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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you Should Know. The Tanka edition.
M you know, I had a terrible thought earlier that it might be fun to release this episode on cranes and then one of the bird cranes, and then we have another one coming up that I just you know, asked our friend Dave Ruse to get on that. Could we could also do you know that one is? Did you see that? I don't want to give it away. It's also a food in a cartoon. I don't We could do one on the food in the cartoon with the same title, and we should just start doing even more confusing titles.
Okay, I think that's a great idea.
So we got to do one on the bird cranes next.
Okay, so and we'll just title them the same thing.
Yeah, okay, how cranes work. How cranes work. Figure, people won't know what they're because that happens a lot anyway. Like when we did Nirvana, we actually put not the band right.
Right, That was the opposite of being purposely confusing.
Yeah, exactly.
Today in this episode a couple of minutes in now we'll finally reveal we're talking about the construction version of Cranes.
That's right.
Yeah, that's why I said the Tonka edition, which is probably a bit of a giveaway. Were you into Tonka?
I wasn't that into Tonka.
Okay.
I think I had a truck or something, but I wasn't. I was a sensitive boy. I wasn't banging trucks around and building things.
I was too.
I also feel like we've gone back in time because this feels like a very ten years ago thing for us.
Oh yeah, the article on the House of Work site was written by Marshall Brain himself. Oh but mister Ruse helps us out with this one.
Yeah, okay, was that the deal?
No, it wasn't. I actually didn't know that there was something. I was looking up some fact or whatever and that article came up and I was like, oh, oh okay, So yeah, no, that wasn't the deal. But I don't remember what made me want to do this.
I think it was just probably saw one. Huh.
I don't think so. I mean, I've seen plenty, but no, I really don't think that's what did it. I don't know where it came from, but I think it's just kind of like a lifelong fascination with it. Like I'm not like a crane aphile or anything like that. I can't tell you, like, you know, the names of the operators. I don't have like trading cards or anything. But I do find construction stuff pretty impressive from like a distance, you know what I mean.
Totally, Yeah, you see the people.
Yeah, when I see one of those things going, I always stop and take a look and just think, my lord, what have we come up with now?
Yeah, and we should say there's a ton of different cranes. So this is specifically tower cranes. And we didn't call the episode that just because apparently we're going to confuse everybody. No tower cranes would have given it away. But we're talking about a very specific kind of crane, and it is the construction crane, the kind you see on construction sites, especially these days if you're driving through toront know.
Yeah, apparently Dave dug up some stats on crane usage.
Who knew that existed?
And Toronto right now leads the way in North America with the most operating cranes. I guess they're building a lot there. Yeah, they've got one hundred and twenty one going. But one boy in the twenty tens he found that there were about one hundred thousand cranes operating around the world during that big you know, twenty tens construction boom.
Yeah, and I mean that's a really good proxy for how the global construction industry is doing, because I guess I think you essentially can't undertake any decent sized construction project without a tower crane of some sort on your site.
Yeah, if you want height, you're gonna need a crane.
Yeah, you want height, you want to very quickly and easily move like a pile of you know, steel girders or rebar like, Yeah, you can break down that bunch of rebar and have a bunch of guys just kind of card it from one side to the other, or you can save about twenty man hours and just lift it up and move it over with the crane. They're they're invaluable for a construction site.
They are.
And he also found this cool stat which is the largest one going right now from I don't know how to say that Kroll cranes that oh has a null set. It's Danish, so yeah, some some Danish pronunciation crue. But the K ten thousand, my friend, as you know and my friends out there listening, that can lift about one hundred SUVs five hundred and twenty eight thousand pounds, Yeah, and like one hundred SUVs. Yeah, not like escapes either, like normal sized SUVs.
At googleed like mid sized fall bo asuv bit.
Yeah, it makes sense. It's a lot of SUVs all at once that it could lift up. And that's as we'll see. It depends on where it's lifting from and all that. There's a lot of a lot of variables and factors, and all of that put together, combined with the danger and just the unique situation anybody who's operating a crane is in, makes it a really demanding, high
pressure job. I saw one crane operator basically liking it to eight hours of NonStop surgery essentially because of the attention to detail you have to have at all times. You have to anticipate what people on the ground are going to do based on the body movement. And you're working with your hands like you use two joysticks and it seems very simple, but you can make the crane do all sorts of interesting things with just those two joysticks.
And depending on how busy the construction site is, you might not stop moving those joysticks essentially the entire day.
Yeah, all sorts of things. How about a solfshoe. Sure, yeah, it's like a battle zone. Remember that game No Battles. I think we even talked about this. That's the one where you look through the arcade game where it was made out of like green what's it called when it's just lined out and not colored in like a vector like a yeah, sort of, and you had a left and right joystick like you were driving a tank around, okay, and looking and looking through an eyepiece.
