South Australian mobile crane rental company Fleurieu Cranes takes first GMK6400 in the country

After a decade of continuous development, Fleurieu Cranes has signaled its intent to continue its recent growth with the purchase of the first Grove GMK6400 to arrive in Australia.

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The company had originally intended to purchase a luffing jib for its existing 350 t rated all-terrain crane, but after seeing the capabilities of the GMK6400, the company’s management decided to add the 400 t capacity Grove to its fleet along with a full luffing jib.

Philip Allen, who together with friends John Elliot and Nick Berry founded Fleurieu Cranes in 2005, explained why it made sense to make the additional investment.

“By adding another all-terrain crane in the 300 t to 400 t capacity class, we have increased our company’s resources. And because the luffing jib provides impressive reach and capacity on the GMK6400, we’re also now able to work in new markets,” he said. “As a result, we’re able to bid projects including wind farm maintenance and tower crane erection. We’re still getting significant work with our older 350 t crane, while the GMK6400 gives us new capabilities to pursue new markets.”

Fleurieu Cranes, which is based in the Adelaide suburb of Wingfield, purchased the GMK6400 through local Manitowoc dealer RMB Service Group. The crane joins three other Grove all-terrain cranes in the company’s fleet, plus a Manitowoc crawler crane. Two of the three Groves are 55 t capacity Grove GMK3055 units and the third is a recently-arrived 100 t capacity GMK4100. The crawler crane is an 80 t capacity Manitowoc 8500.

“Our operators really like driving the Grove cranes,” said Allen. “The support we get from the guys at RMB and Manitowoc is great. They are genuine and easy to deal with, and we like that approach because it’s how we’ve built our own success as a company over the past 10 years.”

The inaugural job for the GMK6400 was at the new Royal Adelaide Hospital, dismantling a tower crane that belongs to Select Plant. The hospital is the single largest infrastructure project ever undertaken in South Australia and is being built for the South Australian state government to be run by the SA Health Partnership Consortium.

For the lifts on the hospital job, the GMK6400 was configured with 44.79 m of main boom and 43 m of luffing jib. In all, the GMK6400 has 60 m of main boom and 79 m of jib available, for a maximum tip height of 136.6 m when working with full luffing jib. With 115 t of counterweight on board for the RAH job, the crane made all the required lifts comfortably, including the removal of the top section of the tower crane that needed the GMK6400 to work with its jib angle set to 80 degrees and at a radius of 46 m. The heaviest component on the tower crane weighed 13.7 t.

“The Royal Adelaide Hospital job was high profile and an ideal first job for our GMK6400 in many ways,” said Allen. “The crane had ample capacity and the configuration worked really well with regards to height restrictions from the local airport. We also had a crane technician flown in from Manitowoc Crane Care to assist us through the job.”

With a transport configuration that allows the crane to travel interstate, Fleurieu Cranes is expecting to deploy the GMK6400 wherever it’s needed.

“The GMK6400 can lift so much more than anything else in our fleet, I think we’ll get strong demand for it beyond our traditional borders,” Allen said. “That’s fine for us. We’re focused on growth as a company, not just in terms of work levels but in terms of equipment, knowledge, expertise and customer service, so investing in a crane like the GMK6400 fits our business goals.”