This article is about Link-Belt Cranes. For LBX Link-Belt Excavators, see LBX_Company.
Link-Belt Cranes is an American industrial company that develops and manufactures heavy construction equipment, specializing in telescopic and lattice boom cranes.[1][2] Link-Belt is headquartered in Lexington, Kentucky, and is a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate, Sumitomo Heavy Industries.[3]
"William Ewart recognized that harvesters with continuous chain belt drives made up of square links and flat links would wear unevenly and break in one spot. Once broken, the entire chain belt had to be taken back to the barn for needed repairs, thus delaying all harvesting."
In 1875, Ewart and investors founded the Ewart Manufacturing Company to build and market the new detachable drive chain. This later changed to Ewart Detachable Link-Belt.
Expansion Into Coal Handling
In the 1880's, Ewart's company looked to expand into coal handling. Ewart Detachable Link-Belt became Link-Belt Machinery Company. In 1888, the company created a separate Link-Belt Engineering Company for its development efforts.
During this period, cranes and excavators shared many similarities. Steam shovels were mounted on railroad chassis. Temporary rail tracks were laid by workers where the shovel was expected to work, then repositioned as required.
The railroad market provided a successful focus for the growing companies. Link-Belt Machinery began manufacturing railroad coal-handling cranes. Link-Belt Engineering began custom designing and building locomotive coaling stations, building facilities railroads like the New York Central and Hudson, the Philadelphia and Reading, and the Chicago and Western Michigan. (See circa 1984 marketing booklet.) Around 1890, Link-Belt developed the first wide-gauge, steam-powered, coal-handling clamshell-bucket crane.
Through the turn of the century, Link-Belt expanded its line of steam-powered, heavy-duty coal-handling cranes. The line expanded into lighter, more versatile rail-based cranes.
Link-Belt Moves to Chicago, Expands into Excavation
Link-Belt Crane Excavator, 1940
By the early 1900's, Link-Belt had moved well beyond its initial drive-chain origins. To support the growth, Link-Belt relocated from Iowa to Chicago in 1906. The two companies, Link-Belt Machinery and Link-Belt Engineering, consolidated into a single Link-Belt Company.
The 1900's also brought new technologies to Link-Belt cranes and excavators. Continuous-track crawler systems moved Link-Belt products off the railroad chassis, removing the need for temporary tracks. Dragline excavators expanded the power of crane-shovel systems. By 1922, Link-Belt expanded into this crawler-mounted crane-shovel excavator market, complementing its locomotive cranes and material handling equipment.
As the rail-based market shrank, Link-Belt's crawler-mounted line continued to grow. By the late 1930s, Link-Belt offered excavators ranging from a 3/4-yd to a 2-1/5-yd capacity.
Link-Belt Speeder & Move to Cedar Rapids
Link-Belt Speeder Logo
In 1939, Link-Belt purchased Speeder Machinery and its line of smaller excavators. Merging Speeder with Link-Belt's Crane and Shovel Division expanded crane-shovel excavator line into the smaller capacity 3/8- to 3/4-yard range.
The acquisition also bought Link-Belt immediate entry into the wheel-mounted excavator market. Speeder had developed the world's first wheel-mounted excavator in 1922.
The merged companies formed the Link-Belt Speeder Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Link-Belt Company. The company eventually relocated manufacturing to Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Disruptive Innovations: Gasoline Power and Hydraulics
This period (post WWII - 1970) put Link-Belt into business history for managing disruptive innovation. Harvard economist Clayton Christiansen analyzed the mechanical excavator industry to understand why disruptive technology innovations frequently cause well-managed companies to fail. Christiansen tracked excavator companies navigating the change to both gasoline power and to hydraulics.
Gasoline power was a less disruptive innovation than hydraulics. Clayton identified Link-Belt as one of thirty-two steam shovel manufacturers operating in the early 1920s. These companies faced a radical technological change to gasoline power changing the architecture of their products. "Where steam shovels used steam pressure to power a set of steam engines to extend and retract the cables that actuated their buckets, gasoline shovels used a single engine and a very different system of gearing, clutches, drums, and brakes to wind and unwind the cable." [4]
Most of the largest manufacturers survived this transition, making gasoline power more of a "sustaining innovation." Following gasoline power, 1928 and onward included less-radical transitions to diesel engines and electric motors. Clayton also noted the surviving companies integrated new articulated-boom technology, "which allowed longer reach, bigger buckets, and better down-reaching flexibility." [4]
Clayton found Link-Belt was part of a more select group surviving the transition to hydraulics. After World War II, excavators moved from cable-actuated systems extending and lifting the bucket to hydraulic mechanisms, which were safer and simpler. Link-Belt was one of about 30 established cable-actuated excavator companies of the 1950s. By 1970, only four of these companies had survived by transitioning to hydraulics: Link-Belt, along with Insley, Koehring, and Little Giant.
