Heavy Lifting

Johnsons heavy lifting team go for gold

Whilst we’ve all been glued to the Olympics, our heavy lifting team have been setting their own world record, completing a record number of machinery moves during the summer.

One of the projects was a multi-phase relocation of a large University in the North West of England into their newly completed £55 million purpose built, state of the art campus building. As part of the decant, Johnsons relocated one of the departments which had over 60 pieces of machinery – specialist printing and workshop equipment – from numerous locations. These items ranged from large relief presses to flat bed CNC milling machines and weighed anything from 50kg to 2 tonnes.

Warren Hamlin, Sales Director at Johnsons said, “Relocating, removing or reconfiguring any commercial equipment often requires specialist plant or lifting gear. We have a fully trained team of specialists who have the skills and expertise to make the relocation process as efficient as possible.”

Dave Shewring, Head of Projects at Johnsons said, “A lot of the machinery required isolating, disconnecting from venting and stripping down prior to relocation.”

Johnsons managed and undertook the required pre-work to prepare the items for relocation, relocated all the items to the new building, built all the items back up that needed to be stripped down to enable relocation, and hardwired all the equipment back. In addition, Johnsons supplied extra metal conduit for the electric cabling and installed this to ensure the cabling didn’t pose a trip hazard in the workshops. All machinery was ready for the principal building contractor to reconnect to the new venting once the venting system was completed.

Dave added, “Due to where some of the equipment was being relocated from, as well as the new lift not being able to fit the stripped down equipment in to it, some advanced relocation techniques were needed to be used at both the collection and delivery buildings.”

At one of the collection buildings, Johnsons had to arrange for the removal of a roof that covered an underpass adjacent to the basement workshop. A mobile crane and sling was used to secure and lift the larger and heavier machinery from basement level to ground floor level, which were loaded on to a reinforced flatbed trailer.

“At the collection address, we used a 12 tonne tele-handler with extended reach forks to lift items through the 2nd and 4th floor windows. Once passed through the windows on the tele-handler, these items were transferred on to a heavy duty mobile A frame and then positioned and bolted in to the floor in their final positions.” Added Dave.

All equipment and machinery was relocated on time. No equipment or any part of the new building was damaged throughout this complex transfer.

Click here for more information on plant and machinery moves.

For a free, no obligation quotation, please call Johnsons on 0800 279 2505 or you can complete and submit the form on our contact page.