New Flagship for Bigge Fleet

Bigge Crane & Rigging recently added the LR 1800 to its fleet.

May 30, 2006 — One of the largest crawler cranes in the world has been added to the fleet of Bigge Crane & Rigging. Bigge joined the bidding at a Ritchie Bros auction in Sacramento, Calif. in late April and came home with a massive Liebherr LR 1800. The crane, built in Germany in 2001, has a rated lifting capacity of 900 tons and comes with 275 ft of lattice boom, 138 ft of derrick boom, and a wheeled trailing counterweight wagon.

 

"Within a week of buying it we had three enquiries from general contractors wanting to hire it," said Reid Settlemier, vice president and co-owner of Bigge. "A machine of this size clearly represents a massive investment for us. It is the biggest machine we have ever owned, and there are very few companies around that have anything this size. However, we were confident that there was a market for it, and the response we have already had just confirms it."

 

The crane was previously owned by Tutor-Saliba, which bought it new in 2001 to work on the seismic retrofit of the Richmond-San Rafael bridge in San Francisco. With the completion of the project, the Tutor-Saliba/Koch/Tidewater joint venture group put its equipment up for auction. The LR 1800 was the largest of some 1,200 lots that were sold.