Yes, I remember now. And then that made me talk about Sea Wolf. I think the Paris game basically yeah, all right.
Yeah, but you can move on from market, yeah, exactly.
It's kind of like that, but with real death involved potentially, right.
And this whole thing was the idea of a German construction engineer post World War two named Hans Liba, because Hans Liba had a lot of Germany and all of Germany had a lot of Germany to rebuild, especially in the city centers. Yeah, post World War two, and so he came up with this idea in nineteen forty nine of a mobile tower crane that you could you know,
take from place to place. What you would say now, it was probably what we would call a luffing crane of the UFFI and G which we'll talk about a little bit later on when we're detailing cranes. So not that you know the hugest, super tall ones, but it was nineteen forty nine. It was a good start.
Yeah, I mean, give liber a break, Like he's the one who essentially said, like, we need cranes, and we can do more with cranes, like there would not be skyscrapers without tower cranes. Sorry, face it. Yeah, and also we should probably give them their due. It goes all the way back to at the very least the sixth century BCE Greeks, who were the first ones to start
using cranes and construction projects. Yeah, so basically nothing happened for twenty six hundred years roughly until Hans Lieber came along.
These climbing cranes were going to detail came about in the nineteen sixties thanks to and these things are pretty remarkable. That's the really giant tall ones that you see that kind of build themselves and boy, just stick around everybody because it gets pretty hot. But they were came to his courtesy of a couple of Ozzie brothers Ted and Eric Favell, I guess in nineteen sixty two. And because they were Australian, of course, they called them kangaroo jumping cranes.
Like for real, I'll bet everyone but the Australians called it that.
Maybe so, but they helped to erect the Twin Towers in New York City.
Yeah, apparently so did the K ten thousand from what I understand.
Oh, so that one's been around. Huh.
Yeah. I think a lot of cranes helped build the Twin Towers. But you couldn't have built the Twin Towers without climbing cranes. And like you said, man, well, if you understand how the climbing cranes work, they're just it's amazing. But it also answers a really great question, like how did those little cranes get all the way on top of a skyscraper? Just wait, just you wait, the eight year old kid in all.
But we're going to be mainly talking about what's known as a hammerhead tower crane, and that is when you look up in the sky and you see a giant, giant tall tea, essentially with a very long side of that tea horizontal tea and a shorter side coming out the other side of the tea.
It's like an inexpertly written tea.
It looks like one of my daughter's teas.
Okay, well, I would call her inexpert at this point, she's just starting out.
Yeah, her penmanship is terrible. We're working on it.
Just teach her how to cut letters out of magazines.
We were, yeah, I should.
We were working on her math last night and she was having me check her actual math work and I said, your.
Math is all perfect.
I said, I'd like to see work on just sort of the neatness in how you display your answers. She was like, what it's like, Well, you know, I can look at this. I was kind of pointing things out in a very Larry David kind of way, so I'm not sure if it's sunk in.
We'll see.
Did she get the curb references?
Oh, she totally did. Jeff Garland's your favorite.
So all right, well, let's talk about the components of a crane, because it's actually extraordinarily simple. It's extraordinarily it's just as it's just as easy as that. They're really simple machines, but they're intricate in how precise they need to be.
Yeah, so we gotta start. Let's go bottom up. You want to go bottom up?
Okay, yeah, that seems all right.
All right, Well, we got to start with a foundation because obviously, if something is this tall and they're you know, lifting things like one hundred SUVs, basically you're going to have to have a heck of a foundation and that's where you're going to start. These things are actually sunk into a concrete pad. The concrete pad for the largest ones weighs about four hundred thousand pounds, and it is it's not like they do this in blocks and sections.
It's one big long con crete pour through rebar to just make that thing as solid as it was built into the actual bedrock of the earth.
Yeah. They essentially are creating their own bedrock to pour around. The foundation of the mast is what it's called. That part of the crane that rises upward from the ground. That's called the tower or the mast, and the bottom of the mast is cemented into an enormous multi hundred thousand pounds block of concrete. It's pretty impressive in and of itself, right totally, So the mast, you might if you look closely, you'll see it's made of essentially trusses,
squares and trusses. And if you will refer to our Bridges episode, we came face to face with the realization that trustes are the most beautifully strong structure on Earth essentially. So it makes sense because as we'll see, you want these the mast sections to be fairly lightweight, and you can make something lightweight if you use trusses. So I'm sure it was Hans Leber who figured that one out, like right out of the gate.
