Ederer: A Small Company With A Big Product

When one thinks of cranes and Florida, what comes to mind for most people are delicate long-legged birds, the Everglades and the fragility of the environment.

For Don Miller, the images are distinctly different. His company, Ederer Cranes, is putting together colossal $5 million bridge cranes that eventually will place 325-ton engines in the next Space Shuttle, housed in the world's second-largest building at Cape Kennedy.

"We're a small company," Miller likes to say of the 100-employee business with annual revenues of $20 million, "with a big product."

Big as in 1 million pounds. Big as in 150 feet long.

Ederer's board room in its headquarters, just south of the Sears building on First Avenue, displays eight patents on the wall - all for one type of crane system. The company has developed three new products in the past year.

Chinese partners came for a visit last week and left shaking their heads.

"They couldn't believe how much we have done with so few people," Miller said.

NASA engineers will visit next week for final inspection before chunks of the cranes start their trip eastward.

"Only three companies bid on the project," Miller said, "and the other U.S. bid got thrown out."

Bridge cranes do things other machinery can't and go places no person can go. The crane consists of a trolley riding on rails attached to girders on opposite sides of a building - "bridging" the work site.

Ederer began building big cranes for nuclear power-plant construction in the late '70s. Later they were adapted for waste handling and monitoring. At Hanford, cranes will lower robots into waste tanks for sampling.

At McDonnell Douglas in San Diego, a 320-foot gantry (self-supported) crane does aircraft testing. You'll find other Ederer cranes at shipyards and logging sites, although those are the more conventional jib cranes.

"The things we do are pretty interesting," Miller said. "We don't have boring products."

Miller joined the company in the mid-'70s and helped marshal it into the space age with technologies such as X-SAM, for extra safety and monitoring, that met demanding government and aerospace specifications. Miller also oversaw the purchase of Washington Cranes in Seattle, which makes rotating cranes largely for ship and barge work, and Tacoma-base Star Cranes, which makes the familiar container-ship units.

In 1984, Miller and a partner, Jim Finch, purchased Ederer from a holding company which had bought it from the founding family in the early 1970s.

Washington Cranes was founded in 1884, Ederer in 1901 and Star in 1912. "We're drawing on 250-plus years of knowledge," Miller said. "We're really high on the know-how list."

Two years ago, NASA - then in the process of redesigning the shuttle in the wake of the Challenger tragedy - granted Ederer a $20 million contract for six bridge cranes. The cranes will be used at three sites in the shuttle-construction process, finishing up at Cape Kennedy in NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building, second in size only to Boeing's 747 plant at Everett.

"The difference is, this one goes up," Miller said of the NASA structure, which measures 525 feet high by 716 feet long and 518 feet wide. Covering eight acres, "it's one of the few things you can see from space," Miller said.

Crane workers will manipulate the shuttle engines from Space Needle-like heights, unable to see what they're doing. A computerized control panel will provide feedback positioning data.

"I can't imagine there's a crane in the world lifting something more important," Miller said. "This is fussy work."

The first units are scheduled to begin work in late winter or early spring.