Link-Belt faced strong new competition from hydraulic innovators, including Case, John Deere, Drott, Ford, Bamford (JCB), Poclain, International Harvester, Caterpillar, O & K, Demag, Liebherr, Komatsu, and Hitachi. [4] A number of these entrants came to excavators through the invention of the backhoe. These small-capacity excavators initially mounted on the back of tractors, either farm or industrial varieties. This opened the excavator market to general contractors.
Marketing Materials for Link-Belt Speed-O-Matic Hydraulic ControlsLink-Belt LS-98 crane. The LS-98 crane and crane-excavator continued in production for 42 years (1954 to 1996).
Link-Belt Speeder succeeded in competing against these new entrants, making it a showcase for managing disruptive innovation. The company adopted the new hydraulic technology quickly. Two years after the 1947 British invention of the backhoe, Link-Belt launched its full-function "Speed-O-Matic" hydraulic control system. It also launched new smaller-capacity excavators on both wheel-based chassis and crawlers.
This early adoption of hydraulics launched Link-Belt Speeder to the forefront of the worldwide crane-shovel market. This culminated in the 1954 flagship model LS-98 crane and crane-excavator, one of the most successful pieces of construction equipment ever built. Production of this model continued for over 42 years (1954 to 1996) with over 7,000 units being shipped. LS-98 units are still in operation around the world.
FMC Link-Belt & Move to Lexington
In 1965, FMC Corporation purchased Link-Belt as a subsidiary.[5] Link-Belt Speeder later became the Construction Equipment Group of FMC Corporation. It branded products with the FMC Link-Belt name, dropping Speeder.
FMC began an aggressive long-term capital expansion plan for manufacturing facilities and product lines. For example, FMC tried to leverage Link-Belt's expertise into its fire truck division. Working with Ladder Towers Inc. (LTI), FMC Link-Belt developed aerial ladder trucks. This venture was unsuccessful and shut down in 1990.[6]
The expansion ended in the early 1980s during the early 1980's recession. FMC consolidated its Link-Belt operations to Lexington, Kentucky. This included the 1985 closure of the Cedar Rapids plant, which had 450 employees manufacturing excavators and both crawler and gantry cranes.
Link-Belt 300 Ton Crane
Sumitomo, Link-Belt Excavators & Link-Belt Cranes
Sumitomo Heavy Industries now owns the Link-Belt companies. Link-Belt Cranes operates separately from Link-Belt Excavators. Both are wholly-owned subsidiaries based in Lexington, Kentucky. Sumitomo's involvement began when FMC and Sumitomo formed a 1986 joint venture named Link-Belt Construction Equipment Company.
The excavator/materials handling versus cranes separation occurred 1998. The FMC/Sumitomo joint venture (JV) spun off excavator products to a new JV with Case Corporation. The excavator JV became LBX, selling Link-Belt branded excavators.
Sumitomo later acquired full ownership of both joint ventures. It operates Link-Belt Cranes separately from LBX Excavators.
Excavators are heavy construction equipment primarily consisting of a boom, dipper, bucket and cab on a rotating platform known as the "house" - although the largest form ever, the dragline excavator, eliminated the dipper in favor of a line and winch.
A backhoe—also called rear actor or back actor—is a type of excavating equipment, or excavator, consisting of a digging bucket on the end of a two-part articulated arm. It is typically mounted on the back of a tractor or front loader, the latter forming a "backhoe loader". The section of the arm closest to the vehicle is known as the boom, while the section that carries the bucket is known as the dipper, both terms derived from steam shovels. The boom, which is the long piece of the backhoe arm attached to the tractor through a pivot called the king-post, is located closest to the cab. It allows the arm to pivot left and right, typically through a range of 180 to 200 degrees, and also enables lifting and lowering movements.
Heavy equipment, heavy machinery, earthmovers, construction vehicles, or construction equipment, refers to heavy-duty vehicles specially designed to execute construction tasks, most frequently involving earthwork operations or other large construction tasks. Heavy equipment usually comprises five equipment systems: the implement, traction, structure, power train, and control/information.
A dragline excavator is a heavy-duty excavator used in civil engineering and surface mining. It was invented in 1904, and presented an immediate challenge to the steam shovel and its diesel and electric powered descendant, the power shovel. Much more efficient than even the largest of the latter, it enjoyed a heyday in extreme size for most of the 20th century, first becoming challenged by more efficient rotary excavators in the 1950s, then superseded by them on the upper end from the 1970s on.
