French crane manufacturer Reel does not do many ordinary projects. It designs, builds and installs special cranes and materials handling equipment. Its biggest client has been the French nuclear industry which still accounts for 70% of its business. At a single nuclear plant near Cherbourg, Reel has 80 staff working on crane maintenance, modification and updates. Other markets include waste plants, aluminium plants and airports. One of the company’s most impressive cranes is in a waste incineration plant at Ivry-sur-Seine near Paris. Produced jointly with Syctom/Tiru, the equipment comprises two 150kN travelling cranes each with a static weight of 90t, a capacity of 750,000t a year, two 6m3 grabs, and a hoist speed of 132m/min. Another plant at Saint-Ouen II has two 150kN travelling cranes and grabs similar to those at Ivry-sur-Seine.
In partnership with Novergie, Reel will soon equip waste plants at Rambouillet and Creteil. Four travelling cranes are envisaged for Creteil, two for waste pick up with 8,000 litre grabs and two more for ash pick up. Once completed the plant will be able to process 220,000t of waste a year. Located in Rambouillet, the Voloryele plant will also be equipped with two waste pick up travelling cranes with 5,000 litre grabs, and a span of 20m for a 120,000t annual capacity.
Reel continues to add to its experience in domestic refuse handling. These installations already operate or will soon be operating totally independently. The Ivry-sur-Seine plant already operates entirely automatically by identifying waste piles by laser. Creteil and Rambouillet will probably also adopt this fully automated system, the company says.
Reel’s field of business goes beyond cranes to a range of handling and moving devices. As part of an emergency transport plan produced by the nuclear authorities, Reel developed a system for picking up flasks of contaminated waste and putting them back onto trains in the event of a derailment.
More recently the company has won a contract for a cable car in Pic du Midi in the French Alps.
International expansion
Reel was founded in 1947 by Charles Franz and is today managed by his son Phillipe. It is still 87% owned by the Franz family and has two factories in the Lyon area. In 1996 it bought Canadian Overhead Handling, based in Quebec, and the following year established Reel (UK). The other subsidiaries are Reel Taiwan in Taipei and Reel Asia in Kuala Lumpur. In January this year it acquired NKM of the Netherlands.
To date, Reel (UK) has not made its presence felt on the general lifting and hoisting marketing, concentrating instead on special applications at airports – designing, building, installing, maintaining and upgrading systems for aircraft docking, for moving hangar doors and, mostly, for special work platforms for aircraft maintenance technicians.
Reel’s presence in the UK dates back to 1988 when it installed eight huge telescoping platforms, suspended from overhead gantries, in a paint bay in a British Airways maintenance hanger at Heathrow airport. With other airport work following on in the ensuing years, BA facilities manager David Walker moved across to Reel in 1996 and in 1997 Reel (UK) was born.
Between 1992 and 1994 Reel installed gantry-suspended access platforms and docking facilities in BA’s Dragonfly maintenance centre at Cardiff airport. In 1996 a new Concorde docking facility was built at Heathrow airport for BA.
A ninth tele-platform was installed at Heathrow in 1998 for 777, Concorde and 747 aircraft.
As with the previous teleplatforms, the telescoping sections move a large work platform up and down to give a variable working height for aircraft maintenance. Travel nearer and away from the aircraft is either by overhead travelling crane or by running on rubber tyres on the ground. The telescoping sections are raised not hydraulically but by a hoist pulling wires. There is one hoist to raise the platform but a cable is reeved through each section to move them proportionally and so avoid jamming.
Walker states that having these big telescoping platforms suspended from the roof is much more preferable to having them running on rubber tyres on the ground. “You can’t beat having them roof suspended where possible. It keeps the working area clear and is much more flexible.” The Cardiff hangar was designed to have the Reel system fitted, so the roof structure is strong enough. When systems are retrofitted, this is not always the case and there is no alternative but to have the floor take the weight.
Reel has also installed teleplatforms at airports in Jeddah, South Africa, China, Japan and at both Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports in Paris.
The UK operation is still small, working almost exclusively in airports. Last year it turned over £2.8m ($4.2m) out of a total group turnover of $60m. But it is now starting to broaden its horizons. “We are looking for new markets in the UK for specialised handling equipment,” says Walker. “…Container cranes, the nuclear industry, cement, garbage, aluminium industry, or even cable cars.”
