A Background On P&H Cranes
The history of the p&h crane is colourful and goes all the way back to 1884. Alonzo Pawling and Henry Harnischfeger, the original founders of the p&h crane, embarked on a business venture in old Milwaukee on December 1, 1884 when they set up the Pawling & Harnischfeger Machine & Pattern Shop. However, it wasn't until 1887 when the young pair met up with Edward P. Allis, that the P&H crane legacy was set in motion.
A.J. Shaw, an employee of Allis, oversaw the rebuilding of a rope-driven overhead travelling bridge crane in the Allis plant. The contraption worked, but it was overly complicated. Shaw had a better crane concept in mind. Pawling and Harnischfeger were called in to replace the complex rope-driven mechanisms with three electric motor-driven functions - bridge drive, trolley drive and hoist drive – and the first p&h crane was born.
110 years later, the industry giant P&H filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. Later renamed Morris Material Handling but still using the P&H trade name, they again went bankrupt. Morris Material Handling still offers a new pre-engineered product line of standard p&h crane parts, under the new umbrella of the world's largest crane company. However, a slightly tarnished legacy has done little to dull the industry wide conviction that p&h cranes are durable and reliable. Today, the P&H trademark can be found on a wide range of equipment including the original overhead crane and hoist line, mining excavators, drills and drag lines as well as construction cranes. Although the manufacturers of P&H equipment are now scattered across the U.S. each company carries its proud history with it.
A list of p&h overhead cranes include: Industrial Cranes, Process & Speciality Cranes,Portal Cranes, Nuclear Cranes, Tower Cranes, Light-duty Cranes. Care and maintenance of cranes is often a costly endeavour and investing in genuine p&h crane parts for replacements may be more expensive, however the brand means reliability and long-term dependability. An alternative to purchasing new parts straight away in these economically strained times is to modernize your existing equipment (through company's like Morris Material Handling). Modernizing your crane can be an economic way to restore your fatigued equipment to peak performance. But whatever route is chosen, maintenace should be vigilantly monitored because when cranes fail to meet the safety requirements, productivity suffers, utilisation decreases and you lose money – so one outweighs the other.
As with all other heavy construction equipment, safety of the operators should be of paramount importance and in order to ensure the machines are handled correctly, the correct p&h crane manuals should be checked and updated regularly. In the same vein of safety, all p&h crane operators should be well-trained and made aware of each cranes load chart. A load chart is a chart usually found on the arm of a crane. It shows how much the machine is rated to lift at specific points of the lift under ideal conditions. In equipment with telescopic booms; the weights that it can lift varies ( the further you have to extend; the less weight it can bear), as well as turning radius under load also varies.
