BELLUNO, Italy — Recom Moritsch, the Italian builder of luffing-jib tower cranes, and ABB have put a new automation package under the company’s second-generation machines: an AC500-S safety PLC talking to ACS880 industrial variable-speed drives, with an FSO plug-in carrying drive-based safety functions.

The work is not a 2026 start-up. Recom began the redesign in 2015, when downtown “mega height” jobs—Moritsch has talked about structures pushing toward 3,200 ft of reach in the sector’s language—made the old motor-and-winch controls look thin on both safety and availability. Luffing jibs already live in tight urban lots. A control miss is not an inconvenience; it is a public-space event.

Luffing tower cranes from Recom Moritsch. Photo: Recom Moritsch.

A partner, not a catalog buy

“We were looking for more than just a supplier. We were seeking a partner that would work with us to find the best solution for our cranes to guarantee greater performance and safety while also being cost-effective,” said Mariano Moritsch, chief executive of Recom Moritsch. ABB’s global service map mattered as much as the hardware. Cranes ship, sit on a skyline for years, and must still be supportable when a local technician opens the cabinet.

ABB offered the AC500-S and ACS880 with the FSO safety-functions module designed to sit inside the drive and run with the drive control, not as a separate safety island that only meets the PLC on a dry contact. Moritsch said the communications guarantee was decisive: the PLC and the VSD had to talk without a third-party glue layer, and the PLC language was already familiar to Recom’s technicians—IEC 61131-3, the same family most European machine builders already staff for.

Walter De Battista, who heads Recom’s hardware engineering, has said in earlier project notes that the AC500-S was not in the original internal sketch. ABB put it on the table; Recom then ran fully integrated machine control and cut time on software and drive commissioning because the same engineering visits covered both controllers and ACS880 set-up.

The memory card is the availability story

Tower cranes see dirty power and weather. Drives fail. The usual recovery is send the unit back, or order a factory-configured replacement and wait. On the ACS880, application software lives on a removable memory card. Recom’s field fix is now: buy a standard drive from a local ABB channel, move the card, and return the crane to work. That is a logistics change as much as an electronics change, and it is the detail Moritsch keeps returning to when he talks about uptime.

Motor matching took longer than a parameter download. Recom builds customized motors for its own cranes. ABB technicians iterated the ACS880 application through several stages on those motors rather than forcing a catalog motor map onto a luffing winch. “The ABB drive guarantees very refined control even on the customised motors that we build for our cranes,” Moritsch said. “The drive has been fine-tuned over a number of stages, with ABB technicians demonstrating in detail how all our scenarios can be resolved.”

Slewing still on the table

Tower rotation on these machines has typically been a DC-motor job. The market is pushing AC. Recom and ABB are developing an ACS880-based answer for that axis rather than treating slew as a leftover DC island while hoist and luff go AC. Until that ships, the published stack is the safety PLC, the ACS880 with FSO, and the card-swap service model.

For crane OEMs already on ABB PLC series hardware, the Recom package is a reminder that the AC500-S is doing safety and machine control in the same conversation as the drive, not as a afterthought SIL box in the next cubicle.