Stuff You Should Know - How Cranes Work

Episode Date: January 11, 2024

You’ve probably seen cranes moving elegantly in the sky, but did you know what an important role they play in their surroundings? Learn all about cranes in this episode on cranes.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is stuff you should know the Tonka edition Hmm, you know I had a terrible thought earlier that it might be fun to Release this episode on cranes. Yeah, and one of the bird cranes Uh-huh And then we have another one coming up that I just

You know asked our our print day ruse to get on that could we could also one coming up that I just asked our friend Dave Ruse to get on that we could also do, and you know what that one is, did you see that? I don't want to give it away. It's also a food in a cartoon. I don't know. We could do one on the food in the cartoon with the same title, and we should just start doing even more confusing titles. Okay, I think that's a great idea. So we have to do one on the bird cranes next. Okay, so and we'll just title them the same thing.

Yeah, okay. How cranes work, how cranes work. Yeah, figure it out. People won't know what they're, because that happens a lot anyway, like when we did Nirvana, we actually put not the band, right? Right, that was the opposite of being purposefully confusing.

Yeah, exactly. Today in this episode, a couple of minutes in now, we'll finally reveal, we're talking about the construction version of Cranes. That's right. Yeah, that's why I said the Tonka edition, which is probably a bit of a giveaway. Were you into Tonka?

I wasn't that into Tonka. Okay. I think I had a truck or something, but I wasn't, I was a sensitive boy. I wasn't banging trucks around and building things. I was too. I also feel like we've gone back in time because this feels like a very 10 years ago thing for us.

Oh yeah, the article on the House of Work site was written by Marshall Brain himself. Oh, goodness. Mr. Rooze helps us out with this one. Yeah, okay, was that the deal? No, it wasn't. I actually didn't know that there was something. I was looking up some factor,

whatever, and that article came up. And I was like, oh, okay. So yeah, no, that wasn't the deal. But I don't remember what made me want to do this. I think it was just. Probably saw one, huh? I don't think so. me want to do this. I think it was just... Probably saw one, huh? I don't think so. I mean, I've seen plenty.

But no, I really don't think that's what did it. I don't know where it came from, but I think it's just kind of like a lifelong fascination with it. I'm not like a crane of file or anything like that. I can't tell you the names of the operators. I don't have the trading cards or anything, but I do find construction stuff pretty impressive

from like a distance, you know what I mean? Totally. Yeah, when you can't see people. Yeah, when I see one of those things going, I always stop and take a look and just think, my lord, what have we come up with now? Yeah, and we should say there's a ton of different cranes. So this is specifically tower cranes,

and we didn't call the episode that's just, because apparently we're gonna confuse everybody. No. Tower cranes would have given it away. But we're talking about a very specific kind of crane, and it is the construction crane, the kind you see on construction sites, especially these days if you're driving through Toronto.

Yeah, apparently Dave dug up some stats on crane usage. Who knew if that existed? And Toronto right now leads the way in North America with the most operating cranes. I guess they're building a lot there. Yeah. They got 121 going. But uh, boy, in the 2010s, he found that there were about 100,000 cranes operating around the world during that big, you know, 2010s construction boom.

Yeah. And I mean, that's a really good proxy for how the global construction industry is doing, because I guess you essentially can't undertake any decent size construction project without a tower crane of some sort on your site. Yeah, if you want height, you're going to need a crane. Yeah, you want height, you want it very quickly and easily move like a pile of steel girders or rebar. Like, yeah, you can break down that bunch of rebar and have a bunch of guys just kind of card it from one side to the other, or you can save about 20 man hours and just lift it up and move it over with the crane.

They're invaluable for a construction site. They are. And they also found this cool stat, which is the largest one going right now from, I don't know how to say that, Croll cranes that O has a null set. It's Danish. So, yeah, some Danish pronunciation. Crue. But the K 10,000, my friend, as you know,

and my friends out there listening, that can lift about 100 SUVs, 528,000 pounds. Yeah. And like 100 SUVs. Yeah, not like escape, see, they're like normal 100 SUVs. Yeah, not like escape either, like normal size SUVs. At Google, like mid-size Volvo SUV, right? Yeah, it makes sense. It's a lot of SUVs all at once that it could lift up.

And that's, as we'll see, it depends on where it's lifting from and all that. There's a lot of variables and factors and all of that put together combined with the danger and just the unique situation anybody who's operating a crane is in makes it a really demanding high-pressure job. I saw one crane operator basically liking it to eight hours of non-stop surgery essentially because of the attention to detail, you have to have it all times, you have to anticipate what people on the ground are gonna do,

based on their body movement, and you're working with your hands. You use two joysticks, and it seems very simple, but you can make the crane do all sorts of interesting things with just those two joysticks, and depending on how busy the construction site is, you might not stop moving those joysticks essentially the entire day. Yeah, all sorts of things.

How about a self-shoe? Sure. Yeah, it's like a battle zone. Remember that game? No. I think we've even talked about this. That's the one where you look through the arcade game where it was made out of green. It's a cold one.

