Product Focus By Mike Larson
Mobile Towers Debut
Ideal Crane Rental Starts Putting Its New MK Mobile Tower Cranes to Work
On its first job, Ideal Crane
Rental’ s new Liebherr MK 88-4.1 mobile tower crane set 2,500-pound bundles of wall panels at a 140-foot radius on the third story of a new apartment building in Madison, Wisconsin.
Operator Dustin Resch says the wireless remote control is as smooth and precise as the in-cab controls.“ All that’ s missing are the cameras and air conditioning,” he said.
The crane operator controls erection of the tower and jib with just one lever. He or she can choose the best tower height for the job.
Just a month and a half after Liebherr began offering its MK series of mobile tower cranes in North America, the first one has gone to work. As noted in Crane Hot Line( June 2024, p. 33), the MK concept puts a self-erecting tower crane on a chassis similar to that used on an all-terrain crane.
The result is a rig that combines the fast setup and long reach of a self-erecting tower crane with the easy roadability of a mobile crane— a tower crane that can do several jobs a day like a taxi crane.
Ideal Crane Rental Inc., Madison, Wisconsin, has taken delivery of one of each of the three MK models Liebherr offers in North America.
The smallest is the three-axle MK 73-3.1. It can lift up to 13,227 pounds, and can pick 4,409 pounds at its 126-foot maximum radius.
The midsized model is the four-axle MK 88-4.1, which has a maximum
22 CRANE HOT LINE ® August 2024 • www. cranehotline. com