What a Crane Does and Who This Course Is For

A crane lifts a load on a rope, moves it through the air and sets it down somewhere else. It does three basic movements: hoisting (raising and lowering the hook on its rope), slewing (turning the boom or jib round a vertical axis) and changing the radius, the horizontal distance from the crane's centre of rotation to the hook. Mobile cranes change radius by luffing (raising or lowering the boom) or telescoping it in and out; many tower cranes do it by running a trolley along a horizontal jib.

Cranes build bridges, erect steel frames, set machinery in factories, unload ships and place materials on high-rise buildings. They are among the most useful machines on a site, and among the most dangerous: a crane failure can drop a load of many tonnes, or bring the crane itself down across a site or a road.

Who it is for

The course is for people who work around cranes or who will start training for a role in lifting: site engineers and supervisors, slingers and signallers at the start of their training, planners, safety advisers, and anyone who must judge whether a crane on their site is being used safely. It is about the cranes themselves: their types, how they stay up, their charts and safety devices, wind, and the hazards around them. Slings, rigging and the detail of lift planning are taught in the course Lifting Operations and Rigging Safety, and this course only recaps them.

The one idea to keep

Every crane can lift less as the radius grows. A crane that lifts 50 tonnes close to its centre may lift only a small part of that at its longest radius. Many crane overturns come back to this idea.