Yeah, absolutely, depending on you know your project, is how tall your tower is going to be, because like you said, they well you'll see how they build themselves. But you don't want one that's taller than it needs to be, and obviously you want it tall enough. The tallest ones are over four hundred feet tall, and the more standard wins are and then like two hundred and fifty foot range.
Right, I guess that with a K ten thousand, and I think some I think China just released like the largest toughest crane around. It's a real competitor to the K ten thousand. Button surprised me anything over about four hundred feet. We haven't really cracked the physics of a free standing tower crane. Beyond that, it just it's too unstable, it's too risky, it doesn't work. So let's say we top out at about two hundred and two fifty I think you said something like.
That, Yeah, two fifty ish.
The top I don't know. Ten percent of that probably would be made up of what's called the cat's head. And the cat's head is essentially the top of the crane that all of the parts that actually do the work above the mast connect to. Okay, yeah, So for example, you have the slewing unit, and the slewing unit is at the neck basically the base of the head of that cat's head, and it's essentially a huge disk that the whole thing can spin around on three hundred and
sixty Degrease, go buy a work site tower crane. Shout up to him, say do me a three sixty. Any crane operator worth their salt will just stop what they're doing and do a three sixty for you to show just how amazing the slewing unit is.
Uh. Did you know what the definition of slew is?
Uh? Does it have something to do with seattle?
No, it's to turn violently or uncontrollably. No, yeah, that's what the verb is, you know, undergoing slewing, or as a noun a violent or uncontrollable sliding movement.
Chuck, I tip my Breton cap to you for looking up that word in year fifteen. Man, way to go.
Well, I didn't know what it meant, so I appreciate that. But it's just I don't know. I'm sure someone can explain this.
Boy. I'm hoping we hear from crane people.
Oh.
I hope so too, And I hope they're like, gosh, you guys sure got it right, Not like I'm never listening.
To you again like the scuba people.
So the slewing unit is the it's where the mast and the top functioning part of the crane meat and it spins it around. It's what allows the whole thing to spin around.
All right.
The next thing we have is that the you know, the big long arm, that big working arm that extends way out, the horizontal arm.
That lifts the stuff. Although it doesn't actually lift the stuff, it holds the stuff.
That's called the jib arm. A jib is it's not specific to cranes or all kinds of jib arms. If you've ever worked on a movie set and they you know, have crane shots and stuff like that. Those are called jibs as well.
Why is it funny? Why are you laughing at everything.
Because you're drunk? No, I'm not drunk. I'm drunk ish, but not fully, not enough to explain my last finess.
So the jib can go out, you know, a few hundred feet sometimes for the extra large ones, and it basically allows it to lift things up, swing it over, and drop it off somewhere else. And if you're thinking, well, that sounds a lot more complicated than that, it is, and it isn't. It's not in that that's what that
jib arm is there for. But there is a something called a load chart that you know, you really got to be well acquainted with, because if you're picking up something from the very tippy end of that three hundred foot jib, not gonna be able to lift as much as you would if that thing were pulled back to like fifty or sixty feet because of physics, it would tip over.
Yeah, you can't lift the full load of Volvo mid sized SUVs that you could if it's much closer, if the load's closer to the center of gravity for the whole crane, right.
Yeah, So I guess that maximum lift capacity would be when it's at its peak of you know position, yeah, peak balance, like lifting, yeah, peak balance.
Right, So it would not necessarily be I don't know. It depends on the weight of the load where that peak of balance would be, right. So, but for the heaviest for its maximum lift, it would probably be pretty much close to the center of the jib arm. Maybe, yeah, No, I think it's actually a little closer regardless. The thing that I think is ingenious about all this is that the jib arm never moves. It's static. It might move
like swiveling, but it's not swiveling itself. It's just swiveling with the rest of the whole working part of the crane, right, So the jib arm stays where it is. So they've actually designed everything else around the fact that the jib arm stays straight, and that's what allows loads to like move toward the cab, away from the cab, toward the end of the arm, toward the inside of the arm.
The jib arm through a bunch of pulleys and specifically a something called the trolley which is attached to the underside of the jib arm, and it's just what moves back and forth along the jib arm, allowing you to kind of move a load, you know, closer or further away, depending on where the people on the ground need it.
Yeah.
Like if you stood up and put one arm out, that arm would just stay there. And there's and picture a little little carriage on the underside of your arm that slides, you know, down to your fingertips and back to your arm pit.
Yeah, that stuff that hangs down from your bicep. When you just let your arms stay there, imagine that moving towards your fingers.
Oh god, it's called aging. So your arms stays straight the whole time, and that little carriage on the underside of your arm is what's moving stuff.
And then if you want to move.