It's just lined out and not colored in like a vector. Yeah, sort of. And you had a left and right joystick like you were driving a tank around and looking through an IP. Yes. I remember now. And then that made me talk about CWALF, I think. The Paris go to the

same real game basically. Basically, yeah. All right. Yeah. But, um, we bought from market. Yeah, exactly. It's kind of like that, but, um, with real death involved potentially. Right.

Uh, and this whole thing was the idea of a German construction engineer, post-World War II, named Hans Lieber, because Hans Lieber had a lot of Germany, and all of Germany had a lot of Germany to rebuild, especially in the city centers, post-World War II. And so he came up with this idea in 1949 of a mobile tower crane that you could take from place to place. What you would say now, it was probably what we would call a Luffing crane, a LeoFFI and G, which we'll talk about a little bit later on when we're detailing cranes. So not that the huge, super tall ones, but it was 1949, it was a good start. Yeah, I mean, give Libra a break.

Like he's the one who essentially said, like, we need cranes and we can do more with cranes. Like, there would not be skyscrapers without tower cranes. Sorry, face it. Yeah. And also, we should probably give them their due. It goes all the way back to, at the very least, the 6th century BCE Greeks who were the first ones to start using cranes and construction projects. Yeah. to start using cranes and construction projects. Yeah, so basically nothing happened for 2600 years,

roughly until Hans Lieber came along. These climbing cranes were going to detail came about in the 1960s, thanks to, and these things are pretty remarkable. That's the really giant tall ones that you see that kind of build themselves. And boy, I just stick around to everybody because it gets pretty hot.

But they were, it came to us courtesy of a couple of Aussie brothers, Ted and Eric Fevelle, I guess, in 1962. Sure. And because they were Australian, of course, they called them kangaroo jumping cranes, like for real. I'll bet everyone but the Australians called it that. Oh, maybe so.

But they helped erect the twin towers in New York City. Yeah, apparently so did the K-10,000 from what I understand. Oh, so that one's been around, huh? Yeah, I think a lot of cranes helped build the twin towers, but you couldn't have built the twin towers without climbing cranes. And like you said, man, if you Towers without climbing cranes. And like you said, man, if you understand how the climbing cranes work, they're just,

it's amazing, but it also answers a really great question. Like, how did those little cranes get all the way on top of a skyscraper? Just wait, just you wait the eight-year-old kid in all of us. But we're going to be mainly talking about what's known as a hammerhead tower crane, and that is when you look up in the sky, and you see a giant, giant tall tea, essentially, with a very long side of that tea, horizontal tea, and a shorter side coming out the other side of the tea. It's like an inexpertly written tea. It looks like one of my daughter's T's.

Okay. Well, I would call her inexpert at this point. She's just starting out. Yeah, her penmanship is terrible. We're working on it. Just teach her how to cut letters out of magazines. We were working on her math last night, and she was having me check her actual math work, and I said, your math is all perfect. I said, I'd like to see work on just sort of the neatness and how

you display your answers. She was like, what? It's like, well, you know, I can look at this. I was kind of pointing things out in a very Larry David kind of way. So I'm not sure if it's sunk in. We'll see. Did she get the curb references? Oh, she totally did. Jeff Garland's her favorite. All right, well, let's talk about the components of a crane because it's actually extraordinarily simple. It's extraordinary. It's just as easy as that. They're really simple machines, but they're intricate in how precise they need to be. Yeah.

So we gotta start, well, let's go bottom up. You wanna go bottom up? Mm. Okay. Yeah, that seems all right. All right, well, we gotta start with the foundation because obviously if something is this tall and they're, you know, lifting things

like 100 SUVs basically, you're gonna have to have a heck of a foundation. And that's where you're going to start. These things are actually sunk into a concrete pad. The concrete pad for the largest ones weighs about 400,000 pounds. And it is, it's not like they do this in blocks and sections. It's one big, long concrete pore through Rebar to just make that thing as solid as it was built into the actual bedrock of the earth. Yeah, they essentially are creating their own bedrock to pour around the foundation of the of the mast is what it's called. That part of the crane that rises upward from the ground, that's called the tower or the mast and the bottom of the mast is cemented into an enormous multi hundred thousand pound block of concrete. It's pretty impressive. In and of itself, right?

Totally. So the mast you might, if you look closely, you'll see it's made of essentially trusses, squares and trusses. And if you will refer to our bridges episode, we came face to face with the realization that trusses are the most beautifully strong structure on earth essentially. So it makes sense, because as we'll see, you want these the mass sections to be fairly lightweight, and you can make something lightweight if you use trusses. So I'm sure it was Hans Lieber who figured that one out like right out of the gate. Yeah, absolutely.

