Pro Crane Services, an independent crane building company from Johannesburg, has provided seven cranes to steel specialist VR Steel Ltd

VR offers, among other things, shovels for so called scraper excavators. These heavy machines are put to use in surface mining mostly in South Africa, the USA and Australia. On the company’s production site the shovels, “that are the size of a lorry,” are overhauled and also produced. With the help of cranes the VR Steel employees can move the oversize parts during production.

As partner of hoisting specialist SWF Krantechnik GmbH for the South African area, Pro Crane Services has designed seven cranes together with the Mannheim based company so far. They are all specially designed for the customer’s needs and each equipped with the heavy duty electric wire rope hoists NOVA. The components such as travelling motors, end carriages, electric control system, power supply etc were delivered by SWF, while Pro Crane Service took over the planning, the steelwork and the mounting.

The most recent crane was specially designed for the handling of the gigantic excavator shovels. A durable double girder crane system ensures an ultimate load of 80t for the 19.7m long crane bridge. Two double girder trolleys NOVA with 80t ultimate load each and a hoisting height of 10.4m provide for save purchase of the shovels. The two hoists are also used for moving the parts, for example, when working on the lower side of the excavator shovels.

Additionally, one of the two hoists is also equipped with an extra 10t NOVA hoisting motor for moving lighter parts into position.

Next to the standard frequency inverter control for stepless and, therefore, according to SWF, soft moving of the load for trolley and crane drive, VR Steel also ordered the electric hoist monitoring system NovaMaster. With its help the hoists are continually monitored and, for example, protected against overloads. The crane driver can read all the hoist’s relevant data such as current load on hook or remaining safe working period directly on the control switch on a LCD display.


Pro Crane Services has designed seven cranes together with the Mannheim based company so far 2 Turning of the shovel for welding works 4 Installation of the new double girder bridge crane equipped with electric wire rope hoist NOVA 1 Tandem use of the electric wire rope hoists during the production of the shovels 3 As partner of hoisting specialist SWF Krantechnik GmbH for the South African area, Pro Crane Services has designed seven cranes together with the Mannheim based company so far swf one Pro Crane Services, an independent crane building company from Johannesburg, has provided seven cranes to steel specialist VR Steel Ltd PCS