It from here to there, you turn your whole body and you go er while you do it.
Yep.
So you know your kids will laugh and stuff, but that's essentially it. That arms just stays there.
Yeah, and when you turn your whole body, your hips are.
Slewing, right, I guess so like Elvis.
So then the hook, the thing that actually hooks onto the load that's just connected to the trolley. Right, it's pretty neat because you actually raise and lower the hook. So it's connected to a system of pulleys, like a whole bunch of different pulleys. And when you connect these
pulleys together, it's called reaving. And so there's a certain way to connect all these pulleys to maximize the just the grip and traction they have while also allowing like the heaviest possible load to kind of hang from that cable without snapping.
Yeah, and it just works as a like a Roden reel, like when you're fishing. You just wind it in to raise it and let it out to lower it.
Now, that technically is found in the hoist unit, which to me is just I mean, it's the thing that makes everything move. Well, no, I guess this slewing unit makes the thing moved to Anything that has to do with the load, the hook, all of that stuff, it's found in the hoist unit.
Yeah, and that works with that hook block through a series of a series of pulleys. They're not just like, hey, let's put get this gigantic pulley and a giant cable.
They want it. They want that cable running through several several.
Pulleys right, and so that goes up and then usually up above the top of the jib arm and then back behind to the counter jib where it sits. I think usually the hoist unit sits behind the counter waits. And it consists of a big, old, burly one hundred and eighty horsepower motor that's spinning, a giant drum that has a bunch of steel cable wound around it. So the whole thing acts like a fishing line. A rodden
reel essentially, is the best analogy for it. When you want to lower something, the drum spins and the line pays out. When you want to raise it back up, the drum spins the other way and reels the line in in mister, you got a big old couple hundred ton fish on the end of your line. Their congratulations.
Yeah.
And that cable is I mean, you would think like it's got to be like three feet around or something, but cable is really really strong. I'm not sure how big this cable is, but I've seen cables that like pull a boat out of the water, and those things are not big around at all. And I'm constantly thinking, well, I wonder when I'm going to see somebody's boat snap off. Yeah, and it just doesn't happen. Cable is just super super strong.
Yeah, for sure.
You know, next time we do a topic like this, we should get two five year olds to come in and explain this part because they would do it such so much more simple.
Do you think so?
I think so simply. Yeah, all right, two five or maybe maybe four year olds.
Okay, it's got a counter jib, but that is if you look at the tower crane and you see that big long arm on the other side of the mast, you're going to see a much shorter horizontal arm out of what I guess you would call the back of the crane, and that is going to hold the counterweights because you got to counterbalance all those bobo suvsh with a lot of serious weights. And that is that those
are the counterweights. The K ten thousand requires almost as many counterweights as it requires for like the maximum lift. It's four hundred and ninety one thousand and change of poundage compared to what I say, like five eighty or something like that.
Yeah, it's a yeah. And there's just these huge concrete slabs that are shaped slightly like a t so the bottom parts fit into a slot, but the tops won't, so they just dangle there. It's nuts. Actually, if you think about what's going on hundreds of feet up in the.
Air, well, what's nuts is when they're not lifting anything, those counterweights make the crane kind of tip backward a little bit. And if you're a crane operator and you start lifting and dropping things off, that crane does a little weeble wobble of a few feet when it's lifting and releasing things, and you just gotta you know, you gotta be used to that, I guess.
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure that takes a lot of getting used to.
Yeah.
And then there's a tower peak, which hammerhead tower cranes don't usually have a peak, it's just flat all the way across. But sometimes they have a nice little almost like a sailboat sail masting kind of thing. Yeah, And usually that's to help support from above the jib because those things extend out pretty far and they're cann of levered, so they can use all the support they can get.
There's more cableage basically right kind of supporting it from above, yes, yeah, yeah, And there's one more big, big piece of equipment as far as importance goes, if you asked me, it could be a little bigger. I have some thoughts on how to improve these things. But that is the operator cab where the person sits the crane operator sits for eight to twelve to fifteen hours a day, depending on how much they're being put to work.
Yeah, and it's like roughly smallish walk in closet size in a mid market priced suburban home.
So here are my two thoughts. A. These people climb up a ladder to get there.
Yeah, how long does it take them? Chuck?
It can take like ten minutes or more, depending on how fast they're climbing. So my first improvement is you got to get them out of like off that ladder. No one needs to be climbing up that thing at the beginning or the end of a shift.
Okay, check one.
