More crawlers coming

The market for 230 ton capacity crawler cranes is going to get crowded in North America. Link-Belt's new 298 Hylab is already available and Terex American has its HC 230 in prototype development.

ACT has also learned that the market should expect the new Manitowoc Model 14000 by the first quarter of 2007. Crawler product manager Allen Kadow said his product development team has been calling it the “contractor” machine, although they expect it to also be a strong rental crawler.

Kobelco Cranes also plans to introduce a new crane to North America in 2007. Jack Fendrick, general manager of Kobelco Cranes, said next year the company will introduce an even larger crawler to its product range (see Interview, page 17).