Grove GMK3055 Crane, My Pictures

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This is what I found at one of our neighborhood construction sites on July 24. The operator was obviously waiting for something to arrive.

I got a side view of the boom when I walked around the site to the above entrance off Gilbert Avenue. (The bank building in the satellite view has been torn down.) Since nothing but waiting was happening at this site, I went to the other site in town where they were doing form work. That is rather boring work, so I took a couple of "status" shots and came back to this site.

When I arrived, it was obvious that he was waiting for this truck.

I was able to catch them unpinning the outrigger pads so...

....that they could shove them in and repin them so that the pads do not stick out beyond the side of the truck.

Then as the operator uses the control levers to pull in the outrigger, the driver puts one of the mats away. (I don't think they had mats on the other side because they were swinging the loads only to my right.)

The operator also does some of the heavy lifting. After this, they came over to ask me if I was taking pictures of them. I said "No. I'm taking pictures of the crane." (I have verified that, even at high resolution, you can't identify the faces very well because of the angles and/or shadows.) I confirmed that what I had missed earlier in the day were trucks arriving with precast concrete slabs that the crane swung into position between the steel girders. I believe he called the slabs "spancrete."

What he had on the hook when he was waiting for the truck was his counterweight ready to load onto the truck when it arrived. I had noticed that Nichols did not paint over the GROVE trademark, but they did paint over the model number. So I asked him what model it was. The reply was a 3055. I noticed that being able to repin the outrigger pads for road transport is important enough that it is one of the six bullet items of features listed for this model: "Outrigger pads stow within width of crane."

So the truck with the counterweight leaves. The three skinny ones are 1t and the one thicker one is 2t.

This is a big contrast with the 6 trailers of 9t and 9.5t counterweights used by the GMK6300L at Downers North.

They store the mats for the outrigger pads on the back of the crane.

Note that when he is doing tight maneuvers around the construction site, he has the steering in a mode where the middle wheels stay straight and the rear wheels turn the opposite direction of the front wheels.

Zoomed

He then spent some time with the wheels straight working with a control panel to his side. I think he lowered and raised the chassis during this time, but it was hard to be sure.

When he left, it soon became obvious that he changed the steering mode so that it worked more like a regular truck. It is hard to see in this still photo, but I believe I saw the middle axle wheels turn a little as the front wheels turned considerably more.

This turn at the end of the block more clearly shows that the middle wheels are also turning.

He went back to "tight steering mode" when he had to recover from turning down a one-way street in the wrong direction.

So I was able to get a nice (except for the sun being on the wrong side) profile shot of the other side as he left town (below). Unlike the GMK6300L, this model is not "oversize." Yet it does have a 6-section boom.