a narrow street in the UK and near the buildings that are under processed where they are utilized from the very first day till to the last day when the building gets finished. The sizes of the cranes vary from the nature of applications, the loads it can combat also ranges from lbs to tons, then significantly the cranes are manual powered and electrical powered.

Who were the first to invent and use cranes and for what purpose? is the first question to propel into the minds when we want to draw the history of the cranes. The credit of invention goes to the ancient Greeks who perhaps used their invention to place heavy blocks in the construction of Greek’s gods temples. After the Greeks, Romans seem to be the second who used cranes to build their marvelous and mammoth buildings, the use of cranes by the Romans can be termed as the halcyon days of the cranes. The cranes used by the Greeks and the Romans were obviously of old technology, the earlier cranes had the construction of an elongated wooden beam called boom, this boom was connected to a rotating base, a rope was wound around a drum that was powered by a wheel or treadmill, the rope with its one end was attached to the top of the wooden beam or boom and with its other end a hook is affixed that helped lifting loads. Not until the invention of steam engines in the midst of the 19th century, cranes were manually powered, but now by this very day, the modern cranes are powered by steam engines, electric motors and hydraulic and internal combustion engines, so more advanced, efficient and accurate in their performance than before.

As the cranes are meant to lift bulk materials, so they need to have a strong structure; therefore the material with which cranes are manufactured need to be durable and hard enough to cope with the quantity of the weight they are carrying and moving along. Steel is the substance highly preferred by the manufacturers to construct cranes, the steel is not the ordinary steel rather the steel for making the cranes is carbon steel, because it has an additional mixture of carbon that improves the longevity of the metal, yet the amount of the standard carbon steel that is used in the manufacturing of cranes must not exceed from 0.05% to 0.015%; chromium, titanium, and niobium are added to strengthen the carbon steel. Tires of the cranes are manufactured with rubber either natural or synthetic.

The cranes in the future will have more advanced techniques than they have now, the operators who are operating this machine must need to take the full fledged account of the precautions require to drive the cranes, for in the unfriendly atmospheric conditions such as windy seasons, the working with cranes is no less than a risk.