Depending on, you know, your project is how tall your tower is going to be because like you said, they, well, you'll see how they build themselves. But you don't want one that's taller than it needs to be. And obviously you want it tall enough. The tallest ones are over 400 feet tall, and the more standard winds are in the like 250 foot range. Right. I guess that was the K-10,000. I think China just released the largest toughest crane around. It's a real competitor to the K-10,000. But anything over about 400 feet, we haven't really cracked the physics of a free standing tower crane beyond that. It's just, it's too unstable, it's too risky, it doesn't work. But so, let's say we

top out at about 200, 250, I think you said something like that. Yeah, 250-ish. The top, I don't know, 10% of that probably, would be made up of what's called the cat's head. And the cat's head is essentially the top of the crane that all of the parts that actually do the work above the mast connect to. Okay.

So for example, you have the sluing unit. And the sluing unit is at the neck, basically the base of the head of that cat's head. And it's essentially a huge disc that the whole thing can spin around on. 360 degrees. Go buy a worksite, tower crane, shout up to to him say do me a 360 any crane operator worth their salt will just stop what they're doing and do a 360 for you to show just how amazing the

sluying unit is. Do you know the definition of sluice? Does it have something to do with Seattle? No it's to turn violently or uncontrollably. No. Yeah, that's what the verb is. Undergoing, sluing, or as a noun, a violent or uncontrollable sliding movement. Chuck, I tip my Breton cap to you for looking up that word in year 15, man.

Way to go. Well, I didn't know what it meant. So I appreciate that, but it's just, I don't know. I'm sure someone can explain this. Boy, I'm hoping we hear from grain people. Oh, I hope so too. And I hope they're like, gosh, you guys sure got it right. Not like I'm never listening to you again.

Like the scuba people. So the sluing unit is where the mast and the top functioning part of the crane meet and it spins it around. It's what allows the whole thing to spin around. All right, the next thing we have is that the big long arm, that big working arm that extends way out, the horizontal arm that lifts the stuff, although it doesn't actually lift the stuff. It holds the stuff. That's called the jib arm. A jib is not specific to cranes. There are all kinds of jib arms. If you've ever worked on a movie set and they have crane shots and stuff like that, those are called jibs as

well. Why is that funny? Why are you laughing at everything? Because you're drunk. I'm not drunk. I'm drunkish, but not fully, not enough to explain my laughiness. Okay, yes. So the gym can go out, you know, a few hundred feet sometimes for the extra large ones. And it basically allows it to lift things up, swing it over and drop it off somewhere else.

And if you're thinking, well, it sounds a lot more complicated than that. It isn't, it isn't. It's not in that that's what that Gibarm is there for, but there is something called a load chart that you really got to be well acquainted with because if you're picking up something from the very tippy end of that 300 foot Gib,

you're not gonna be able to lift as much as you would if that thing were pulled back to like 50 or 60 feet because of physics. It would tip over. Yeah, you can't lift the full load of Volvo mid-size SUVs that you could if it's much closer if the load's closer to the center of gravity for the whole crane, right? Yeah. for the whole crane, right? Yeah, so I guess that maximum lift capacity would be when it's at its peak of a position. Yeah, peak balance.

Like lifting, yeah, peak balance. Right, so it would not necessarily be, I don't know, it depends on the weight of the load where that peak of balance would be, right? So, but for the heaviest for its maximum lift, it would probably be pretty much close to the center of the jib arm. Maybe. Yeah. Now, I think it's actually a little closer. Regardless. The thing that I think is ingenious about all this is that the jib arm never moves. It's static. It might move like swiveling, but it's not swiveling itself. It's just swiveling with the rest of the whole working part of the crane.

So the jib arm stays where it is. So they've actually designed everything else around the fact that the jib arm stays straight. And that's what allows loads to like move toward the cab away from the cab toward the end of the arm, toward the inside of the arm, the jib arm, through a bunch of pulleys and specifically a something called the trolley, which is attached to the underside of the jib arm. And it's just what moves back and forth along the jib arm, allowing you to kind of move a load, you know, closer or further away depending on where the people on the ground need it. Yeah.

Like if you stood up and put one arm out, that arm would just stay there and there's and picture a little little carriage on the underside of your arm that slides down to your fingertips and back to your armpit. Yeah, that's stuff that hangs down from like your bicep when you just let your arms stay there. Imagine that moving toward your fingers. Oh, God. It's called aging. So your arms stay straight the whole time

and that little carriage on the underside of your arm is what's moving stuff. And then if you want to move it from here to there, you turn your whole body and you go, errr, while you do it. So, you know, your kids will laugh and stuff. But that's essentially it. That arm just stays there. Yeah, and when you turn your whole body, you know, your kids will laugh and stuff, but that's essentially it. That arms just stays there.

Yeah, and when you turn your whole body, your hips are sluing. Right. Guess so. Like Elvis. So, then the hook, the thing that actually hooks on to the load, that's just connected to the trolley, right? It's pretty neat because you actually raise and lower the hook, so it's connected to a system of pulleys, like a whole bunch of different pulleys. And when you connect these pulleys together, it's called weaving.

And so there's a certain way to connect all these pulleys to maximize the grip and traction they have while also allowing like the heaviest possible load to kind of hang from that cable without snapping. Yeah, and it just works as a rod and reel, like when you're fishing. You just wind it in to raise it and let it out to lower it.

