Floor Mount Jib Cranes

Floor Mount Jib Cranes Buying Guide

Foundation or foundationless: the first fork. A standard freestanding floor jib anchors into a reinforced concrete foundation poured to the manufacturer's drawings for your exact capacity and span. The typical spec is 3,000 psi reinforced concrete, with depth and footprint that grow with the load and the soil pressure under the slab, so the honest project cost is crane plus concrete plus cure time before the first lift. HSI's foundationless freestanding models delete the pour: a larger baseplate spreads the moment into a slab you already have, generally a minimum of 6 inches of sound reinforced concrete free of cracks and expansion joints, with anchor bolts embedded around 4-3/4 inches and the area signed off by a qualified engineer. Both rotate a full 360 degrees; the choice is money and calendar. Foundationless runs from about $3,576 at 500 lb and gets you lifting the week the anchors cure, while a poured foundation is the route when capacity, span, or floor condition pushes past what a bare slab will hold. When the floor is thin, unknown, or tiled with joints, have that engineering conversation before the crane ships, not after.

Medium duty or heavy duty freestanding. Two freestanding tiers cover most floor jib work. The medium duty line, 250 to 2,000 lb from about $2,360, is the buy for a work cell, assembly bench, or single machine that gets lifted to all day at moderate weight, and it is the cheapest full circle crane on the page. The heavy duty line, 500 to 10,000 lb, is real production steel, and its pricing splits by reach: an 8 to 14 ft span costs less than the same capacity at 15 to 20 ft, because boom deflection and the foundation both grow with the arm. Spec the height under boom from your tallest load plus the hoist and trolley headroom above it, then buy the next capacity up if you land between sizes, since deflection eases and the duty cycle gets kinder on the bigger frame. A medium duty foundationless version, from about $2,640, blends the light tier with a no-pour baseplate for shops that want both.

Mast type: a full circle without the pour. A mast type jib bears on the floor at its base and takes its upper support from building truss or a wall bracket, which buys full 360 degree rotation with no special foundation, in a lower headroom package than a freestanding frame. HSI builds it 500 to 10,000 lb from about $3,390, and the building's top steel does the work a freestanding jib's concrete would, so it is the pattern to reach for when solid overhead structure already sits above the work and pouring a footing is the part you want to skip. The trade is that your building has to actually carry that upper reaction, so put an engineer on the truss or column before ordering, the same way you would size a foundation. If the load is light and a wall or column stands where you need it instead, wall and column mounted jib cranes skip the floor entirely, though they give up full rotation to do it.

Articulated: reaching around corners. An articulated jib swings two pivoting arms instead of one straight boom, so the hook travels around obstructions, under overhangs, and inside machines a rigid boom cannot enter, then holds its position without drifting back. HSI builds them freestanding from 150 to 2,000 lb, from about $9,940, which is a premium over a plain boom of the same capacity, and it earns that premium exactly when the reach path is not a straight line: feeding a press, threading between fixtures, or working a load into a deep machine. If your lifts are open and straight overhead, a standard freestanding frame does the job for a good deal less.

Portable forkpocket: no anchoring at all. When even the slab is off limits, a portable forkpocket jib skips anchoring entirely: the base carries fork pockets, a forklift lifts the whole crane, and it travels between work areas on the truck you already own. HSI rates them 250 to 1,000 lb from about $6,670, with bases ordered hollow or filled with concrete for ballast, the heavier fill trading portability for a steadier stance under load. This is the answer for leased space, changing layouts, or a lift that happens in three spots this month and three others next, where bolting a crane down would be the wrong commitment.

Power down the boom, and the hardware that finishes the job. The boom rotates but the hoist on it still needs electricity or air, and feeding that across a turning pivot is the detail that separates a finished install from a cord wrapped around the mast. Top and bottom entry collectors, 4 conductor, carry power through the rotation axis, top and bottom entry swivels do the same for compressed air, and the tight wire tagline festooning kit plus air supply hoses run the service out along the boom to the trolley. Order this hardware with the crane, because retrofitting a collector means pulling the pivot apart. The anchoring path ships here too, J type anchor bolts with washers and nuts, quick dry epoxy systems, steel hole pattern templates, and a dispenser, so the install is one order rather than five, and rotational stops at about $71 fence the sweep of a manual jib wherever a wall or aisle sits inside the circle. Every jib here rotates by hand, and the hoist and trolley are separate line items sized to the boom flange and built to ASME B30.16; the full range lives in hoists. The finished crane and its underhung trolley run under ASME B30.11, which calls for a frequent visual check plus a documented periodic inspection on intervals that tighten as the duty gets heavier.