There's got to be a way to get somebody up there, like a rig they attached them to and mechanically pulley themselves up or something like that. Okay, So that's my first suggestion. The other one is that thing needs a little tiny toilet. There's no bathroom. There's climate controlled, which is great, but they don't have a toilet, and Dave said he found out they pee in a bottle and
poop in a plastic bag. Like get a little bitty You could make that thing a little bit bigger and put a couple of mod cons in there for these people.
Yeah, no, it's true for sure. I think the thing that fascinated me the most about the cab, besides not having a bathroom, is that the windshield essentially extends all the way down below the operator's feet, so when you're sitting in the seat, your feet are dangling over the ground and hundreds and hundreds of feet below. Yeah, it's really something.
List see.
I'm not trying to be gross, but this is real world stuff. What if you've got you know, diarrhea or something, then then you're up there.
Well, you know, I saw I saw a lot of real pro for sure.
It is.
I saw a lot of like blogs and articles about how as a crane operator you really need to take care of yourself, like probably more than the average construction worker would. In addition to like getting sleep so you're not like off your game on any day. You want to eat well, at least for that reason, Like you don't want to eat like a dozen wings for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That's a bad Idelly, no chili, nothing like that chili dog's chili concarne, none of that stuff. Yeah,
this is a real consideration for sure. And because it takes at least ten minutes to get to the ground, of course, you're not going to stop every time you have to go to the potty. You're gonna just go up there.
Yeah, you put a little tiny body up there, it's all I'm saying.
Plus, also, even if you don't, even if you're like, I want to climb back down and this is going to be awful, So I need to get out of this cap. When you're climbing down and you go to the bathroom and then you have to climb back up, that could be forty five minutes an hour worth of time.
That's my point.
That the entire construction site has just essentially shut down waiting on you, or whatever was coming next is just waiting on you. You have literally slowed down the entire project. That's the amount of pressure that's on the crane operator at all times.
Typically, little bathroom solve that whole problem.
Yeah, at the very least one of those like stadium catheters that people use at football games.
Should we take a break, Yes, all right, we'll be right back with more on tower cranes.
Okay, Chuck, So now we're at probably the coolest part. You thought everything was cool thus far, just wait for this, because you mentioned the Favel Brothers out of Australia and they invented that kangaroo crane, which from what I can tell, no one calls it that anymore. They probably did at first. Now they call them climbing cranes. There's actually two ways they figured out to make cranes climb to essentially build themselves. That's what they do because there's only so much of
the mast that you can build using smaller cranes. Eventually, the crane's going to get too tall for the cranes that are helping build it to lift, and it needs to start taking over. It needs to stand on its own two feet and take charge of its own life.
Yeah, or really four legs.
Sure.
The two methods are top climbing and bottom climbing. So at the beginning of each job, or when you're going to get a job, I guess you have to determine if you're a top or a bottom, and for top climbing, it really helps. I got to say to look at a video like Dave sent us these video demos. We're going to do our best to describe this stuff. If you happen to be at home or a safe place when you're not driving your car, you know, give yourself thirty seconds and check it out.
I found a good one for top climbing search Stafford Soima soo Ima, okay. And then for bottom climbing, Hans Leber's company has a great video on it too.
I love these guys.
Hopefully this is going to blow up Andy and be like, man, where are we getting all these views from.
We've gotten one hundred views in the last six months.
Now, yeah, I hope that doesn't mean like we should invest in buying more cranes because of all the interest.
Hey, that's on them if they miousread the market that badly.
All right, So the climbing frame is what is necessary to build a top climbing crane. The climb frame is three sided. It's got you know, three sides and then one open side, and it's built around the base of the mast kind of like Dave describe it as like a cage that's a little wider than the mass, so it can slide up and down on the outside, which makes a lot of sense.
You know those construction elevators that they have on construction sites that are essentially that that people like used to get up. Imagine that. But there's no place for you to stand because it's the mast of the crane is going through it. Yeah, that's a much more convoluted way to think of it.
I like to think, yeah, exactly.
The cool thing about this climbing frame is it is equipped with these hydraulic jacks. So what it does is it they have all these you know, trusses in a very straight line, because while you're doing this, that jib arm has to stay completely straight and still or I'm sorry, yeah, that long arm. You don't want it moving around, and you'll see why in a second. So they line them all up in a row, and that climbing frame goes down and it picks up one of these trusses, or
you know, it doesn't pick it up. I imagine it gets loaded in or whatever, and then these hydraulic jacks push it up, you know, kind of you know, a few feet at a time. Basically it's you know, decompressing and compressing and inching this thing up and up and up until it gets to the top of where you need a new section, and then they slide it in and attach it. But the frightening part is all of this is done like this thing has to be unbolted another to bolt in order to bolt the new section on.
So there's a very tenuous time where everything has just got to be perfectly imbalanced while they unbolt this thing.
