Advantages and Disadvantages of Crawler Cranes
Crawler crane advantages & disadvantages: unmatched soft-ground stability & load-carrying mobility vs. transport difficulty, ground damage & high costs. See if a crawler crane suits your heavy lift project.
Core Strengths: The Crawler Crane Advantage
Where great strength and accuracy are required for a project, crawler cranes generally beat out wheeled mobile cranes and tower cranes in performance capabilities. Below are some of the strengths inherent to crawler cranes.
1. Exceptional Stability on Soft Terrain
While rubber-tired cranes rely on paved surfaces for lifting operations, crawler cranes evenly distribute their considerable weight using steel tracks. This provides greater stability than other lifting machinery on tough, wet, or sandy landscapes. If your job site includes wind farm development in open areas or bridge building over a river, you will save a lot of work by avoiding the installation of hard surface pads.
2. Transporting Capacity
Mobile cranes are known for being able to carry very heavy loads; however, their main weakness lies in the fact that they cannot transport the load from Point A to B while raising it. One of the advantages that crawler cranes offer is the mobility during such lifting operations. You can easily transport the object wherever it needs to go without unloading it again.
3. Not Requiring Hydraulic Outriggers
The wide footprint of the tracks is adequate for stabilizing the crawler crane, thus eliminating the need for using hydraulic outriggers. Hours spent preparing to stabilize such equipment are reduced. The operator drives the machine to the work area, extends or assembles the lattice boom, and starts lifting the load. In case several lifting points are involved, the process will mean significant savings in labor.
4. Unmatched Lifting Capacity Using Lattice Booms
Lattice booms are used on most crawler cranes instead of the telescopic booms found on other machines. Although lattice booms look old-fashioned, they have an important advantage. They are lighter and sturdier than telescopic booms and allow the machine to lift heavier loads over greater radii. Certain crawler cranes possess a lifting capacity of over 2,500 tons, which is impossible for conventional cranes.
Crawler Crane Disadvantages
While being incredibly powerful, crawler cranes certainly have many downsides, which might be the reasons why construction companies may prefer wheeled cranes in certain cases.
1. Transportation Issues
Probably, the greatest difficulty associated with using crawler cranes is transportation. Crawler cranes can never travel along the road because of their metal tracks, which would destroy road surfaces, and their extreme dimensions.
Implication: The necessity arises to use flatbed trucks and other machinery for delivering each part of the crane separately, assembling it again, and doing the opposite when it comes to moving to another place.
2. Slow Travel Speed
Even within a jobsite, crawler cranes are slow movers. Their top speed typically ranges between 1 and 2 miles per hour (approx. 1.6–3.2 km/h). If a project requires moving lifting points over a large area—such as laying a mile of pipeline—a crawler crane becomes highly inefficient. In contrast, rough-terrain cranes can travel at speeds of up to 15 miles per hour between lifts.
3. High Ground Bearing Pressure
Though they excel when used on soft terrain, the high ground bearing pressure they generate can cause serious harm to any finished surface below them. Crawler cranes cannot usually be used inside fully constructed underground concrete parking structures without placing heavy steel plates on top of the ground, thus increasing the cost and effort involved.
4. Difficulty in Assembly and Disassembly
Despite avoiding the use of outriggers, their design still necessitates boom assembly. The lattice boom comprises different sections that need to be joined using pins, a process that requires another auxiliary crane. The large models require such extensive disassembly for transport purposes that it could take half a day for one crew just to accomplish that task alone.
5. High Initial Cost and Maintenance Expenses
The crawler crane involves high initial cost and maintenance expenses. The traveling device, including the track shoes, idlers, and drive sprockets, gets worn out quickly while operating on uneven surfaces. The spare parts for the undercarriage are far more costly than the tires. Moreover, training is required for personnel to operate lattice booms.
Recommendation for the Industry:
Crawler cranes excel in long-term and large-scale projects with intensive lifting tasks such as hoisting bridge girders, refinery reactors, or nacelles of wind turbines. The ability of the crawler to move with a load, coupled with its lack of outriggers, makes it the unquestioned leader when it comes to heavy assembly.
Nevertheless, in cases where there is a need to carry out numerous short-distance lifts on an already completed surface, or when there is a need to move the equipment from one urban block to another, the disadvantages of crawler cranes will likely exceed their positive characteristics.
It would be more efficient to rent crawler cranes only for heavy lift stages and use telescopic boom cranes for other stages.