Now that technically is found in the hoist unit, which to me is just, I mean, it's the thing that makes everything move. Well, no, I guess the sluing unit makes the thing move too. Anything that has to do with the load, the hook, all of that stuff, it's found in the hoist unit. Yeah. And that works with that hook block through a series of pulleys.

They're not just like, hey, let's put get this gigantic pulley and a giant cable. They want that cable running through several, several pulleys. Right. And so that goes up and then usually up above the top of the jib arm and then back behind to the counter jib where it sits, I think usually the hoist unit sits behind the counter weights. And it consists of a big old burly 180 horsepower motor that's spinning a giant drum that has a bunch of steel cable wound around it. So the whole thing acts like a fishing line, a rod and reel essentially, is the best analogy for it. And when you want to lower something, the drum spins and the line pays out. When you want to raise it back up, the drum spins the other way and reels the line in, in, Mr. You got a big old couple hundred tonn fish on the end of your line there. Congratulations.

Yeah, and that cable is, I mean, you would think it's got to be like three feet around or something, but cable is really, really strong. I'm not sure how big this cable is, but I've seen cables that like pull a boat out of the water, and those things are not big around at all, and I'm constantly thinking, well, I wonder when I'm going to see somebody's boat snap off. And it just doesn't happen. Cable is just super, super strong. Yeah, for sure. You know, next time we do a topic like this,

we should get two, five year olds to come in and explain this part, because they would do it such as so much for simple. Do you think so? I think so, simply, yeah. All right. Two, five, or maybe four year olds. Okay.

It's got a counter-jib, but that is if you look at the tower crane and you see that big long arm, on the other side of the mass, you're gonna see a counter-jib, but that is if you look at the tower crane and you see that big long arm on the other side of the mass You're going to see a much shorter horizontal arm Out of what I guess you would call the back of the crane and that is going to hold the counter weights because you got a counterbalance all those Volvo SUVs With a lot of serious weights and that is that those are the counter weights

They the the K 10,000 requires almost as many counter weights as it requires for the maximum lift. It's 491,000 in change of poundage compared to what I say, like 580 or something like that. Yeah. And there's just these huge concrete slabs that are shaped slightly like a T. So the bottom parts fit into a slot, but the tops won't, so they just dangle there.

It's nuts. Actually, if you think about what's going on, hundreds of feet up in the air. Well, what's nuts is, when they're not lifting anything, those counterweights make the crane kind of tip backward a little bit. And if you're a crane operator, and you start lifting and dropping things off, that crane does a little weeple wobble of a few feet when it's lifting and releasing things.

And you just gotta, you know, you gotta be used to that, I guess. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure that takes a lot of getting used to. Yeah. And then there's a tower peak, which hammerhead tower cranes don't usually have a peak. It's just flat all the way across. But sometimes they have a nice little, almost like a sailboat sail, masting kind of thing. And usually that's to help support from above the jib, because those things extend out pretty far and they're canilevered.

So they can use all the support they can get. There's a more cableage basically, right? Kind of supporting it from above. Yes. Yeah. And there's one more big, big piece of equipment. As far as importance goes, he asked me it could be a little bigger. I have some thoughts on how to improve these things.

But that is the operator cab where the person sits, the crane operator sits for eight to 12 to 15 hours a day, depending on how much they're being put to work. Yeah, and it's like roughly, small-ish walk-in closet size in a mid-market price suburban home. So here are my two thoughts. Eight, these people climb up a ladder to get there. Yeah, how long does it take them, Chuck? It can take like 10 minutes or more, depending on how fast they're climbing. So my first improvement is you got to get them out of like off that ladder. No one needs to be climbing up that thing at the beginning or the end of a shift.

Okay. Check one. There's got to be a way to get somebody up there like a rig they attach them to and mechanically pulleat themselves up or something like that. Okay. So that's my first suggestion. The other one is that thing needs a little tiny toilet. There's no bathroom. There's climate controlled which is great, but they don't have a toilet. And Dave said he found out they pee in a bottle and poop in a plastic bag.

Like get a little bitty. You could make that thing a little bit bigger and put a couple of mod cons in there for these people. Yeah, no, it's true for sure. I think the thing that fascinated me the most about the cab besides not having a bathroom is that the windshield, essentially, extends all the way down below the operator's feet.

So when you're sitting in the seat, your feet are dangling over the ground, hundreds and hundreds of feet below. Yeah. It's really something to see. And let's see. I'm not trying to be gross, but this is real world stuff. What if you've got, you know, diarrhea or something and you're up there? Well, you know, I saw a lot of real problems.