Yeah, and what's scary is at that most tenuous time, that's when the crane is lifting the next mass section up so that it can be slid into that open fourth wall of the climbing frame.
It's yeah, really, and the drivers, the operators even out because they don't even want anyone in the cab moving around like you know, with diarrhea.
Right. But no, I saw in one video that the the crane had to have the operator in there to lift up the east each mass section.
Well, I saw that a lot of times they're not in there. So some may be self operational and some may require just a very steady h you know, someone on some emodium maintaince.
I mean, yeah, no, that makes sense that there wouldn't be any in there because it's it's very dangerous because the only thing connecting the entire top part of the crane, which is already built to the bottom of the mast, is that climbing frame at those points when they're starting
to move a new section in. But when you do this, you can do this up till what was it about, you know, four hundred feet where the whole thing tops out, Like, yeah, that's I can't imagine seeing something like that, let alone working on it, because I don't know if you said on that climbing frame, there's some dudes being gender neutral here riding that thing, like you're a dude if you are still making giant pins into the mass frame sections
to erect a giant, a giant tower crane. That's just the kind of personality it takes, I think.
Yeah, And I had always assumed these were telescoping like a fire truck ladder.
Nope.
I thought it was just some huge unit on the ground that could just telescope up to four hundred feet. The fact that this is how it's done is remarkable.
Yeah, So you can almost imagine the climbing frame is like a giant speculum that separates the top of the tower crane from the bottom, and you insert another section and then it does it again.
All right, you explained the bottom because I got it and I saw the video, but I had a couple of questions.
Oh okay, all right, So bottom climbing you do the opposite with the top climbing. You're adding the new sections at the top. At the bottom. You build the crane like any other tower cran to start up to two hundred, three hundred feet whatever, and you use it like normal. But the difference is with the bottom climbing crane, you build the building around the crane.
With the top climbing inside the building exactly.
Top climbing is outside of the building. It stays outside of the building the whole time. Bottom climbing, you build the building around the crane, and eventually, as the building gets tall enough, it starts to serve as the support structure for the crane, because eventually you have to decouple the crane from the foundation that was poured for it, like any other crane, and there's a jack that climbs up. These climbing rails essentially two ladders that are on the
outside of the crane. Itself, and it pushes the crane up little by little, usually about three stories at a time. And so now the crane has lost its bottom section because the bottom section is now three stories above it, and the top three stories is now unsecured to the next top three stories of the building. So they then secure that to the building with callers, and then they disassemble everything below it and build the building out around
the shaft where the crane used to be. They fill it in as the crane just moves higher and higher and higher. And with this method you can build as tall a building as physics will allow, because the crane grows upward with the building as the building grows upward.
Yeah, it's amazing, and I guess i'd answer my question. My question was sort of if you need that kind of foundation for a freestanding outside, like is being attached to the building enough And I guess it is.
Yeah, yeah, yes, for sure. And I think it's like special parts of the building. It's not like they attach it to like studs and drywall or something like that. Like I think the building is designed to accommodate this pain.
Also, yeah, I think that more than answer my question.
Yes, but those are the two ways that you can raise a crane, and they're both spectacular in their in their ingeniousness.
All right, so that's how they're built. Bottom up or top down, not top down.
How do we say.
Either one? I think bottom climbing or top climbing.
You mean, I guess.
So those are the giant tower cranes. We mentioned that luffing crane at the beginning. This is a This is when you don't have a ton of space, and I saw a video where it showed, especially when there's multiple cranes on a job swinging around. Yeah, you got to think about the fact that, like if you're swinging something three hundred feet, everything has got to be out of the way of that swing as well. So when you have tighter spaces, you might want a luffing jib arm.
And that is when the horizontal arm actually raises and lowers. So instead of having that that block and hook going you know, up and down on with a pulley, it's just sort of there and the action of lifting that arm up and down is what brings the the thing on the hook closer further away.
Yeah, if you've ever seen like one of those wrecking balls that they use that's attached to a luffing crane.
Typically, sure, what about self erectors?
These are pretty neat. They usually show up on the back of like a truck, and the truck puts down some feet for stabilization and probably lifts the truck off of the ground and a crane just kind of pops out. It folds out. Telescope, it's that telescoping effect that you were You thought the original tower cranes were doing this essentially.
Does this is a folding.
It's not telescoping, okay, but it's it's folded up in itself. It's all there and it unfurls. I guess is what I'm after here.
Yeah, I just want to make sure you knew what telescoping meant.
I learned what telescoping means and slewing thanks to you in this one episode.
That's right.
These thing's just unfold into the sky and it's a really also some really cool videos you can watch.
