For the Hamburg crew at crane services company Fricke-Schmidbauer, the Tadano HK 4.070‑1 is the perfect fit – it’s like the crane was made for them. “In the Greater Hamburg area, Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony, we handle pretty much every kind of lifting work up to 700 tonnes. So, we need versatile machines that can cover a lot of bases – and the HK 4.070‑1 is a prime example of the kind of all-rounders we need,” Fricke-Schmidbauer’s Hamburg branch manager Heiko Burmester commented on taking delivery of the crane from Tadano sales manager Hans Asam.
Burmester learned about the benefits of Tadano’s HK truck-mounted cranes during a demonstration of its smaller sibling HK 4.050‑1 two years ago. And he saw right away that these cranes were perfect for his needs. “From that point on, it was only a matter of time before we added an HK to our fleet,” he said. “The HK 4.070‑1 is ideal for city projects in and around Hamburg because of its extreme flexibility – the nationwide road permit means we can use it in a wide range of scenarios without major additional effort or cost.” For Burmester, the crane offers multiple flexibility benefits. For example, it can be used with or without counterweights and with or without a trailer. It can be set up in many different ways to support a wide range of requirements. And its axle configuration makes it both highly maneuverable and extremely stable – perfect for inner-city assignments.
To get the most out of the HK 4.070‑1 model’s extensive capabilities, Fricke-Schmidbauer ordered it trailer-ready and with a remote control, a 15-meter boom extension, and the full counterweight of 15.2 tonnes. “We also opted for the impressively low-weight Volvo chassis,” Burmester explained. All of this meant that the HK 4.070-1 was perfectly set up for a large project that Fricke-Schmidbauer had been planning for quite some time: the dismantling of an entire container facility in the northern German town of Buxtehude. As expected, the crane was more than a match for the job – just as it was for many smaller jobs in the 40-60 tonne range before that.