Tilt Wall and Steel Erection that footprint.
“ This is the most difficult panel layout we’ ve done,” said Anthony Oritz, Alliance’ s operations manager.“ We held a pre-lift meeting for each panel just to make sure everything was right.”
Planning and Good Communication Prove Vital
A major key to the project’ s success was meticulous planning and frequent, clear communication between Alliance; general contractor Jaynes Corporation, which also cast the concrete panels; the project owner, the architect, the engineer of record and the steel fabricator.
Alliance actually began its planning by using AutoCad and 3D Lift Plan as it bid the job in 2022, more than a year before the physical work started.
“ You can’ t even bid a job this complex without having a solid plan,” said Alliance co-owner and CEO Phil Cordova.
As Alliance developed the panel-erection layout plan in AutoCad and 3D Lift Plan, the information could be transferred into Jaynes’ building information management( BIM) system so that everyone stayed on the same page.
As the precise planning progressed, cooperation between the team members made the project more workable.
The key piece of equipment was Alliance’ s LR 1750 lattice-boom crawler crane, which would be uprighting, lifting and setting the concrete wall panels.
“ There aren’ t many big cranes in this area, and our LR 1750 was the best solution to lifting nearly all of the panels from inside the building,” said Cordova.
He noted, however, that some of the panels plus rigging would be heavier than the crane could pick at the radius needed.
Working together, Alliance, Jaynes, the architect and the engineer of record made some of the panels narrower in order to keep the weight within a safe percentage of the crane’ s capacity.
In addition, Jaynes worked with Alliance to make sure each panel was cast in an orientation for proper tilt-up.
“ We could tell them that the top of a panel needed to face a specific direction for us to lift and place it effectively, and they would cast it that way,” said Cordova.
Full Supporting Cast of Equipment
The fleet of equipment that Alliance brought to the job included the Liebherr LR 1750, a Tadano AC 250 all-terrain crane, a Liebherr LTR 1100 teleboom crawler crane, a Magni RTH 6.35 rotating telehandler, and a Merlo P120.10 fixedbody telehandler.
The AC 250 stayed on the job only long enough to assemble the big 825-U. S.-ton LR 1750 crawler crane, which was rigged with 253 feet of boom.
In that configuration, the LR 1750 uprighted all the concrete panels and set the heavier pieces of structural steel, including three 120-foot-long trusses that each weighed 35,513 pounds with rigging and were set at radii to 165.6 feet.
The LTR 1100 primarily set structural steel, and the Magni RTH 6.35 rotating telehandler set lighter steel and also handled the four long temporary braces that supported each panel until it was secured in place by structural steel.
The Merlo P120.10 fixed-body telehandler shook out steel at the laydown yard, carried it a quarter mile to the building site, and hung low-level steel.
As mentioned earlier, the big rig on this job was the LR 1750.
Although it would handle all the panels except the last two from inside the building’ s footprint, Alliance needed to figure out where within that footprint it needed to sit.
Alliance used two-point rigging in eight places to tilt up the tallest panels. The four temporary braces each weighed more than 1,000 pounds, so all were placed by a Magni telehandler.
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