Yeah, should we take another break?
Well, before we do, I want to take another crackhet explaining bottom climbing.
We'll be right back, all right.
We talked a little bit about the operator, but there are all kinds of a team of people that work with these cranes. Obviously, in the US there's a certifying body called the n c c c O National Commission for the Certification of Crane Operators, and so that's that's the big job. That's the most experienced person. They have worked on all these other jobs that we're about to talk about for years and years before they get to be the crane operator. And I was curious what kind
of money they made. And it's all over the map if you look on the internet, because it seems like it's just kind of hard to find that stuff out. But I did see that in the southeastern United States, like ninety thousand dollars puts you at about the seventy fifth percentile. I also saw on Reddit, like my friend
os this in New York kind of thing. Yeah, but apparently this people on Reddit are saying, in New York City, you can make you know, two to three to four hundred thousand dollars as like one of the top two or three earners in New York, which, as I imagine, the top of the game in the world.
Yeah. No, I totally believe that, like you're so in demand that you have nothing to do with raising the crane or taking it down. You're there as long as they need a person to operate the crane for the job. And then once that's done, they move you over. Somebody hires you on another job site, like you are untouchable as far as like the the job site's concerned.
Yeah, And in the interview, their first question is how much fiber do you include in your diet?
So then there's a lift director. That's somebody who basically manages the lifting that goes on. If it's a heavy load or any kind of unique or dangerous load, they're supposed to formulate a plan for it of how it's going to be lifted, where it's going to go, what direction it's going to follow, all that stuff, and they essentially are just kind of running the show on the ground. I believe they're usually the one.
No.
I was going to say they're the one that the crane operator's probably in touch with, but I believe that's the signal person instead.
That's right, And the signal person is doing just what you think. They're on the radio and constant communication, but they're also doing hand signals, not just on that CB radio or whatever. They use walkie talkies and there are times when that crane operator is working blind and they don't have sight of what they're doing, and that's when that signal person and really everyone working together is so key.
Yeah, that's the person who communicates to the crane operator that the people on the ground want them to toot their horn, right, and they use that same pull down motion that you use for big rig truckers.
Right, or it gets the message that I have to go potty, so let's shut everything down for forty minutes.
That's the international squeeze your knees together and hold your crotch signal.
Uh, did you go over their rigor no? Okay, Now that is the person who was preparing the load attaching it to the crane hook. Obviously that load on the ground, it's not just like, you know, just attach it there and I'm sure it's fine. Like everything has to be so buttoned up, like nothing can be loose or falling off of that thing, Like it's got to be a very nicely wrapped Christmas present.
Yes.
So, depending on where you're working, there are sixteen states and seven cities that require you to have a license. That's it. Everywhere else there's state or the city does not require you to have any sort of formal training whatsoever. The thing is, the NCCCO offers certification too, which is
usually voluntary. But I get the impression that if you want to be one of those higher end crane operators, you would be certified for that job multiple times over, and not only just to kind of enhance your desirability as an employee, but also wow, I put that as like the HR person and to all HR people, but also like some job sites might require you to have at least a certification, if not a license, and it
might not even be the job site. It might be their insurres, Like nobody's gonna be like, hey, you come over here and operate this crane, Like you're gonna have to have tons of experience and probably some sort of paperwork to back that experience up. But I find it shocking and alarming that plenty of states don't require the person who's four hundred feet in the air lifting two hundred tons to have some sort of formal training.
For that totally it is. It shocked me as well.
Yeah, these things are expensive to rent, you're you know, obviously it's a cost a lot of money to build one, but they get that money back. Because Dave just looked up just sort of an average rental a flat top tower crane within just an eighty eight thousand pound capacity lift, which is I don't know how many babos that is, but it's nowhere close to what I said earlier.
It's forty four tons.
A two hundred and sixty two foot jib arm, so about you know, a little more than half of sort of the maximum that that sucker is thirty five thousand dollars a month. Yeah, the cheapest is thirty six hundred, and that's for the one you bring on the truck.
Yeah, and a lot of those rental prices will include putting the thing together over the course of four or five days and taking it down too, and maybe even a skilled crane operator depending, So you can imagine that these things are actually fairly dangerous. Safety is far and away like the number one concern for any crane operator.
Every single interview I've read with a crane operator, they all were like, it's all about safety essentially, Like, yes, you're really important on the job site, but if it's not safe, you don't do it, Like you just don't. I mean, you're lifting heavy loads, you're swinging them through the air, you can drop them. There's all sorts of stuff that can happen. And yes, wind is a big one, as we'll see, but they've kind of figured that out. But just the fact that there's that you have these
huge loads high up in the air. When they get dropped or when something goes wrong, people can die, and I mean it does happen. I remember this past July in Manhattan, the entire jib arm of a crane fell down. I think, I don't remember how many stories, but it was significant. I actually I think it did kill one person who was in a nearby apartment building, Like some of the debris like crashed through their window and killed them,
I think. But they were the only person who died out of this, A sixteen ton load in a jib arm crashing to the ground in Manhattan in the middle of a day.
