Trees, Trees, and More Trees

[John Griffin]

We had to pack up the gmk and go get the tms300 to finish the job. The pressure transducer for the boom shorted out and took down all the sensors on the can bus. This is why we keep the old crane as a back up. We ended up with a couple of nice oak logs we took to the sawmill.

 

[John Griffin]

Used the rt crane at our lot to unload those oak logs so we can take them to the mill on a rain day.

 

[John Griffin]

We had a bunch of storms roll through here a little while back. Spent 6 solid days craning trees off houses. Started tuesday morning and got wrapped up just in time sunday afternoon. Monday morning we had a snow and ice storm move in. We had snow and ice on the ground for a bit over a week.

I didnt get any pics of the crane setup for n this one as I was running the crane myself. Our normal crane operator was out after having surgery. One of my guys found the old septic tank under a dirt driveway with our f550. The house had been hooked up to city sewer 30 years ago. Part of this was they were supposed to pump out the old tank and fill it with gravel. Someone didnt fill it with gravel.

 

[John Griffin]

 

[John Griffin]

The last pic is of another oak tree that slammed into a house. It was the last one before the snowstorm. Packed the crane in at 4 and headed back to the lot.

 

[John Griffin]

Started snowing monday morning and didnt stop for a couple of days. Had to go rescue a friend of mine tha thg had trouble with his obs truck. Many years we dont see snow here. I think I remember two times in my life it has stayed around more than a week before this. I'm 40.

 

[John Griffin]

Got my new work truck by the scales. We plan to use this to haul a fuel tank for filling up the cranes, counterweights, and extra cribbing. Plenty of capacity for hauling 8800 lbs of counterweights. It's a 25999 gvwr truck. Itll be handy for hauling crew back on multi day jobs.

 

[John Griffin]

It didnt take long for us to put it to work. I have apparently been slacking on posting pictures.



All loaded up with 25500 lbs of counterweights. It really wouldnt hurt my feelings to have more at times. We had to really stretch out the crane to pick the broken half of this cherry tree. It had split and was hung in several small hickory trees. If not for them, it would have been on the neighbors house. This ended up being a 4400 lb pick. We had 5800 lbs net lift capacity when we first started lifting it. We were able to boom up as it came up and closer to the crane but I dont like getting that close to the limit. We dont work beyond a calculated 60 percent of net normally.

 

[crane operator]

Sorry you've been having troubles with your GMK. Its rough to spend that kind of money, and still end up in your old rig.

 

[John Griffin]

Sorry you've been having troubles with your GMK. Its rough to spend that kind of money, and still end up in your old rig.

Yeah I'm not happy about it. The gmk ended up down for almost 3 months over the sensor. The sensor was replaced by grove about a year ago. Our local grove dealer has some problems. It took them a month to dispatch a tech to look at my broken down crane.

 

[crane operator]

Our 90 ton link belt has lost its boom/ cylinder location a few times. The operator that runs it the most, has been in it each time. After the third time, I was like "why is it doing this"?

Turns out, each time he had shut the crane off with the boom extended, for lunch/ break/ discussion, it sometimes looses the location of the tele cylinder, and then you have to do a complicated "reboot" to let the computer locate the telecylinder.

I just told him to not shut the crane off with the boom out, and it hasn't happened again. Don't want to suck boom in for lunch- let it run, I would rather burn the fuel than have to go through the whole length reset.