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Lorry Mounted Cranes
Lorry mounted cranes also known as General Purpose or Road Cranes are designed to allow a crane unit to travel quickly from place to place and be ready for work as quickly and simply as possible.

The mobile crane was nothing new to Coles after all their first cranes were mobile all be it on railway tracks. The move to fully mobile cranes, which could drive from place to place however, had to await suitable vehicles and engines to carry a crane.

The first serious contender in this field was a crane first made in 1920 for the Indian market (right), then adapted for the British market (below left). This was achieved by using a Tilling Stevens buss chassis and using electric motors to drive the crane unit. As the buss was petrol electric, i.e. the bus engine drove a generator which in turn provided power for the buss wheels via an electrical motor. The Coles unit only had to tap into the buss power supply for operation. This system of electrical power was to be used by all their crane right up until the late 1950s.
This experiment with lorry mounting was not however to be repeated or developed until the WW2 when the demand for truly mobile cranes meant Coles fitting their EMA unit onto any suitable lorry unit they could be provided with, the majority being AEC Matador (above middle) and Thorneycroft Amazon (above right).
As the load requirement increased Cole found that they needed a better chassis and developed their own unit. This became the Ranger series which quickly pushed up the carrying capacity from 20 (far left) to 25 then 30 ton. (left)

Where cranes are concerned size does matter and Coles was not going to fall behind its competitors again and by 1954 they had the Colossus lifting 41 ton, at the time the biggest crane in the world. By 1959 the Valiant was weighing in at 60 ton only to be topped four years later by the Centurion (right) which could lift a massive 100 ton.
Crane were benefiting all the time from new materials and by 1972 the largest lattice jib crane that Coles were to ever build rolled off the production line. The giant Colossus L6000 (left) that would eventually be rated at 300 tons.



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