Best way to get power from Bridge to hoist and travel motor?

Getting close to setting the 5 ton crane bridge in my shop. Originally it had festoon cable on the runway and bridge. The cable sat outside for awhile and I lengthened the runway so I bought a used 4 wire duct-o-bar setup for the runway to bridge power. I plan to mount 3 VFD's and wireless controller on the bridge. I'll have to get 7 conductors to the hoist and trolley motor. My bridge is only 34 feet long so festoon cable makes sense to me. I do have quite a few extra duct-o-bar strips though so if I bought all the brush assemblies I could probably do it that way.

Which way would you do it?

EDIT: I need to look at my hoist. I may need to mount the controls on the hoist itself when I consider all the brake and limit switch logic. Maybe my first question should be how are the crane controls normally configured? The hoist is a 10HP 5 ton Shaw-Box (About as heavy it gets for a 5 ton) and trolleys.

Normally all the electrical stuff is on the bridge. Of course the cranes that we use ( and I operate) in the power generation industry are larger. Mounting it on the bridge catwalk makes it all accessible. You should have space available where the resistors were for the wound rotor motors, which will have the rotor circuit shorted for use with the VFD.

Trolley duct, the orange stuff with copper buss,s and brushes...Phil

Phil in Montana said:

Trolley duct, the orange stuff with copper buss,s and brushes...Phil

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That stuff is made by a company called Duct-O-Bar. That's what I got.

i used this stuff for the incoming power
very nice

Powerail Enclosed Conductor Bar Systems | VAHLE USA

Garwood - If you would like to check out our 5-ton bridge crane - I'd be happy to let you take a test drive, you can have the schematics and if you have 480V, I'll may even have some VFD's that you can have and I'll give you the parameter files to set up the brake operation for the hoist, bridge and trolley drives.

We put the bridge drive on the bridge and the hoist and trolley drives on the hoist/trolley with a wire rope strung between the bridge carriages that carried a festoon for the controls and power between the bridge cabinet and the trolley cabinet.

Here is what it looked like in our old building - 01_Bridge Crane Runway Install - Google Photos we moved it to the new building and now it has 175 feet of runway and increased the cable length to give it a 25 ft hook height. We still have the old 100 ft runway beams if you need them . . . W27-102 They allow for 33 ft column spacing for 5-ton bridge no problem.



And this is what it looks like in the new shop.

I see why the tax man likes you...Phil

MG, do you have a second hoist on that runway?

gbent said:

MG, do you have a second hoist on that runway?

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Only 1 bridge on this runway covering this bay. On the bay to the right, there are two bridges, a 5-ton unit and a 25 ton unit.

This building is designed to have 4 runways and we only put cranes on two of them for now. The two level bay to the left of this photo has a runway below the mezzanine for a 3-ton bridge and is designed for a runway above the mezzanine for a 3-ton bridge.

The photo is taken from a deck that leads to the upper mezzanine . . . the deck has a design payload of 7.5 tons so that we can pick stuff up from downstairs with the crane and set it on the deck and then use a pallet jack to move it onto the mezzanine. We can also easily service the 5-ton crane from the deck with a rolling staircase.