When President Barack Obama toured Intel's Fab 42 construction site in Chandler, Arizona, last week, he was upbeat and excited. And why not? The weather was beautiful, the crowd receptive, and his State of the Union address the night before had gone over well. As his Republican rivals tore at each other's throats in a nasty Florida primary, here he was cracking jokes in Arizona, promoting a brand-new $5 billion microprocessor factory.
Obama said he was excited to learn about Intel's high-tech gizmos, but then he pointed to the Sarens SGC-120 crane behind him and said: "I decided I had to check this out for myself because honestly, first of all who wants to miss out on a chance to see the crane? That thing is huge."
According to Preston McDaniel, the man in charge of Intel's construction -- and the man who introduced the President last week -- the crane is not only huge, it's the biggest crane on land.
Built by Wolvertem, Belgium's Sarens Group, the Chandler crane is indeed an impressive feat of engineering. With a 740-foot boom, it can lift more than 3,500 tons, or 7 million pounds. Intel says its parts fill up 250 truckloads, and it's big enough to lift the 24,000 tons of rebar and 25,000 tons of structural steel going into Fab 42.
But to Bill Calder, this mega-crane was also a threat. Calder is a spokesman up north at Intel's Hillsboro, Oregon, campus, where they're building another chip-making facility. This one is called D1X. Just a few months before Obama's visit, Calder wrote a piece for Intel's website talking about the crane that had recently been dismantled after dominating Hillsboro's skyline for months.
When Calder first heard about the Chandler crane, he was under the impression that his crane, up in Hillsboro, was actually the world's largest. And for awhile, he says, nobody at Intel was quite sure who had the bigger crane: Chandler or Hillsboro?
Calder was rooting for the home crane. The folks at Hillsboro liked their crane. Or as they affectionately call it: their badass crane.
"It was our version of Taipei 101 or the Space Needle, you know, it's big regardless of how far away you are from it," says Jason Waxman, the general manager of Intel's High Density Computing Data Center Group. "They say some cities struggle to have a defining characteristic in their skyline; for a while ours was the crane."
The folks at Hillsboro weren't eager to concede their title to Chandler. "There was this little bit of mano-a-mano between the two construction sites," Calder admits. "It was like, 'Our crane is bigger.'"
Well, according to Lampson International, the company that built the Hillsboro crane, Chandler actually has a bigger crane than Hillsboro. The Lampson crane has a 460-foot boom -- a jib extension stretches it to 560 feet -- but it comes with better moves.
"The Lampson Transi-Lift LTL-2600 is the world’s largest land based mobile crane," says Karen Lampson, a spokeswoman for the Kennewick, Washington, crane-maker. The Sarens crane, on the other hand, is a fixed crane. "That means that our crane can pick and carry a load whereas the Sarens crane can only pick the load, but it cannot move forward, backward or sideways the way the Transi-Lift can."
The Lampson is no weakling either. It can lift 2,600 tons. That's 5.2 million pounds.
All my-crane-is-bigger-than-your-crane rivalry aside, Intel's Calder says he was proud to hear Obama talk about Fab 42.
"Any time you can have the leader of the free world highlight the work we do and what it takes to build these Fabs today is great," he says.
Still, he won't quite let go of the grudge. "In today's mobile world, the largest land-based crane isn't nearly as cool as the largest land-based mobile crane!"
