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The customer already had the hoist. What they did not have was a crane.
A North American equipment distributor and integrator, working across the United States and Mexico, had bought an electric wire rope hoist for a project in El Paso, Texas. A hoist on its own lifts nothing. It needs a girder to run along, end carriages to carry that girder, a runway for the end carriages to travel on, columns to hold the runway up, electrification to feed the whole thing, and a control system to drive it. Buying a complete crane would have meant paying for a second hoist and throwing the first one away.
So we supplied everything except the hoist, and designed all of it around the one they already owned.
The customer is a distributor and integrator rather than an end user, supplying machinery into projects on both sides of the US–Mexico border. For this job in El Paso, Texas, the hoist had already been procured. The rest of the crane had not.
That is a more common situation than it sounds, and it is usually handled badly. The two normal outcomes are that the customer buys a complete crane and writes off the hoist they already own, or they buy structure from one supplier and spend the commissioning period watching two vendors argue about whose interface is wrong.
Three things had to be true for the third option to work.
The mechanical interface had to be right the first time. The hoist runs on the bottom flange of the main girder. Its wheel gauge, wheel profile, headroom and hook approach are fixed facts about a machine that was already sitting in a crate. The girder had to be designed to them, not the other way round.
The electrical interface had to be right the first time. The hoist has its own motors, brake, limit switches and control wiring. Our control panel, radio remote and travel drives had to work with them as one system, at 220 V / 60 Hz with 48 V controls.
Responsibility had to be unambiguous. If the boundary is vague, every fault on site becomes a negotiation. The quotation and the proforma invoice both stated plainly that the hoist was buyer-supplied and that everything else was ours, designed against the hoist drawings the customer provided.
The hoist was a fixed input, not a variable. Every dimension and every electrical decision in this project was derived from a machine that had already been bought — which is the opposite of how a crane is normally engineered.
The clearest way to describe this project is to state who supplied what.
| Supplied by the customer | Supplied by Kinocranes |
| Electric wire rope hoist | Main girder, 9.4488 m span, Q235B box section |
| Hoist electrical drawings, as design input | End carriages, 2 sets, with travel geared motors and wheels |
| Site installation labour | Control panel with variable frequency drives |
| Radio remote control system | |
| Festoon power supply system across the full 9.4488 m | |
| Conductor bar, 4 × 10 mm², 13.716 m, with fixings | |
| Square bar crane rail, 50 × 30 mm, 2 × 13.716 m | |
| Columns, H350 × 200 × 6 × 10 × 4419 mm, 6 off | |
| Runway beams, H550 × 280 × 200 × 6 × 12 × 10 × 6858 mm, 4 off | |
| End stops, 4 off; English installation and maintenance manuals |
The building had no crane runway and no columns capable of carrying one, so the runway system came with the crane. That matters for the same reason the hoist interface matters: hook to foundation was designed as one load path, by one party.
| Crane Type | European style single girder overhead crane, customer-supplied hoist |
| Quantity | 1 set |
| Rated Capacity | 10 000 kg (10 t) |
| Span | 9.4488 m (31 ft) |
| Lifting Height | 3.048 m (10 ft) |
| Runway Length | 13.716 m (45 ft) |
| Crane Classification | FEM A5 |
| Mechanism Group | FEM 2m (ISO M5) |
| Hoisting Speed | 6 / 0.96 m/min, two speed |
| Long Travel Speed | 0–32 m/min, variable frequency |
| Power Supply | 220 V / 60 Hz / 3 phase |
| Control Voltage | 48 V |
| Control | Radio remote control, 48 V, IP55 |
| Control Panel | IP55 enclosure, Schneider components, variable frequency drives |
| Main Girder | Q235B box girder |
| Wheels | Ø200 mm, 4 off |
| Total Installed Power | 11.6 kW, complete system including the customer’s hoist |
| Total Weight | 3 300 kg, including the customer’s hoist |
| Surface Preparation | Sa 2.5 blast cleaning, 120 µm dry film thickness |
| Protection | Hoisting and cross travel limits, emergency stop, overload, short circuit, overheat, overspeed, overcurrent, phase failure and earth fault protection; anti-collision, warning light, trolley end stops and buffers |
| Delivery | 40 days from receipt of deposit, DDU El Paso, Texas |
Span 9.4488 m is 31 ft. Lifting height 3.048 m is 10 ft. Runway 13.716 m is 45 ft. Columns 4419 mm are 14 ft 6 in; runway beams 6858 mm are 22 ft 6 in. Nothing here was designed in metric and converted afterwards — the geometry was set in the units the building was built in, and the metric figures are what came out. On a US project that is not cosmetic: it is what lets the crane land on foundations and steelwork that were laid out in feet and inches.