For sure, it is. I saw a lot of like blogs and articles about how as a crane operator, you really need to take care of yourself. Like probably more than the average construction worker would, in addition to like getting sleep, so you're not like off your game on any day,

you want to eat well, at least for that reason. Like you don't want to eat like a dozen wings for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That's a bad idea. No chili, nothing like that, chili dogs, chili con carne, none of that stuff. Yeah, this is a real consideration for sure. And because it takes at least 10 minutes to get to the ground,

of course you're not going to stop every time you minutes to get to the ground. Of course, you're not gonna stop every time you have to go to the pot. You're gonna just go up there. Yeah, you put a little tiny potty up there, it's all I'm saying. Plus also, even if you don't, even if you're like, I want to climb back down, and this is going to be awful,

so I need to get out of this cap. When you're climbing down and you go to the bathroom and then you have to climb back up, that could be 45 minutes an hour or worth of time. That's my point. That the entire construction site has just essentially shut down waiting on you or whatever was coming next is just waiting on you. Yeah. You have literally slowed down the entire project. That's the amount of pressure that's on the crane operator at all times typically. Little bathrooms solve that whole problem. Yeah. At the very least one of those like stadium catheters that people use at football games. Should we take

a break? Yes. All right, we'll be right back with more on tower cranes. From the studio who brought you the number one podcast, The Piked and Massacre. This is Murder 101. A group of high school students started a project to research a string of unsolved murders. If those murders happened in the mid-1980s. He's out there doing stuff. He just didn't stop. Everything that the students predicted through their profile turned out to be accurate. Redhead killer profile, male Caucasian, 5'9 to 6'2,

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Those are the things that keep me up. Listen to on purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHot Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay Chuck, so now we're at probably the coolest part. You thought everything was cool thus far. Just wait for this, because you mentioned the Faville brothers out of Australia. They invented that kangaroo crane, which from what I can tell no one calls it that anymore, they probably did it first. Now they call them climbing cranes. There's actually two ways they figured out to make cranes climb to essentially build

themselves. That's what they do. Because there's only so much of the mast that you can build using smaller cranes. Eventually, the cranes going to get too tall for the cranes that are helping build it to lift. And it needs to start taking over. It needs to stand on its own two feet and take charge of its own life. Yeah, or really four legs. Sure. The two methods are top climbing and bottom climbing. So at the beginning of each job,

or when you're going to get a job, I guess you have to determine if you're a top or a bottom. And for top climbing, it really helps, I got to say, to look at a video like Dave's in his these video demos. We're going to do our best to describe this stuff. If you happen to be at home or a safe place when you're not driving your car, you know, give yourself 30 seconds and check it out. I found a good one for top climbing. Search Stafford, Soyma, SOIMA, and then for bottom climbing, Hans Lieber's company has a great video on it, too. I love these guys. Hopefully this is going to blow up.

And we'll be like, man, where are we getting all these views from? We've got 100 views in the last six months now. Yeah, I hope that doesn't mean like we should invest in buying more cranes because of all the interest. Hey, that's on them if they misread the market that badly. All right, so the climbing frame is what is necessary to build a top climbing frame. The climbing frame is three sided. It's got three sides and then one open side.

And it's built around the base of the mast, kind of like Dave described it as like a cage that's a little wider than the mast so it can slide up and down on the outside, which makes a lot of sense. You know those construction elevators that they have on construction sites that are essentially that,

that people like used to get up? Imagine that, but there's no place for you to stand because the mass of the crane is going through it. Yeah, that's much more convoluted way to think of it. I like the thing. Yeah, exactly. The cool thing about this climbing frame is it is equipped with these hydraulic jacks.

So what it does is, they have all these, you know, trusses in a very straight line because while you're doing this, that jib arm has to stay completely straight and still. Or I'm sorry, yeah, that long arm, you don't want it moving around. And you'll see why in a second. So they line them all up in a row. And that climbing frame goes down. And it picks up one of these trusses or it doesn't pick it up. I imagine it gets loaded in or whatever. And then these hydraulic jacks push it up, you know, kind of, you know, a few feet at

a time basically, decompressing and compressing and inching this thing up and up and up until it gets to the top of where you need a new section, and then they slide it in and attach it. But the frightening part is all of this is done. Like this thing has to be unbolted in order to bolt the new section on. So there's a very tenuous time where everything has just got to be perfectly imbalanced while they unbolt this thing. Yeah, and what's scary is at that most tenuous time, that's when the crane is lifting the next mass section up so that it can be slid into that open fourth wall

of the climbing frame. It's really nuts. And the drivers, the operators even out, because they don't even want anyone in the cab moving around, like, you know, with diarrhea. Right. But no, I saw in one video that the crane had to have the operator in there to lift up each mass section. Well, I saw that a lot of times they're not in there, so some maybe self-operational and

some may require just a very steady, you know, someone on some emoticum. I mean, yeah, no, that makes sense that there wouldn't be any in there because it's very may require just a very steady, you know, someone own some emotive make- Yeah, no, that makes sense that there wouldn't be any in there because it's very dangerous because the only thing connecting the entire top part of the crane, which is already built to the bottom of the mast is that climbing frame at those points when they're starting

to move a new section in. But when you do this, you can do this up to, what was it about, you know, 400 feet where the whole thing tops out? Like, yeah, that's, I can't imagine seeing something like that. Let alone working on it, because I don't know if you said it on that climbing frame, there's some dudes being gender neutral here, um, riding that thing. Like, you a dude, if you are sticking giant pins into the mass frame sections to erect a giant tower crane, that's just the kind of personality it takes, I think. Yeah, and I had always assumed these were telescoping like a fire truck ladder. Nope. I thought it was just some huge unit on the ground that could just telescope up to 400 feet.

