Ag students build winning crane

By Michael Brooks

Staff Writer

Last September, Edna Ag Mechanic students Michael Foster and Josh Nicholson were brainstorming ideas for a project with their teacher, Kurtis Koop, and came up with the idea of a unique gantry crane. Last weekend, the idea paid off as the duo took home fourth place in the Shop Equipment category at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo in Houston.

“The thing is, a lot of people do a gantry crane in their own style but it is not always that creative,” Nicholson said. “That is why we came up with the idea for a double. We wanted something unique that would set us apart from the other entries. At the rodeo, there were 30 something entries in our Shop Equipment class, and five of those were gantry cranes, but ours was the only one like this.”

“We were also competing against a plasma table, and a telescoping miter saw stand,” Foster said. 

An overhead crane is a crane that is firmly attached to a structure, usually a shop building, or some other stationary structure. The overhead crane has a hoist that runs along an I-Beam, with the I-Beam attached to the walls of the structure. A gantry crane is the same idea, except instead of being attached to a structure, it is firmly attached to legs on either end of the I-Beam, creating a mobile crane. And the double gantry crane that Foster and Nicholson created has two I-Beams attached to legs on both ends with hoists running along both beams.

*For the full article, buy a Jackson County Herald Tribune newspaper or purchase an online subscription