Manoeuvres
The corner is what decides the building.
Most handling problems are not about weight. They are about geometry: whether the thing you are moving can get from where it is to where it has to be, through the space that already exists. These drawings work through the manoeuvres that decide that, at the scale they actually happen.
Manoeuvre 01
A member nearly twice the corridor width, round a right angle
Turning a long member at a corner is not a matter of driving carefully. Swinging a rigid body about any point on it needs a clear circle of its own length, and a corridor does not have one. So the usual answers are the expensive ones: a crane over the corner, a wider bay, or cutting the member and welding it back together on site.
Two machines, one member
Plan view
Haul in · stand and turn · walk it round · run out
Why it works
Two limits, and what each one costs
The first limit is geometric and applies to anything rigid, whoever is moving it. Through a right-angled corner between corridors of equal width, the longest line that can pass is2.83 times that width, and only on the path where both ends stay against the outer walls. Nothing longer gets round at all, by any method. That figure is for a line with no thickness, though. Real width comes off it: the machines turn to any heading, so what has to clear the walls is the circle they sweep, and here that leaves room for a member 1.9 times the corridor width with a working margin still in hand.
The second limit is the machine, and it is the one that usually bites. A steered vehicle cannot hold that path: the two ends have to travel at different speeds along different curves, and the load has to rotate relative to both machines while they do it. Here each machine turns on the spot at the start of a leg, drives straight along it, and the bolster under the load takes up whatever angle is left over. No machine is ever dragged sideways, and nothing has to be lifted.
1.9×
Member length against corridor width, as drawn
2.83×
The geometric ceiling, for a line with no thickness
0
Cranes, lifts and cuts in the manoeuvre
Next step
Send us the corner you cannot get round.
Give us the corridor widths, the member and the headroom. We will tell you whether it goes, what it takes, and whether it is worth doing with machines at all.