Cranes and Derricks

by Howard I. Shapiro

Everything you need to know about using cranes and derricks If you employ cranes, trust one rock-solid reference to provide tried-and-tested guidelines for selecting and working with them safely and efficiently. Nothing available covers the subject with the depth and expertise you'll find in Cranes and Derricks. The authors - Howard I. Shapiro, Jay P. Shapiro, and Lawrence K. Shapiro, are the principals of an international firm that's helped define the state-of-the-art in crane and derrick engineering. This new third edition addresses... *the latest innovations and technologies, including new telescopic crane attachments and heavy-lift mobile crane arrangements - both telescopic and lattice boom - and newly-permitted partial outrigger extensions *a solution to the problem of crane stability under dynamic loading *crane support considerations, pick-and-carry work, tailing operations, site access and other site issues *new information on safety and accident avoidance and risk management *and much, much more

576 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had been reading this book on and off for a while because I was doing some copywriting work on cranes, and I needed to understand the subject well. I haven't finished it, but I have got all I can from it for now, so it's time for a review. Written by two engineers who also happen to be brothers, this is the definitive modern book on crane technology, and goes into the kind of excruciating detail you would expect from good engineers. Its authors are passionate about their subject, and their knowledge is broad and deep. Unfortunately, it is also written in the style you would expect of engineers - it's very cold and clinical, with plenty of long, convoluted sentences, and has no dynamism or energy to inspire the reader. After an excellent first chapter, in which they define everything down to the word "crane", they become much more technical, and it is sometimes quite a challenge for those not trained in engineering to understand all the mathematics necessary to explain the forces at work in the crane mechanisms. They occasionally try to insert jokes which always fall flat because of the context that is mostly very serious, dealing as it does with the safety of the equipment and the personnel using it. In addition, I only found this book somewhat useful for the basic crane concepts - it did give me a good grounding in terminology - but it was missing any detail about the kinds of cranes I really needed to know about: overhead travelling cranes and gantry cranes are allocated only half a page of text out of a 654-page book. Given the variation in size, shape and purpose of such cranes, and the very different forces at work on them as a result, I would have thought they warranted at least a full chapter. Something for the next edition, perhaps?