Marion Power Shovel Company was an American firm that designed, manufactured and sold steam shovels, power shovels, blast hole drills, excavators, and dragline excavators for use in the construction and mining industries. The company was a major supplier of steam shovels for the construction of the Panama Canal. The company also built the two crawler-transporters used by NASA for transporting the Saturn V rocket and later the Space Shuttle to their launch pads. The company's shovels played a major role in excavation for Hoover Dam, the Holland Tunnel and the extension of the Number 7 subway line to Main Street in Flushing, Queens.
Case Construction Equipment is an Italian manufacturer of construction machinery. Along with CASE IH, Case Construction Equipment is a brand of CNH. Case produces construction equipment including excavators, motor graders, wheel loaders, vibratory compaction rollers, crawler dozers, skid steers, and compact track loaders.
FMC Corporation is an American chemical manufacturing company headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which originated as an insecticide producer in 1883 and later diversified into other industries. In 1941 at the beginning of US involvement in WWII, the company received a contract to design and build amphibious tracked landing vehicles for the United States Department of War, and afterwards the company continued to diversify its products. FMC employs 7,000 people worldwide, and had gross revenues of US$4.7 billion in 2018.
Hitachi Construction Machinery (Europe) NV (HCME) is a subsidiary of Hitachi Construction Machinery Co., Ltd. (HCM) and was established in 1972 in Oosterhout, The Netherlands. It is responsible for the manufacture, sales and marketing of Hitachi construction equipment throughout Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
The Euclid Company of Ohio was a manufacturer which specialized in heavy equipment for earthmoving, particularly dump trucks, loaders and wheel tractor-scrapers. It operated in the US from the 1920s to the 1950s, when it was purchased by General Motors. The firm was later bought by Hitachi Construction Machinery.
Ruston-Bucyrus Ltd was an engineering company established in 1930 and jointly owned by Ruston & Hornsby based in Lincoln, England, and Bucyrus-Erie based in South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the latter of which had operational control and into which the excavator manufacturing operation of Ruston & Hornsby was transferred. The Bucyrus company proper, from which the Bucyrus component of the Ruston-Bucyrus name was created, was an American company founded in 1880, in Bucyrus, Ohio.
JBT Corporation, or John Bean Technologies Corporation, is a food processing machinery and automated vehicle company. JBT Corporation was incorporated in 2008 when FMC Technologies divested its non-energy businesses. JBT Corporation is based in Chicago, Illinois. The company traces its history back to a company founded in 1884 by John Bean, an orchardist in Los Gatos, California.
Manitowoc Cranes is a division of The Manitowoc Company, Inc. Manitowoc Cranes produces five brands of cranes: Grove, National Crane, Shuttlelift, Manitowoc, and Potain. In addition, Manitowoc has two distribution businesses based in the U.S.: Aspen Equipment and MGX Equipment Services.
Joy Global Inc. was a company that manufactured and serviced heavy equipment used in the extraction and haulage of coal and minerals in both underground and surface mining. The company had manufacturing facilities in Alabama, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin, Australia, Canada, China, France, South Africa, Poland and the United Kingdom. In 2017, Joy Global was acquired by Komatsu Limited and was renamed Komatsu Mining Corp.
LiuGong, officially Guangxi LiuGong Machinery Co., Ltd., is a Chinese multinational construction machinery manufacturing company headquartered in Liuzhou, China. It is the world's 10th-largest construction equipment manufacturer by market share and the world's largest manufacturer of wheel loaders.
Hitachi Construction Machinery Co., Ltd. (日立建機株式会社) is a Japanese construction equipment company which is into the manufacturing, sales and service of construction machinery, transportation machinery, and other machines and devices. It is no longer a subsidiary of the Hitachi Group.
Link-Belt or Link Belt may refer to:
William Dana Ewart invented and patented the linked belt, a square detachable link for chain belts, on September 1, 1874. The metal chain "linked belt" replaced the leather and strap belts used on agricultural equipment at the time.
Xuzhou Construction Machinery Group Co., Ltd. is a Chinese multinational state-owned heavy machinery manufacturing company with headquarters in Xuzhou, Jiangsu. Founded in 1943, XCMG currently ranks first in the Chinese construction machinery industry, 3rd in the world, 4th in China's top 100 machinery enterprises, and 409th in the world's top 500 brands.
CNH Industrial N.V. is an American-Italian multinational corporation with global headquarters in Basildon, United Kingdom, but controlled and mostly owned by the multinational investment company Exor, which in turn is controlled by the Agnelli family. The company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The company is incorporated in the Netherlands. The seat of the company is in Amsterdam, Netherlands, with a principal office in London, England.
LBX is an American industrial company that develops and manufactures excavators, forestry equipment and scrap material handlers.
References
Link-Belt Construction Equipment Company website, www.linkbelt.com
1 2 3 Christiansen, Clayton (2015). The Innovator's Dilemma. Harvard Business Review Press. pp.Chapter 3.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
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