The fact that this is how it's done is remarkable. Yeah, and so you can almost imagine the climbing frame is like a giant speculum that separates the top of the tower crane from the bottom and you insert another section and then it does it again. All right, you explain the bottom because I got it and I saw the video,

but I had a couple of questions. Oh, okay. All right. Mm-hmm. So bottom climbing, you do the opposite. With the top climbing, you're adding the new sections at the top. At the bottom, you build the crane

like any other tower crane to start up to 200, 300 feet, whatever. And you use it like normal, but the difference is with a bottom climbing crane, you build the building around the crane with a top climbing inside the building. Exactly. Top climbing is outside the building, it stays outside of the building the whole time. Bottom climbing, you build the building around the crane and eventually as the building gets tall enough, it starts to serve as the support structure for the crane because eventually

you have to decouple the crane from the foundation that was poured for it like any other crane. And there's a jack that climbs up these climbing rails essentially two ladders that are on the outside of the the crane itself and it Pushes the crane up little by little usually about three stories at a time and so now the crane has lost its bottom section Because bottom section is now three stories above it and the top three stories is now Unsecured to the next top three stories of the building. So they then secure that to the building with callers. And then they disassemble everything below it and build the building out around the shaft

where the crane used to be. They fill it in as the crane just moves higher and higher and higher. And with this method, you can build as tall a building as physics will allow, because the crane grows upward with the building as the building grows upward. Yeah, it's amazing. And I guess I'd answer my question. My question was sort of, if you need that kind of foundation for a freestanding outside,

like, is being attached to the building enough, and I guess it is. Yeah, yeah, yes, for sure. is being attached to the building enough, and I guess it is. Yeah, yes, for sure. And I think it's like special parts of the building. It's not like they attach it to like studs and drywall or something like that. Like I think the building is designed to accommodate this frame also. Yeah.

I think that more than it's for my question. Yes, but those are the two ways that you can raise a crane and they're both spectacular in their ingeniousness. All right, so that's how they're built. Bottom up or top down, not top down? How do you say it?

Well, either one, I think, bottom climbing or top climbing, you mean? I guess so. Those are the giant tower cranes. We mentioned that Luffing Crane at the beginning. This is a, this is when you don't have a ton of space. And I saw a video where it showed, especially when there's multiple cranes on a job swinging around. Yeah.

You got to think about the fact that like, if you're swinging something 300 feet, everything has got to be out of the way of that swing as well. So when you have tighter spaces, you might want a Luffing Gibarm. And that is when the horizontal arm actually raises and lowers. swing as well. So when you have tighter spaces, you might want a luffing jib arm, and that is when the horizontal arm actually raises and lowers. So instead of having that block and hook going up and down with a pulley, it's just sort of there. And the action of lifting that arm up and down is what brings the thing on the hook closer or further away. Yeah, if you've ever seen like one of those wrecking balls that they use, that's attached to a luffing crane typically.

Sure. What about self-reactors? These are pretty neat. They usually show up on the back of like a truck and the truck puts down some feet for stabilization and probably lifts the truck off of the ground. And a crane just kind of pops out, it folds out. Telescoping effect that you thought

the original tower cranes were doing. This essentially does. This is a folding, it's not telescoping. Okay, but it's folded up in itself. It's all there and it unfurls, I guess, is what I'm after here. Yeah, I just want to make sure you know it, telescoping men.

I learned what telescoping means and sluing, thanks to you in this one episode. That's right, these things just unfold into the sky. And it's a really also some really cool videos you can watch. Yeah. Should we take another break? Well, before we do, I wanted to take another crack at explaining bottom climbing. We'll be right back.

From the studio who brought you the number one podcast, The Pike to Massacre. This is Murder 101. A group of high school students started a project to research a string of unsolved murders. Those murders happened in the mid-1980s. He's out there doing stuff. He just didn't stop. Everything that the students predicted through their profile turned out to be accurate. Redhead killer profile.

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Listen to Weedian House, an I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, my name's Jay Shetty, and I'm the host of On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. On Purpose is dedicated, bringing a safe space to have the most vulnerable, powerful and inspiring conversations that define culture. In this week's episode, I have the immense privilege of sitting down with the incredible Michelle Obama, a woman whose life story resonates with strength, resilience, and unwavering grace.

From her early days as a dedicated student to becoming the first lady of the United States, Michelle Obama's journey is laced with hope, compassion, and a real commitment to making the world a better place. What keeps me up are the things that I know, the war in the regions. What is AI going to do for us? The environment are we moving at all fast enough. What are we doing about education? Are people gonna vote? Those are the things that keep me up. Listen to on purpose with Jay Shetty on the Alright, we talked a little bit about the operator, but there are all kinds of team of people

that work with these cranes obviously in the US. There's a certifying body called the NCC CO National Commission for the certification of crane operators and So that's that's the big job. That's the most experienced person They have worked on all these other jobs that we're about to talk about for years and years before they get to be the crane operator. And I was curious what kind of money they made.