That one caught on fire, didn't it.
Yeah, there was a fire in the hoist unit for some reason. I couldn't figure out what caused it.
That's a lot that no one was killed. I mean that.
I remember when that happened too, and I was just like, how can that happen? In New York City and not kill like twelve people below at least, you know.
Yeah, apparently another real danger chuck is hitting power lines.
Yeah, because people.
Will walk like they'll walk like a load you know, along to stabilize it, say, like a bunch of pipes, and that pipe is connected via metal cable to the crane. And if the crane came in contact with a thirteen thousand volt power line, whoever's got their hand on that load of pipes is it will be electrocuted. And it happens like a lot, Like not a lot, It happens frequently, to an alarming degree.
How about that, Well, they found some stats and what he got was from twenty eleven to twenty seventeen, over that seven years, they averaged forty two crane related deaths per year. That's not insignificant, you know, forty two per year. And I think half of those were things falling on people. Not all of them were tower cranes. It's kind of all cranes basically lumped together. But yeah, sometimes they're taking
it apart and it falls apart on them. It seems like there's a lot of crushing death with it, which is just you know, unfathomable.
Yeah, people have gotten caught in the climbing cage, caught between that and the frame of the mast. There was one guy who was taking a part a crane and he was on the forty fifth story and that platform that he was on outside the crane removing pins didn't have a railing. It didn't have a railing, and it shifted and he fell forty five stories because it didn't have a railing. Wow. I just couldn't believe it. When I read like the Oshra report, I'm just like, oh
my god, that's insanely nuts. But yeah, so safety is extraordinarily important. You can see and I said, I tease something, Chuck that I think you should take us home with that. They figured out what to do in high winds.
Yeah, you know what you do in high winds is you unbolt that thing and let it spin with the wind. Obviously you've got the reel all the way reeled in and it's not like swinging anything around. But when if you see and heavy winds a horizontal arm moving, that's
what it's supposed to do. Because they have learned that if that thing is bolted down, that puts the entire thing at risk, whereas if you just let it move with the wind and obviously out of the way of hitting anything, then that's the way to go.
Yeah, and I read an interview with a crane operator who had to ride out a storm once because it was too dangerous to make the ten minute climb down, so you had to sit there in the cab and just get pushed around by the wind, letting it a weather vane.
And I'm not even going to make a poop joke. There.
You got anything else?
I got nothing else.
This was robust. Thanks for doing it with me. This was fun. Thanks for being the top or the bottom to this crane episode, Chuck, Hey, anytime if you want to know more about cranes. Apparently there's a Housetiff Works article on it by Marshall Brain. And there's plenty of other interesting stuff too, including really mesmerizing CGI videos of cranes building themselves magically. And since I said that it's time for listener mail.
All right, I'm going to call this.
Well, I'm going to call it sits scuba related. This is kind of very poignant email. Hey, guys, been listening for a long time. I learned to scuba with my brother and dad when I was fourteen, back in nineteen eighty nine, the moment we took our first breaths underwater, we were hooked along. Aside from a long hiatus, I've been an avid diver ever since. Many of my best
memories were created on dive trips with my brother and dad. Tragically, we lost my brother to suicide last year after a decade's long battle with mental illness, and I just wanted to take a moment to commend you and your team for your sympathy and in dexterity with which you handle mental illness on your show. Know that the links in which you go to assure you were using the most compassionate language to discuss mental illness and other touchy subjects
does not go unnoticed and is greatly appreciated. But to be clear, so are the moments you choose to essue the acceptable standards for a moment to make a joke, Chuck, this is for you by all means. Please get scuba certified with your daughter and your wife if she's interested. I have so many crystal clear, fantastic memories with my dad and my brother diving. You can't make a child's any more awesome than by taking them to visit another planet.
Lifetime memories are made by the moment. It's a magical pursuit.
Do it.
My brother used to say diving is easy to do and difficult to master.
So true.
He was my friend, my die buddy, and my hero and I miss him like crazy. He sure would have loved the Scoob episode. And that is from Dan Man.
Dan, thank you for writing in about that. That was really amazing stuff. I'm sorry about your brother.
Same.
If you want to be like Dan and write us just a masterful, amazing, heartfelt email, we'd love those things. You can address it directly to us at stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
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