Watch Me Entertain Myself!

Sacha Guitry once said, "You can pretend to be serious, but you can't pretend to be witty." Oh yes, I'm the great pretender.
(pilot episode: 20 January 2004)

Friday, May 16, 2008

Inquiring Minds Wanna Know

I see cranes like this on top of buildings under construction every day. And as the buildings go up, so do these cranes. For the longest time I’ve been wondering: So how do they raise the crane as the building rises? Do those cranes have hydraulics? Do they use another crane to raise them while they add more height? Or do the workers hurriedly dismantle and reassemble them while everyone’s asleep? I’ve asked officemates, friends, even acquaintances, and so far no one knows.

Is any there any engineer here who can answer this inquiry?

8 comments:

odin hood said...

im not an engineer... but i think they dismantle and then reassemble the crane with the help of a smaller crane.

Anonymous said...

I think the crane climbs up through hyrdaulics, but only high enough to make room under it for the workers to assemble another block or level for it to rest on.

Anonymous said...

Got something from the net (though it might sound gibberish to you). To put it simply, the crew unscrews (errrr) the upper part, hydraulics pushes this part upwards, another crane attaches a steel lattice in the gap to "grow" the shaft and reattaches the upper part. The shaft is supported by the building and grows with it. Once the building is finished, the tower crane is dismantled by another crane.

Bragging rights slightly out of topic: I once operated an overhead crane inside a copper smelting plant.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/tower-crane4.htm

joelmcvie said...

@SKY: Thank you, thank you! Oh wow, oo nga naman. It does make sense now. And thanks to the link, there are pictures to make things clearer.

Any interesting story to your overhead crane experience?

Anonymous said...

Ooh I sense a dash of sarcasm there but really, no excitement. Making out would be impossible given the sulphurous fumes underneath, unless autoerotic asphyxiation is my thing which unfortunately, is not.

I don't know why I made a segue to making out in the first place.

joelmcvie said...

@SKY: "Sarcasm"? Huh?! WTF?

WikiPika said...

wow... learned something new today

Anonymous said...

i thought they use huge helicopters!

on a more serious note, i read somewhere that in dubai, about 60% of the world's cranes are busy there right now.