And it's all over the map if you look on the internet because it seems like it's just kind of hard to find that stuff out. But I did see that in the southeastern United States, like $90,000 puts you at about the 75th percentile. I also saw on Reddit, like my friend does this in New York kind of thing. But apparently, these people on Reddit are saying in New York City, you can make, you know, two to three to $400,000 as like one of the top two or three earners in New York, which is I imagine the top of the game in the world.

Yeah, no, I totally believe that. Like, you're so in demand that you have nothing to do with raising the crane or taking it down. You're there as long as they need a person to operate the crane for the job. And then once that's done, they move you over. Somebody hires you on another job site. Like, you are untouchable as far as like the job site's concerned. Yeah. And in the interview, the first question is how much fiber do you include in your diet? Right.

So then there's a lift director that somebody basically manages the lifting that goes on. If it's a heavy load or any kind of unique or dangerous load, they're supposed to formulate a plan for it of how it's going to be lifted, where it's going to go, what direction it's going to follow, all that stuff. And they essentially are just kind of running the show on the ground. I believe they're usually the one. No, I was going to say they're the one that the crane operator is probably in touch with, but I believe that's the signal person instead. That's right.

And the signal person is doing just what you think. They're on the radio and constant communication, but they're also doing hand signals, not just on that CB radio or whatever they use, walkie talkies. And there are times when that crane operator is working blind and they don't have sight of what they're doing and that's when that signal person and really everyone working together is so key. Yeah, that's the person who communicates to the crane operator that the people on the ground want them to to their horn. Right.

And they use that same pull down motion that you use for big rig truckers. Right. Or it gets the message that I have to go potty. So let's show everything down for 40 minutes. That's the international squeeze your knees together and hold your crotch. Signal. Uh, did you go over the rigor? No.

Okay. Now, that is the person who is preparing the load, attaching it to the crane hook. Obviously, that load on the ground, it's not just like, you know, just attach it there and I'm sure it's fine. Like, everything has to be so buttoned up. Like, nothing can be loose or falling off of that thing. Like, it's got to be a very nicely wrapped Christmas present. Yes.

So depending on where you're working, there are 16 states and seven cities that require you to have a license. That's it. Everywhere else, there's state or the city does not require you to have any sort of formal training whatsoever. The thing is the NCCO offers certification too, which is usually voluntary, but I get the impression that if you want to be one of those higher

end crane operators, you would be certified for that job multiple times over. And not only just to kind of enhance your desirability as an employee, but also, wow, I put that as like the HR person and the all HR people. But also like some job sites might require you to have at least a certification if not a license. And it might not even be the job site, it might be their insurers. Like nobody's gonna be be the jobs, I didn't might be there in sure.

It's like nobody's gonna be like, hey you, come over here and operate this crane. Like you're gonna have to have tons of experience and probably some sort of paperwork to back that experience up. But I find it shocking and alarming that plenty of states don't require the person who's 400 feet in the air,

lifting 200 tons to have some sort of formal training for that. Totally. It is, it shocked me as well. These things are expensive to rent. You know, obviously it's a cost a lot of money to build one, but they get that money back because Dave just looked up just sort of an average rental, a flat top tower crane within just an 88,000 pound capacity lift, which is, I don't know how many of all those that is, but it's nowhere close to what I said earlier.

It's 44 tons. A 262 foot jib arm, so about, you know, a little more than half of sort of the maximum, that sucker is $35,000 a month. The cheapest is $3600, and that's for the one you bring on the truck. A lot of those rental prices will include putting the thing together over the course of four or five days and taking it down, too, and maybe even a skilled crane operator, depending. Yeah, absolutely. So you can imagine that these things are actually fairly dangerous. Safety is far and away like the number one concern for any crane operator.

Every single interview I've read with a crane operator, they all were like, it's all about safety essentially. Like yes, you're really important on the job site, but if it's not safe, you don't do it. Yeah. Like you just don't. I mean, you're lifting heavy loads, you're swinging them through the job site, but if it's not safe, you don't do it. You just don't. I mean, you're lifting heavy loads, you're swinging them through the air, you can drop them. There's all sorts of stuff that can happen. And yes, wind is a big one, as we'll see, but they've kind of figured that out.

