InfraStructures - April 2023 - Canada’s First Grove GMK6400-1 Kick-Starts New Era for A.W. Leil Cranes and Equipment

Canada’s First Grove GMK6400-1 Kick-Starts New Era for A.W. Leil Cranes and Equipment

Following its December 2022 delivery to A.W. Leil Cranes and Equipment, the first Grove GMK6400-1 to arrive in Canada has sparked a revival in fortune for the Nova Scotia-based rental services provider.

Due to fleet capacity constraints, the company had been excluded from many opportunities in its market – particularly in providing maintenance services to the dozens of wind turbines it had erected during the last wind construction boom in the early 2000s.

“Our largest crane was 400 USt (363 t), which usually left us just shy of being able to service larger wind towers, so we recognized there was a need to upsize,” said Ryan Long, A.W. Leil’s president. “We were initially looking at larger machines, but once we started doing careful comparisons, the GMK6400-1 kept shining through.”

The 408 t GMK6400-1 more than compensates for size with features such as the self-rigging MegaWingLift™ and MAXbase variable-position outriggers that support a lifting performance usually only seen on 7- or 8-axle cranes. The crane joins a large fleet of Grove TMS truck cranes and National Crane boom trucks. Clad in its distinctive custom wrap, the crane immediately headed out to its first wind farm on Prince Edward Island – and it has not stopped working long enough to return to its Dartmouth base ever since.

Given the sparsely distributed population of the region and the scarcity of long-term projects, A.W. Leil’s cranes invariably cover far more ground than most, making the GMK6400-1’s effortless road-legal status highly appreciated.

With a Shawmut technician on hand for the first setup, A.W. Leil’s Crane and Rigging Supervisor Ryan Bruce was also impressed by the speed and logical nature of the process – in particular, the easily accessible plug-in ports for the remote handset that eliminates unnecessary trips to the operator’s cab.

Source: The Manitowoc Company, Inc.

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