Sectors

Automotive Lifting Equipment & Crane Solutions

Overhead cranes, gantries and precision handling for vehicle plants, component suppliers and maintenance workshops — designed, installed, maintained and certified across the UK and Ireland.

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Lifting Equipment for Automotive Manufacturing and Vehicle Maintenance

The automotive sector runs on repeatable lifting. In the press shop, dies weighing tens of tonnes are changed against the clock. On body-in-white and powertrain lines, engines, gearboxes and battery packs move at cycle time, to the same position, every time. In the aftermarket, a single workshop bay might take a van chassis in the morning and an EV battery pack after lunch.

What links them is duty and tolerance. Automotive lifting equipment works harder than most industrial plant, in tighter spaces, alongside people and automation — and it is expected never to mark, drop or misplace a component that is often worth more than the crane lifting it.

WH Scott designs, fabricates, installs, maintains, inspects and certifies lifting equipment for automotive operations across the UK and Ireland. One supplier, the whole life of the asset, whoever originally built it.

Automotive Lifting Challenges: Duty Cycle, Headroom and EV Batteries

Duty cycle, not just tonnage

Cranes are too often specified on safe working load alone. A five-tonne hoist on a forty-second cycle needs the right duty classification — commonly M5 to M7 under FEM and ISO, higher again in press shops — or it will wear out well inside its expected life. We classify against the real cycle count and load spectrum, not the nameplate.

Headroom, hook approach and floor space

Assembly halls and workshops rarely have room to spare. Low-headroom hoists, underslung and semi-gantry arrangements and tight hook approaches recover working height and reach where a standard top-running crane simply will not fit.

Precision and component damage

Body panels, castings and battery housings are damaged by snatch, not by weight. Variable frequency drive control, micro-speed positioning, twin-hoist load summation and purpose-made below-the-hook tooling keep the load controlled and the component unmarked.

EV battery packs and high-voltage assemblies

Passenger EV packs commonly weigh between 400 kg and 800 kg, and they are large, awkward and impact-sensitive. They need rated, purpose-designed lifting frames and controlled descent — and, like every other lifting accessory, thorough examination under LOLER.

How WH Scott Supports Automotive Lifting Operations

Engineered equipment and handling systems

Overhead travelling cranes, single and double girder, plus semi-gantry systems
Automotive gantry cranes and mobile A-frame gantries for workshops and low-clearance bays
Jib and light crane systems for workstation and assembly-cell handling
Electric chain and wire rope hoists, including overhaul and modernisation
Lifting beams, spreader beams, vacuum lifters and bespoke below-the-hook tooling
Roll and reel handling for trim, seating and interior materials
AUTEC radio remote control, micro-speed and VFD motion control
ATEX-rated lifting equipment for paint shop and solvent areas
AGV integration where lifting feeds an automated material flow

Maintenance, breakdown cover and modernisation

Planned preventative maintenance built around your shutdown windows
All-makes service — we maintain cranes and hoists whoever manufactured them
Rapid breakdown response from 16 offices across the UK and Ireland
Hoist overhaul, crane modernisation and control upgrades to extend asset life
Design working period assessment for high-duty cranes approaching their design life

Inspection, certification and in-house engineering

LOLER thorough examination and PUWER assessment — over 400,000 statutory examinations a year across the Group
Proof load testing and certification, reported digitally through the client portal
Hand-arm vibration testing to ISO 5349
Structural steel design, fabrication and installation to BS EN 1090 up to execution class EXC2, UKCA and CE marked
Accredited NDT and materials testing through Metlab (INAB, ISO/IEC 17025) when the question is whether the metal itself is sound

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Tell Us About Your Project

Whether you need a single piece of equipment or a fully engineered lifting system, our specialists can help. Tell us your load, environment and compliance requirements — we’ll do the rest.

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Automotive Lifting Compliance: LOLER, PUWER and Crane Standards

Lifting equipment on automotive sites in Great Britain and Northern Ireland is governed by LOLER 1998 and PUWER 1998; in the Republic of Ireland the equivalent duties sit in the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work (General Application) Regulations 2007. All of them require lifting equipment to be properly selected, installed, maintained and thoroughly examined by a competent person.

Under LOLER, thorough examination is required:

at least every 12 months for lifting equipment such as cranes and hoists
at least every 6 months for lifting accessories, and for anything used to lift people
or at the intervals set out in a written scheme of examination — which is usually the right answer for high-duty automotive cranes, where twelve months is too long a gap

Equipment is designed and assessed against the relevant standards — BS EN 15011 for bridge and gantry cranes, BS EN 14492-2 for power-driven hoists, BS EN 13155 for non-fixed load-lifting attachments — used in line with BS 7121, and supplied with UKCA or CE marking as applicable. Supporting structures are fabricated to BS EN 1090.

WH Scott is a LEEA member, certified to ISO 9001:2015 and SafeContractor accredited. Examination records and certificates are managed digitally, so a customer quality audit or an HSE visit gets the paperwork the same day rather than the same month.