27.11.2023

Tadano HK 4.070 1 for Fricke-Schmidbauer

German rental company Fricke-Schmidbauer has taken delivery of a new 70 tonne Tadano HK 4.070-1 truck crane.

The crane is mounted on a four axle Volvo chassis with steered trailing rear axle and features a five section 41 metre main boom plus an 8.8 to 15.8 metre bi fold swingaway extension for a maximum tip height of 60 metres, it can also offset by up to 40 degrees. The crane can carry up five tonnes of counterweight within 10 tonne axle loads with the Volvo chassis, or 10 tonnes within 12 tonnes axle loads. A two axle counterweight trailer allows the entire 15.2 tonnes to be carried. Fricke-Schmidbauer ordered the machine ‘trailer ready’.
With 15.2 tonnes of counterweight installed it can handle 55.6 tonnes at a three metre radius and 19.8 tonnes at a 10 metre radius and with the full extension 1.3 metres at 46 metres.

Fricke-Schmidbauer’s Hamburg branch manager Heiko Burmester said: “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.”

Burmester attended a launch demonstration of the 50 tonne sister crane, the HK 4.050 1 two years ago. “These cranes are perfect for our needs and from that point on, it was only a matter of time before we added an HK to our fleet. The HK 4.070 1 is ideal for city projects in and around Hamburg because of its extreme flexibility – the national road permit means we can use it in a wide range of scenarios without major additional effort or cost.”

The crane went straight to work on dismantling a container facility in the northern German town of Buxtehude.
Based in Braunschweig, between Hanover and Magdeburg, Fricke-Schmidbauer is part of the Schmidbauer group of companies. Louis Fricke KG was founded in Braunschweig in 1868 and was acquired by Schmidbauer in 1978, and then rebranded as Fricke-Schmidbauer Schwerlast.

Today the company runs an extensive crane, access and heavy transport fleet from three locations, Braunschweig - plus branches in Hamburg and Hanover. It includes All Terrain cranes to 700 tonnes, crawler cranes to 1,350 tonnes along with spider cranes, loader cranes, truck mounted lifts and self-propelled platforms.

Schmidbauer was founded in Munich in 1932 as a transport company when Jakob Schmidbauer converted a Chevrolet truck and trailer into a special transporter for long materials. After the war he collaborated with an excavator factory in Württemberg, to build a three tonne truck crane on surplus American and German army heavy truck chassis, but finding the result too weak he began building his own chassis, resulting in a decent crane. The rest they say is history.