But just the fact that you have these huge loads high up in the air when they get dropped or when something goes wrong, people can die. And I mean, it does happen. I remember this past July in Manhattan, the entire jib arm of a crane fell down. I think, I don't remember how many stories, but it was significant. I actually, I think it did kill one person

who was in a nearby apartment building, like some of the debris like crashed through their window and killed them, I think it did kill one person who was in a nearby apartment building, like some of the debris like crashed through their window and killed them, I think. But they were the only person who died out of this 16 ton load in a jib arm crashing to the ground in Manhattan in the middle of a day. That one called on fire, didn't it? Yeah, there was a fire in the hoist unit for some reason. I couldn't figure out what caused it. That's a lot that no one was killed. I mean, I remember when that happened too, and I was just like, how can that happen in New York City

and not killed like 12 people below at least, you know? Yeah. Apparently another real danger check is hitting power lines. Yeah. Because people will walk, like they'll walk like a load, you know, along to stabilize it, say like a bunch of pipes. And that pipe is connected via metal cable to the crane, and if the crane can, in contact with a 13,000 volt power line, whoever's got their hand on that load of pipes, it will be electrocuted, and it happens like a lot. Like not a lot.

It happens frequently to an alarming degree. How about that? Well, they found some stats and what he got was from 2011 to 2017. Over that seven years, they averaged 42 crane related deaths per year. That's not insignificant, you know, 42 per year. And I think half of those were things falling on people. Not all of them were tower cranes.

It's kind of all cranes basically lumped together. But yeah, sometimes they're taking it apart and it falls apart on them. It seems like there's a lot of crushing death with it, which is just unfathomable. Yeah, people have gotten caught in the climbing cage, caught between that and the frame of the mast. There was one guy who was taking a part, a crane,

and he was on the 45th story, and that platform that he was on outside the crane, removing pins, didn't have a railing, it didn't have a railing, and didn't have a railing and it shifted and he fell 45 stories because it didn't have a railing. I just couldn't believe it when I read like the OSHA report. I'm just like, oh my God, that's insanely nuts. But yeah, so safety is extraordinarily important,

you can see. And I said, I teased something, Chuck, that I think extraordinarily important, you can see. And I said, I teased something, Chuck, that I think you should take us home with, that they figured out what to do in high winds. Yeah, you know what you do in high winds is you unbolt that thing and let it spin with the wind. Obviously, you've got the real all the way, realed in, and it's not like swinging anything around. But when if you see and heavy winds, a horizontal arm moving, that's what it's supposed to do because they have learned that if that thing is bolted down, that puts the entire thing

at risk, whereas if you just let it move with the wind and obviously out of the way of hitting anything, then that's the way to go. Yeah, and I read an interview with a crane operator who had to ride out a storm once, because it was too dangerous to make the 10-minute climb down. So he had to sit there in the cab and just get pushed around by the wind, letting it weathervane. And I'm not even going to make a poop joke there. You got anything else?

I got nothing else. This was robust. Thanks for doing it nothing else. This was robust. Thanks for doing it with me. This was fun. Thanks for being the top or the bottom to this crane episode. Hey, anytime. If you want to know more about cranes, apparently there's a House of Workstar article on it by Marshall Brain, and there's

plenty of other interesting stuff to including really mesmerizing CGI videos of cranes building themselves magically. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Alright, I'm gonna call this... I'm not gonna call it Skuber related, it's kind of very poignant email. Hey guys, been listening for a long time. I learned a Scooba dive with my brother and dad when I was 14. Back in 1989, the moment we took our first breaths underwater, we were hooked.

Along, aside from a long hiatus, I've been avid diver ever since. Many of my best memories were created on dive trips with my brother and dad. A tragically, we lost my brother to suicide last year after a decade's long battle with mental illness. And I just wanted to take a moment to commend you and your team for your sympathy and indexed sterility with which you handle mental illness on your show. Know that the links in which you go to assure you are using the most compassionate language to discuss mental illness and other touchy subjects does not go and notice and is greatly appreciated. But to be clear, so are the moments you choose to issue

the acceptable standards for a moment to make a joke. Chuck, this is for you. By all means, please get Scuba certified with your daughter. And your wife, if she's interested. I have so many crystal clear, fantastic memories with my dad and my brother diving. You can't make a child's life anymore awesome than by taking them to visit another planet. Lifetime memories are made by the moment. It's a magical pursuit. Do it. My brother used to

say diving is easy to do and difficult to master. So true. He was my friend, my buddy, and my hero. And I miss him like crazy. He sure would have loved the scoop episode. And that is from Dan. Man, Dan, thank you for writing in about that. That was really amazing stuff. I'm sorry about your brother. Same. If you want to be like Dan and write us just a masterful, amazing heartfelt email, we'd

love those things. You can address it directly to us at StuffPodcast. at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. A group of high school students started a project to research a string of unsolved murders. There is no profile of this killer except for the ones the students created. What if this guy's still alive, like what if he comes after us? Once you start getting a few tips or a few leads or few identifications, then the co-case isn't so cold anymore.

This is Murder 101. Listen to Murder 101 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Fear the unknown is the greatest fear of all, and for millions of Americans, there is no greater unknown than Alzheimer's disease. I'm Dana Taredo, a writer and Alzheimer's advocate. On my podcast The Memory Whisperer, I strapped calm your fears about the disease through thoughtful conversations with experts, care partners, and more. Action is the antidote for fear. Listen to the memory whisperer on the I Heart ReadyWap, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Prepare to venture to the darkest, most haunted locations once again.

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