Cranes & Grapples: Bridge, pedestal and track cranes and hoists.

Cranes and grapples are used for moving heavy materials in industrial plants.  In the wood products industry cranes and grapples are used to load trucks and rail cars (trains) with logs, lumber, plywood, OSB and MDF panels and pulp and paper.  Cranes are also utilized to feed logs into the merchandising systems.  A crane with a log grapple is also used in to offload logging trucks, deck wood in the mill yard and feed the stems to the sawmill or pulp mill woodroom infeed.

There are normally three types of cranes used for log handling.  These are radial log cranes, pedestal log cranes  and lineal log cranes.  Radial log cranes rotate around a center pivot point driven by wheels on a circular track .  Pedestal cranes rotate on a bearing with a planetary drive system.  Lineal log cranes travel on parallel track driven by wheels.