Hoists help to lift efficiency
May 1st 2008

At Sandvik Hard Materials' plant in Epinouze, France, Konecranes has upgraded the lifting systems, providing 25 new cranes and hoists to boost production efficiency.

It configured five of the lifting systems specially for the application, to fit into restricted spaces and provide the optimum lifting automation.

Among these lifting systems is a runwaymounted 1t version of the XM crane that is used for changing tools on production machinery.

The main machine shop has a low roof, so Sandvik designed a custom doublebeam arrangement for suspending the hoist between the runways, to achieve the lifting heights needed. This allows a single crane to serve a much larger set of machines.

A further improvement in efficiency was provided by Konecranes' SXN dual chain hoist: one hoist lifts the tool, the second has a frequency inverter drive which is then used to provide precision rotation of the load, allowing the tool to be aligned and fitted very rapidly, speeding machine tooling changeovers.