So yesterday I went to my first HIAB job since early June, and it’s a builders’ merchant’s in west Sussex - a nice enough DAF CF with a Fassi F155 crane with remote control and brick grab. It looked nicer than the old wreck of a Volvo from Thomas Trucks I had to drive last time I worked there, but at least the crane (an Atlas) worked OK. So I had a whole load of blocks to take down to a site on Brighton.
On arrival, I couldn’t get it to even start, because they hadn’t bothered to tell me which of the two switches with identical symbols was the PTO rather than the diff lock - I had to ring the Fassi dealership to find that out. Then when I got it working and the legs far enough out as I could (building site, narrow entrance, scaffold on one side, stacks is timber on the other), I tried getting the crane to lift and it wouldn’t. After several attempts to reposition the lorry so the legs would extend fully, they told me to take the truck outside so they could fork-lift the whole lot off.
Once back at base, the supervisor told me to have a play around with it and see if I could get it all working, and hey presto, when in flat ground with nothing to stop the legs extending fully, the thing worked.
Do I need the legs fully out to make these things work at all, or is there some override? These ones were wider than any I’ve seen on builders’ merchants’ trucks. The guy on that site told me that the regular driver had never had problems, but he’d been taught how to use it by the guy from the dealership rather than having to teach himself in under an hour without ever having seen this model before.