Regular maintenance is the foundation of crane reliability, preventing costly downtime and safety risks. But when it's time to replace worn parts, the decision between OEM and third-party options sparks debate. It's about more than cost—it's about keeping your crane on the job.

Why Scheduled Servicing Is Non-Negotiable

Every crane, including Tadano models, follows a maintenance schedule based on usage or wear. Over time, components like filters, seals, and structural parts degrade. Skipping these intervals lets small issues escalate into project-stopping failures. The real question is which parts to use during servicing.

The Case for OEM Parts

OEM parts come from the crane's original manufacturer. They're built to precise specs, ensuring seamless integration and reliable performance. Tested to handle your crane's specific conditions, they reduce the chance of breakdowns and typically protect your warranty.

The downside is cost—OEM parts are often more expensive. Availability can also be an issue, especially for older models, leading to potential delays.

Third-Party Parts: A Mixed Bag

Third-party parts are attractive for their affordability and quicker delivery. Some aftermarket options are well-engineered, rivaling OEM quality at a lower price. But quality varies widely. Poorly made parts may fit incorrectly, wear out fast, or cause damage to other systems. They could also void your warranty.

For non-essential components like filters, a reputable third-party part might be fine. But for critical systems, caution is crucial.

Tadano Cranes Demand High Standards

Tadano cranes are known for their durability and precision, but only if maintained properly. High-pressure systems like hydraulics, electronics, or load-bearing components require parts that meet strict standards. Parts designed for these demands ensure safety and performance.

For less critical parts, a vetted third-party option could work, but only from a trusted source.

Partnering with a Parts Supplier

A reliable supplier is your ally in making smart choices. They understand your crane, can recommend when third-party parts are viable, and ensure fast delivery to minimize downtime. They'll also clarify the risks of each option.

Suppliers who push parts without context or can't verify compatibility are a liability. Choose a supplier who values your operation's success.

Closing Thoughts

Scheduled servicing keeps your crane in the game. The parts you choose—OEM or third-party—shape its future. While OEM Tadano crane parts deliver reliability, third-party options can save costs if chosen carefully. Work with a supplier who knows your equipment and prioritizes quality.

Ask the tough questions: Is this part reliable? What's the risk? A little care today prevents major headaches tomorrow.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization which hosts and develops Wikipedia, has paused an experiment that showed users AI-generated summaries at the top of articles after an overwhelmingly negative reaction from the Wikipedia editors community.

“Just because Google has rolled out its AI summaries doesn't mean we need to one-up them, I sincerely beg you not to test this, on mobile or anywhere else,” one editor said in response to Wikimedia Foundation’s announcement that it will launch a two-week trial of the summaries on the mobile version of Wikipedia. “This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source. Wikipedia has in some ways become a byword for sober boringness, which is excellent. Let's not insult our readers' intelligence and join the stampede to roll out flashy AI summaries. Which is what these are, although here the word ‘machine-generated’ is used instead.”

Two other editors simply commented, “Yuck.”

For years, Wikipedia has been one of the most valuable repositories of information in the world, and a laudable model for community-based, democratic internet platform governance. Its importance has only grown in the last couple of years during the generative AI boom as it’s one of the only internet platforms that has not been significantly degraded by the flood of AI-generated slop and misinformation. As opposed to Google, which since embracing generative AI has instructed its users to eat glue, Wikipedia’s community has kept its articles relatively high quality. As I recently reported last year, editors are actively working to filter out bad, AI-generated content from Wikipedia.

A page detailing the the AI-generated summaries project, called “Simple Article Summaries,” explains that it was proposed after a discussion at Wikimedia’s 2024 conference, Wikimania, where “Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from.” Editors who participated in the discussion thought that these summaries could improve the learning experience on Wikipedia, where some article summaries can be quite dense and filled with technical jargon, but that AI features needed to be cleared labeled as such and that users needed an easy to way to flag issues with “machine-generated/remixed content once it was published or generated automatically.”

In one experiment where summaries were enabled for users who have the Wikipedia browser extension installed, the generated summary showed up at the top of the article, which users had to click to expand and read. That summary was also flagged with a yellow “unverified” label.
An example of what the AI-generated summary looked like.
Wikimedia announced that it was going to run the generated summaries experiment on June 2, and was immediately met with dozens of replies from editors who said “very bad idea,” “strongest possible oppose,” Absolutely not,” etc.

“Yes, human editors can introduce reliability and NPOV [neutral point-of-view] issues. But as a collective mass, it evens out into a beautiful corpus,” one editor said. “With Simple Article Summaries, you propose giving one singular editor with known reliability and NPOV issues a platform at the very top of any given article, whilst giving zero editorial control to others. It reinforces the idea that Wikipedia cannot be relied on, destroying a decade of policy work. It reinforces the belief that unsourced, charged content can be added, because this platforms it. I don't think I would feel comfortable contributing to an encyclopedia like this. No other community has mastered collaboration to such a wondrous extent, and this would throw that away.”

A day later, Wikimedia announced that it would pause the launch of the experiment, but indicated that it’s still interested in AI-generated summaries.

“The Wikimedia Foundation has been exploring ways to make Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects more accessible to readers globally,” a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told me in an email. “This two-week, opt-in experiment was focused on making complex Wikipedia articles more accessible to people with different reading levels. For the purposes of this experiment, the summaries were generated by an open-weight Aya model by Cohere. It was meant to gauge interest in a feature like this, and to help us think about the right kind of community moderation systems to ensure humans remain central to deciding what information is shown on Wikipedia.”

“It is common to receive a variety of feedback from volunteers, and we incorporate it in our decisions, and sometimes change course,” the Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson added. “We welcome such thoughtful feedback — this is what continues to make Wikipedia a truly collaborative platform of human knowledge.”

“Reading through the comments, it’s clear we could have done a better job introducing this idea and opening up the conversation here on VPT back in March,” a Wikimedia Foundation project manager said. VPT, or “village pump technical,” is where The Wikimedia Foundation and the community discuss technical aspects of the platform. “As internet usage changes over time, we are trying to discover new ways to help new generations learn from Wikipedia to sustain our movement into the future. In consequence, we need to figure out how we can experiment in safe ways that are appropriate for readers and the Wikimedia community. Looking back, we realize the next step with this message should have been to provide more of that context for you all and to make the space for folks to engage further.”

The project manager also said that “Bringing generative AI into the Wikipedia reading experience is a serious set of decisions, with important implications, and we intend to treat it as such, and that “We do not have any plans for bringing a summary feature to the wikis without editor involvement. An editor moderation workflow is required under any circumstances, both for this idea, as well as any future idea around AI summarized or adapted content.”

Interesting that they are going the subscription route and not selling these outright. It works because the comparison with the cost of a human looks so favorable. I'd expect to see this with humanoid robots too as they take over more and more human jobs.

XRobotics’ countertop robots are cooking up 25,000 pizzas a month

XRobotics' countertop robots are cooking up 25,000 pizzas a month | TechCrunch

XRobotics recently raised a $2.5 million seed round to help it produce more of its countertop pizza robots.

^{Rebecca Szkutak (TechCrunch)}