Author: Anco Kok

There are few better places to do business in the leisure marine world than the METSTRADE Show in Amsterdam.

Lift Emotion will have a stand (10.305) in the newly expanded SuperYacht Pavilion and would welcome the chance to meet you there. This will give us the chance to share in person some of the exciting products and innovations we’ve recently unveiled for the yachting market.

This year’s METSTRADE Show runs from Tuesday 13 to Thursday 15 November. The RAI Amsterdam convention centre will host over 1500 exhibitors and more than 16,000 visitors from all over the world to the largest B2B platform in our industry.

Lift Emotion has a dedicated METSTRADE page here. To register as a visitor for the event simply follow the simple instructions here.

We know that you will have a busy day at the METSTRADE Show so if you’d like to schedule a meetingin advance, feel free to contact us via info@lift-emotion.eu.

You are welcome to visit us at stand QS73 in the Darse Sud section, where you can view our products and have a chat about any questions or remarks you might have. We have a number of entrance tickets we can share with select clients; if you are interested, simply email Mike Brandt at m.brandt@lift-emotion.eu and we will forward a ticket to you (subject to availability).

Lift Emotion always shares its designs with naval architects and designers. Come to our stand to share your details and tell us what you need, and we will send you a file with specific lifts corresponding to your requirements – this can be handy in the design process for a vessel.

Visitors to our stand at the Monaco Yacht Show will also have the chance to win two free tickets for the SuperYacht Night party organised during the METSTRADE Show in Amsterdam on 13-15 November. Last year’s event brought together some 1250 professionals from across the industry for a memorable evening of drinks, fun, networking and live entertainment.

Our products are also featured on numerous equally impressive yachts that won’t make it to this year’s Monaco show, such as Echo Yachts’ 84-metre trimaran White Rabbit and a recently delivered Feadship. We are currently working on solutions for projects in build at top yards such as Feadship, Benetti, Lürssen, Nobiskrug, Damen, Delta Marine, Turquoise and Echo. And there’s more – other ongoing projects include highly specialised work like wind turbine access towers for windfarm service vessels, side loaders for cruise ships in the upcoming Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collections, and navy projects.

Lift Emotion has also produced a range of remarkable onshore solutions. After work on Apple’s Steve Jobs Theater in 2017, we have now also delivered equipment for the refurbishment of the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York City. Moreover, we provided one all-glass lift in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, while another, all-round one will be installed in a private home in the United States in the near future.

In its ten years of operation, Lift Emotion has had the chance to work with some of the world’s greatest designers with their requests ensuring our team is kept on its toes creating solutions to match their visions. This has meant each project has required a custom approach, but to meet the market, we’re now changing to offer a basic lift design to meet a range of requirements and budget brackets.

Applied to round elevators, this means we’re working to set diameters to enable development which brings the style to a new sector of the market. Material choices are still flexible within a certain range and it can be a great tool for shipyards with a standard range of vessels. Watch this space for updates.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have delivered several high end land-based projects in the past few years. From the most expensive house in Switzerland, to one of the most iconic global building projects of recent years in Cupertino; we’ve also delivered a glass elevator in France and are currently producing a glass elevator for a private house in the US.

It might sound simple, but the integration of cladding and lift parts is time consuming with cladding needed for every separate part, as well as the landing and cabin doors. These doors will receive a thick, aesthetically-pleasing cladding making custom made door panels and door drives necessary.

The lift will be pre-assembled in the Lift Emotions workshop in Meppel and then transported to the ship where it will be hoisted onto the vessel over the course of a few days.

The engineering process was created in 3D for a simpler integration with the 3D design of the vessel. The drive system has been made with a 1:1 acting telescopic cylinder which passes through the pit into a dedicated machine room and with this, 50% of noise inside the lift trunk is eliminated for the comfort of passengers. The inverter-driven power pack ensures a perfect smooth ride and low heat production, with the addition of producing low sound. The elevator controls are in compliance with the latest elevator rules and the entire lift has received complete Lloyd’s approval.

Everybody uses elevators but often the passengers riding in them the have no real idea what’s behind the mechanism that makes them move.

On our Lift Emotion projects the mechanism we usually use is an hydraulic elevator with the latest inverter drive technology.

So how does it work?
Hydraulic elevators act on an old principle where fluid is used to give force. We use this to push the cylinder piston upwards, which then holds an elevator cabin in direct drive. Another solution is to use a cylinder, sheave and ropes – when the cylinder moves one meter, the cabin moves two meters – this is called an indirect drive.

The cleanest and most beautiful elevators are created using this direct drive mechanism as there are no ropes in sight, resulting in a clean look. There is a disadvantage in these cases however; the lifting height and space needed for the cylinder.

With requirements for cylinders of up to 12 meters or more, placing a cylinder of that size under the cabin would cause obvious depth problems on yachts. To solve this, we’ve developed a diversity in single stage cylinders as well as telescopic cylinders, so that the same height is achieved with a smaller cylinder.

The pump unit for the hydraulics are stand-alone units, as elevator hydraulics are based on high flow and low pressure for better comfort for the passengers. Compare that to ship’s hydraulics which are high pressure, low volume making it impossible to use the ship’s power pack for an elevator.

All our current elevators we use have inverter-driven power packs for a lower KW usage but more importantly, superb passenger comfort. Feel free to contact us, or pay us a visit to experience this technology for yourself.

In addition, there are a few other drive types which are often used in other applications. In land-based settings, it’s common to find traction-driven elevators. These are well-suited for high rises, but on a yacht we find these to be too complex for the crew to maintain and they normally need more space for the pit/top and machinery, making them unsuitable for the space available on superyachts.

A drum drive is a more old fashioned drive system, though it still has its uses in some applications. These units tend to be less practicable for a yacht as drum drives usually have high kw power motors inside a staircase, which can cause issue with class and sound. They also require a more skilled engineer for maintenance, thus less maintenance can be done by the crew and the cost for service is more.

At Lift Emotion, we always look at the situation onboard and the requirements of the client to advise on which is the best way up.

Lift Emotion pre-assembled the lift at its facilities in Meppel, the Netherlands. The glass elements were mounted on the lift installation according to the highest yachting standard in the controlled factory environment. After assembly the modular glass elevator installation was transported to the build yard.

Once at the yard, the complete elevator was hoisted onboard the yacht at an angle of four degrees, the elevator installation was completed just three days.

For the yard, advantages of this short installation time meant less downtime and reduced obstruction time of the staircase of the yacht under construction. The Lift Emotion crew were onboard solely for the few days it took to complete installation, meaning the process caused minimum impact for other construction disciplines onboard the yacht.

Although this was the first time that a pre-assembled glass elevator was installed on a yacht, Lift Emotion has previously used the process on a high-end residence in the Alps and France.

Lift Emotion worldwide strives to be the first choice for the design, build and installation of high end lifts both offshore and onshore.

By employing creativity, flexibility and new techniques, Lift Emotion is capable of offering solutions for the most challenging lifting projects to the benefits of its clients.