ABUS cranes in a metal working factory in Slovakia

The company ALFUN SK (www.alfun.cz/sk) was founded in 1999 and dealt originally in aluminium and its alloys. You can find the company’s headquarters in Bruntál, in the north east of the Czech Republic. There are further sites of the company in Hungary and in Poland, and the Slovak daughter company is located in Sered’, in the south west of the Slovak Republic. ALFUN have considerably enlarged their product portfolio and the scope of services on offer over the intervening years. Nowadays ALFUN have positioned themselves as a modern European service centre offering their customers transverse and longitudinal cutting of sheets and binders (in the Czech Republic) as well as aluminium sheets cut to length on saws (in the daughter company in Slovakia).

ALFUN worked together with the company ITECO ZERIAVY (www.itecozeriavy.sk), the Slovak ABUS partner, in order to realise a project in the production plant in Sered’ comprising of two EOT cranes and one jib crane. ITECO ZERIAVY was not only involved in the sales of the products but was also in charge of the installation and the commissioning of the cranes in accordance with the Slovak rules and regulations and they also undertook to train the crane users.

Aluminium sheets of different dimensions are transported from the storage racks to the respective processing machinery where they are cut according to customers’ requirements in the production plant where the ABUS cranes are operating. Thanks to the overload protection LIS-SV the crane user is able to read the weight of the lifted load on the display of the remote control when lifting these huge aluminium sheets. Two single girder EOT cranes of the ELK type with load capacities of 6.3 tonnes and spans of 23 metres are employed to lift these aluminium sheets. If sheets with smaller dimensions and less weight need lifting then the pillar jib crane type VS comes into play: this pillar jib crane lifts loads of up to 1.6 SWL and has a jib arm length of 4 metres. A vacuum device is used to attach the sheets to the cranes. This vacuum device is suspended from the load hooks of the EOT cranes and the jib crane respectively.

Both single girder cranes are operated via the radio remote control ABURemote Button. The weight of the suspended load is always displayed on the display of the ABURemote. Both bridge cranes are installed on the same crane track; therefore they have been fitted with an anti-collision device so as to avoid collisions. If one crane approaches the other a first switching point is travelled over and the travelling speed is reduced to slow long travelling. When the second switching point is travelled over the crane is stopped dead in its tracks.