On a normal crane the hoist and the girder come from the same drawing set. Here the hoist was a fixed object with a fixed wheel gauge, fixed headroom and a fixed hook approach. The bottom flange width, the flange thickness and the girder depth all follow from it. Get the flange wrong and the hoist does not sit on the beam; get the depth wrong and 10 ft of hook travel is no longer 10 ft.
We asked for the hoist electrical drawings twice before the panel was built, and we did not start the control design until we had them. The result is a single system: one radio remote drives the customer’s hoisting motions and our long travel drives, with limits, interlocks and emergency stop working across both. The alternative — two independent control systems on one crane — is a maintenance liability for as long as the crane exists.
US supply is 60 Hz, and this site runs at 220 V. Motors, drives and the control transformer were specified for it rather than adapted from a 50 Hz standard build. Control voltage is 48 V, which keeps the pendant and remote circuits at a level the customer’s own electricians can work on safely.
The original quotation was CIF Dallas. The customer moved the delivery point to El Paso, and the final proforma invoice was reissued DDU El Paso, shipped by sea and rail. On a project where the buyer is doing their own installation, landing the equipment at the site rather than at a port removes the part of the logistics chain they are least equipped to manage.
The quotation and the proforma invoice both record that the electric hoist is buyer-supplied and that the remainder of the crane and runway system is ours. That sentence is worth more than it looks. It is the reason nobody had to argue about scope when the equipment arrived.
For a project built around equipment somebody else supplied, the enquiry stage is the engineering. These are the items that had to be settled before a price meant anything:
| What we needed | What it determined |
| Hoist wheel gauge and rail profile | Bottom flange width and thickness of the main girder |
| Hoist headroom and hook approach | Girder depth, and whether the required lifting height was achievable |
| Hoist electrical drawings | Control panel design, interlocks, limit circuits, remote channel allocation |
| Supply voltage and frequency at site | Motor, drive and transformer selection — 220 V / 60 Hz, not a 50 Hz build |
| Building span and available runway length | Girder length, runway beam and column layout, conductor bar length |
| Who installs it | Level of detail in the drawings and manuals, and what support had to be available remotely |
Everything on that list is information the customer had. None of it is information a supplier can assume.
We are describing what the photographs and records show, which is a completed mechanical installation. Commissioning, load testing and formal handover are the customer’s own steps and we make no claim about them here.
This approach saves the cost of a hoist. It does not save the cost of getting it wrong, and there are cases where buying a complete crane is simply the better decision.
If the hoist has no documentation — no drawings, no nameplate, no wheel gauge you can measure — then the interface is a guess, and a guess that arrives as a 9 metre girder is an expensive one. If the hoist is near the end of its own service life, matching a new structure to a worn mechanism buys a crane that will need opening up again shortly. And if the hoist duty class does not match the work the crane will actually do, the hoist becomes the limiting component of a machine built around it.
The test is whether the hoist is a known quantity. Where it is, integrating around it is straightforward engineering and it saves real money. Where it is not, the honest answer is that the saving is not worth the risk.
If you have a hoist and need the girder, end carriages, controls, electrification or a complete runway system to go with it, send us the following and our engineering team will confirm what will fit before quoting anything:
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