Went from a 50 ton to a 100 ton mobile crane last spring and the difference was wild

I spent 6 years on a 50 ton Grove running small jobs around Atlanta. Last March I got certified for a 100 ton Liebherr and hopped on a high rise project in Buckhead. The controls feel heavier and the cribbing setup takes way longer, but man the lift capacity changes everything. I had to relearn how to swing because the inertia is totally different. Has anyone else made a big jump in crane size and had to adjust your groove?

2 comments

2 Comments

oscarh161mo ago

Man I feel this so hard. I went from a 55 ton Link-Belt to a 130 ton Tadano a couple years back and the first week I about put a load through a wall cause I forgot how much more momentum the bigger machine has. The swing inertia thing got me too - it's like driving a sedan then hopping into a dump truck, everything takes that extra second to stop.

ward.mason1mo ago

Used to be one of those guys who said "a crane is a crane, you just run it." Boy was I wrong. @oscarh16 nailed it with that sedan to dump truck comparison, it's dead on. The 50 ton let me get away with sloppy habits like relying on quick corrections instead of planning every move. That 100 ton machine punished me hard for that lazy thinking, almost put a steel beam through a glass storefront my second week. What really got me was how different the load charts feel - that 50 ton gave me so much more room for error on pick radius and outrigger setup. Now I find myself running the same sequence calculations three times over before I even touch the controls.