A Recipe for Success in the US Scrap Market

E-Crane Worldwide, the Belgian manufacturer of equilibrium cranes, has proven throughout the world that it offers turnkey scrap handling solutions for steel mills and scrap yards. This expertise and knowledge has recently been expanded to include the United States scrap market.  Within the past year, two additional cranes for the scrap industry in the United States were installed.  E-Crane International USA now supports more than 60 E-Cranes operating in the Americas.  

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E-Crane offers steel mills and scrap yards a proven scrap handling solution, combining uniquely designed equipment with state-of-the-art communications to optimize scrap yard operations. For turnkey installations, E-Crane will design, engineer, and construct the optimum scrap handling solution to meet or exceed the customer’s project requirements.

The E-Crane is capable of easily unloading ships, barges, trains, and trucks.  The E-Crane also shines on dedicated tasks including feeding shredders, filling shears and loading charge baskets. One E-Crane is able to replace several mobile material handlers which in turn leads to lower costs for scrap handling.  The savings and efficiency are due to the E-Crane’s innate design.

The key to the E-Crane’s efficiency is the parallelogram design linking the stick to the moving counterweight. This unique 4-bar mechanism ensures that the E-Crane remains in near perfect balance throughout its working range. Compared to conventional cranes that require as much as 80% of their available energy just to move the boom, stick, and grab, the E-Crane allows gravity to work for you instead of against you, reducing horsepower requirements and power consumption by up to 50%, reducing maintenance and operating costs.

Nucor General Recycling

A 700 Series, Model 4264 E-Crane was installed for Nucor General Recycling at their Flowood, Mississippi facility near Jackson, Mississippi in July of last year. The E-Crane is being used to feed auto-bodies into a shredder at the Flowood facility. The shredder was previously fed by an older material handler which was replaced with the new E-Crane.

The 700 Series E-Crane has a duty cycle capacity of 6 US tons (5.5 metric tons) and an outreach of 86 feet (26 meters). Equipped with a Young 3×2 bypass grapple, the E-Crane is capable of feeding 2 to 3 auto-bodies into the shredder per cycle.

E-Crane engineers worked closely with Nucor to develop a turn-key solution for removing the old crane and erecting the E-Crane in its place. The E-Crane is mounted on a 4-legged pedestal, with custom stairways to accommodate the infrastructure that had previously been surrounding the old material handler. Complete assembly and installation, including the tear-down of the original, outdated equipment, took only two weeks. The E-Crane became operational shortly after installation and has been successfully feeding the shredder since.

Technical Specifications

American Recycling

More recently, the commissioning of a 700 Series / Model 4290 pedestal mounted E-Crane was completed in Fort Worth, Texas for American Recycling. The E-Crane has a maximum outreach of 29 meters (95′) and a duty cycle capacity of 5.5 Mtons (6.1 UStons)  The E-Crane uses a 1,25 cubic meter hydraulic orange peel grapple to feed scrap into a 2000hp shredder.

E-Crane engineers and technicians worked with American Recycling to optimize the layout and operation.  The E-Crane was placed near the motor house for the shredder and was designed with custom stairways, which allow shredder operators to utilize the E-Crane stairways to access the shredder operator house as well as the E-Crane operator’s cab and platform.  The entire installation was a success, and took E-Crane service technicians only nine days to complete from start to finish.

Technical Specifications