When equipping your fleet to best tackle the task at hand, cranes come in at the top of the wish list (and rightly so). Choosing the right type of crane to equip your service truck is essential to ensuring that the job can be done with the utmost efficiency.
The emergence of knuckle boom cranes is growing with massive popularity amongst LP gas professionals. Increased safety, less equipment wear, and easier loading make knuckle boom cranes the obvious choice for anyone needing to pick up and drop off LP tanks.
Knuckle Boom Crane Benefits
Knuckle boom cranes offer a hinge on the boom, allowing tanks to be loaded and unloaded with one swift movement. Compare this to a telescoping crane, which from an efficiency standpoint makes about zero sense.
With a telescoping crane, one would need to load the LP tank, raise it to a certain height, then slowly turn the boom while retracting the boom at the same time. Two different actions, both of which necessitate precision for a safe loading process.
A knuckle boom crane can raise a tank and retract at the hinge in one fluid motion. Two motions are harder than one motion. Performing one task is easier than two. I am good at math.
In addition to a much easier loading process, a knuckle boom crane is much more resistant to every day wear. The hinging “knuckle” on the boom takes pressure off the crane as a whole, which can significantly increase the life cycle and service cycle of the crane. Cost savings over the crane’s lifetime can be exponential if the service truck housing the crane is in high operational rotation.
Loading Safety
It is no secret that there are safety precautions that come with the line of work for LP gas professionals. Knuckle boom cranes allow more accurate load placement of tanks on the truck body due to an increased range of motion from the boom.
The hinge can provide a massive benefit to ensuring that your cargo is placed in the most optimal surface area atop your truck. With this added precision, you can ensure that LP tanks are in the right spot and secured safely every time. In addition to precision load placement, the efficiency of loading and unloading, by doing so in a fluid motion, removes SOME safety concerns of swinging cargo causing harm.
