Marshall Specialist Vehicles

When Marshall Specialist Vehicles decided to expand their site at Mildenhall near Cambridge, due to a large increase in business, they brought in the experts to help with the overhead crane facilities for a new fabrication area.

SCX removed two existing 5Tonne overhead cranes and their gantries from one hangar to another, and a new 3.2Tonne crane and gantry was installed to provide sufficient overhead crane coverage for the new fabrication area.

The existing cranes and gantries required height and length modifications in order to position them in their new locations, before their re-erection and certification for use in the new hangar.

Because this relocation was so successful, with Street CraneXpress completing the whole job in the tight two week schedule, they were rewarded with further conversion work by the Custom Vehicle Manufacturer.

SCX next modified a number of existing 20T cranes, used for the assembly of specialist vehicles including transport for the Armed Forces. The majority of the daily lifting activities undertaken on site are of loads of less than a quarter of the capacity of these hoists, and so SCX installed 5T auxiliary hoist units onto four of the 20Tonne cranes in order to offer increased hoist speeds for lighter loads. With the new hoists operating at 5m/min as opposed to the 2.5m/min of the 20T hoists, Marshalls were able to dramatically increase production levels.

Thanks to SCX’s installation of radio-control units incorporating selector switches, Marshalls are now able to select the correct hoist for the job in hand, with the added flexibility and freedom offered by the radio-control.

In addition to this work, SCX also re-sited a 5T crane from the client’s Cambridge site, 20 miles to Mildenhall, to complement these developments and further increase the site’s efficiency. This meant reinforcing the whole of the existing 50m gantry with perpendicular supports to safely accommodate the crane.

In the final stage of the expansion SCX further increased the site’s mechanical handling capabilities with a number of additional light crane systems enabling small military truck chassis components to be handled in a fast working environment.

This equipment consisted of a light crane system featuring two 250kg SWL manual crane bridges plus two jib cranes each with a SWL of 250kg, all utilised in the handling of the small truck components.

The full scale of the work undertaken by SCX, thanks to the strong relationship that was built out of SCX’s high levels of service, has provided MSV the total solution for all their required mechanical handling processes.