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Makro Explains

How heavy cargo
actually
gets moved.

Whoever specifies a lift rarely finds serious technical material to work from. This section is our engineering team explaining, without jargon, what actually decides an operation.

Why it exists

The decision is
made before
the crane
arrives.

On most projects, the person choosing the equipment is not the person operating it. It is a planning engineer, a shutdown manager, an erection coordinator — people who have to decide with good information and rarely get it.

Makro produced 150 rigging studies for a single wind complex. That knowledge should not die in the project archive. Here we publish what we learned, in the most useful form for whoever specifies the next job.

01 A rigging plan is not paperwork. It is the design of the operation. Method 02 Crawler or telescopic? The right question is not which lifts more. Equipment selection 03 The crane can take it. The question is whether the ground can. Planning 04 Erecting a turbine is engineering by window. Wind 05 In a shutdown, the crane is the least likely thing to run late. Shutdowns 06 Indivisible cargo: the transport starts with paperwork, not on the road. Transport
01 Method

A rigging plan is not paperwork. It is the design of the operation.

Many treat the rigging plan as an audit document. It is the engineering work that determines whether the operation is possible at all.

A rigging plan answers questions that admit no guessing: the real weight of the piece and where its centre of gravity sits; the working radius at every point of the slew; which boom and counterweight configuration covers that radius; which rigging gear takes that load at that angle; and what happens if the wind picks up mid-movement.

When the plan is written after the equipment is already booked, it stops being design and becomes justification. The crane already on site becomes the fixed variable and everything else bends around it — which is exactly backwards.

On the Iguatemi arch lift, the piece required a 180° rotation in the air with interference from the crane's own structure. That is found in the plan. Later, with the load in the air, it is no longer information: it is an accident.

02 Equipment selection

Crawler or telescopic? The right question is not which lifts more.

Two cranes with the same rated capacity solve different problems. What decides is time on site, mobility and ground.

An all terrain telescopic drives itself in, rigs in hours and can leave the same day. It is the right call for a one-off lift, for several scattered work fronts, or for a short window. The price is assembling and stripping counterweight at every reposition.

A crawler pays off when the machine is staying. It travels with the load suspended, works at long radius with better stability and sustains a long sequence of lifts from one position — but it needs lowbed transport, an assembly area and prepared ground.

The calculation that actually decides is rarely capacity. It is time: how many days the machine stays, how often it repositions and what each move costs.

03 Planning

The crane can take it. The question is whether the ground can.

The load chart describes the machine. What fails an operation most often is the ground underneath it.

A large telescopic concentrates hundreds of tonnes onto four outrigger pads. The resulting pressure usually far exceeds what natural ground will bear — which makes the ground bearing capacity calculation as decisive as the manufacturer's chart.

Hence the working platforms: spreader mats, timber or steel cribbing, a compacted layer, sometimes piling. Each changes the cost and the schedule of mobilisation, and none of it appears in a quote that priced only the crane.

At Iguatemi the site was reclaimed mangrove. The ground survey came before anything entered the site — and it, not the machine's capacity, defined where the crane could stand.

04 Wind

Erecting a turbine is engineering by window.

The component is enormous, the sail area is vast and the wind — the very reason the farm exists — is the enemy of the operation.

Every nacelle or blade lift happens in a gap between gusts. The wind limit for the lift is far below the turbine's design limit, and it drops further as height increases. At 120 metres, the difference between wind at ground level and wind at the boom tip decides whether the day is productive or lost.

That reshapes the whole plan: the erection sequence is designed so the most wind-sensitive component is ready to go up at the best hour of the day, everything pre-assembled at ground level and the crew in position before the window opens.

That is exactly the kind of optimisation that earned Makro the 2022 Top Crane award — lifts at 120 metres, executed in short windows between heavy gusts.

05 Shutdowns

In a shutdown, the crane is the least likely thing to run late.

An idle plant burns money by the hour. What saves the window is the work done weeks before the shutdown starts.

A shutdown is the opposite of improvisation. The window is fixed, every lift has a scheduled hour, and one late work front pushes all the others. The decisive work happens beforehand: a site walkdown, a rigging plan per work front, machine positioning and an on-site simulation.

At a pelletising plant shutdown in São Luís it was a thirty-day window, forty people and three large cranes to replace rotors, dampers and a furnace ventilation duct — the heaviest assembly totalling 75 tonnes.

When the client calls the crane company after the schedule is locked, the equipment becomes the adjustment variable. When they call before, it becomes part of the schedule.

06 Transport

Indivisible cargo: the transport starts with paperwork, not on the road.

Before any oversized piece leaves the yard, a permitting process defines the route, the hours and the escort.

Indivisible cargo is cargo that cannot be broken down to fit within legal weight and dimension limits. To travel, it needs a Special Transport Permit — issued by the authority with jurisdiction over each stretch of the route.

What precedes the permit is a route survey: clearance measurements, assessment of every bridge and structure the load will cross, turning radii, overhead power lines, toll plazas and time-of-day restrictions. One bridge that fails assessment can add hundreds of kilometres to the trip.

That is why the lead time on a specialised transport is almost never the travel time. It is the permitting time — and it must enter the project schedule from the start.

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