WOLFFKRAN 7532.16 cross on tracks at the ÖSWAG Shipyard in Linz, Austria
From Alpine terrain to narrow city streets, from dry dessert territory to shipyards by the water – a WOLFF feels at home in all these environments. As such, the ÖSWAG Werft Linz, an Austrian shipyard founded in 1840, recently installed a WOLFF 7532.16 cross on its premises. The crane will be used for maintenance work on riverboats at the slipway, which was enlarged several years ago to accommodate larger vessels of up to 23 meters wide. WOLFFKRAN convinced the ÖSWAG team not only with its high-performance crane, but also with a solution for the technically challenging adaptation of the travelling undercarriage. The customer’s requirements for a new shipyard crane presented the Austrian WOLFFKRAN team with numerous challenges. First of all, the WOLFF 7532.16 cross needed to be installed on an existing 6-meter-high rail structure, on which it can move back and forth during operation. Further, the width between the tracks of the rails was only 4 meters. Finally, the crane had to pass over an existing 5.5 meter high control stand installed on the rail structure. “Planning this was extremely demanding. The narrower the track width of the undercarriage, the more ballast is necessary to stabilize the crane. In this case, 60 tons of central ballast was used for the 7532.16 cross. At the same time, it was crucial to keep the individual wheel loads exerted on the rails to a minimum and not to exceed 18 tons per wheel.” explained Wouter van Loon, Product Manager at WOLFFKRAN. The team used a standard WOLFF undercarriage with a 5.5-meter track width as a basis, and modified it so that it would fit on the existing rail structure with a 4-meter track width. In order to not exceed the maximum permissible forces exerted on the tracks, the 145-ton operating weight of the crane had to be evenly distributed over 16 wheels (four wheels at each corner of the undercarriage).