Moving a 1,100-ton historic brick mansion through a tight urban turn is not the kind of job you tackle with whatever happens to be in the yard. It demands purpose-built machinery, equipment engineered to hoist, slide, steer, and transfer extraordinary weights with millimeter-level precision and zero margin for error. And for most contractors, riggers, and structural movers, the smartest way to get hands on that machinery is not to buy it, but to rent it.
Here at Buckingham Structural Moving Equipment, we offer one of the most complete rental fleets available for this kind of work. Our lineup covers nearly every phase of a heavy lift or move, from the initial jacking and shoring through the final positioning of a structure on its new foundation. Below is a closer look at the major categories of equipment available for rent, what each one does, when it earns its keep on a job site, and why renting structural movement equipment it almost always makes more financial sense than buying outright.
Power Units, Power Dollies, Coaster Dollies, and Crab Steer Dollies
The dollies themselves are the unsung workhorses of any move. Buckingham's rental fleet includes power dollies (the driven units that supply tractive force), coaster dollies (non-powered units that follow along under the load), and crab steer dollies (which can move the load sideways or in any direction without rotating the structure itself). The power units that drive these dollies can be ordered with EPA-compliant exhaust handling, which matters more than ever on urban job sites where emissions standards are tight and neighbors are watching.
Selecting the right combination (how many power dollies, how many coasters, where to position crab steer units) is part of the art of structural moving.
Unified Jacking Machines and Crib Jacks
Before a structure can roll anywhere, it has to come up off its foundation. That is the job of the jacking equipment.
Crib jacks are the foundational tool of any vertical lift. They sit atop timber cribbing, those interlocking wood stacks you see under raised houses, and provide controlled hydraulic lift one increment at a time. As the jacks extend, more cribbing is added beneath the load; as they retract for a new stroke, the cribbing holds the weight. It is a slow, methodical process that has been used in structural moving for more than a century, but modern hydraulic crib jacks make it dramatically safer and faster than the screw jacks of an earlier era.
A Unified Jacking System takes this concept to the next level by tying many jacks together into a single coordinated hydraulic circuit. Instead of each jack operating independently, with the inevitable risk that one corner rises faster than another and twists or cracks the structure, a unified system raises every point in lockstep. This is essential for raising large or rigid structures (think masonry buildings, concrete slabs, or industrial equipment) where differential lift can cause catastrophic damage. For historic preservation work, where every brick matters, unified jacking is non-negotiable.
Jacking-Shoring Posts and Multi-Purpose Jacks
Once a structure is up, it has to stay up, sometimes for days or weeks while a new foundation is poured, beams are inspected, or the move itself is staged. Jacking-shoring posts are essentially heavy-duty adjustable steel columns that lock in at the desired height and hold the load. They free up the active hydraulic jacks to be used elsewhere on the project.
Multi-purpose jacks fill in the gaps, as they handle the medium-duty lifts and adjustments that come up constantly on a job site, from leveling beams to aligning equipment for connection. Toe jacks, a specialized variant, are designed to lift loads from underneath where there is almost no clearance, with a low-profile "toe" that slides under a beam edge or steel base before the jack body takes over the lift.
The Jack & Slide System
The Jack & Slide System is one of those purpose-built tools that solves a very specific, very common problem: getting a heavy load off a transport platform and into its final position, or transferring it laterally onto rollers and dollies. It combines jacking and sliding in a single coordinated setup, which dramatically shortens the time spent on the most delicate phases of a move, the hand-offs.
For contractors who run heavy haul or rigging operations, the Jack & Slide is one of the most-rented items in the catalog because the use case (set down a piece of heavy equipment, transfer it sideways, walk away) recurs constantly across very different jobs.
Skates and Rollers
Skates and rollers are the lowest-tech, highest-utility items in the fleet, and arguably the most universally useful. Hevi-Haul heavy-duty skates are available in capacities from 10 tons to 100 tons, with low profiles and broad footprints that distribute load and keep the structure stable. Medium-duty skates run from 6 to 30 tons with about half the footprint, ideal for lighter applications where space is at a premium. Beam roller skates allow heavy materials and beams to slide with minimal effort and can be ordered with or without a fixed guide cam roller system to keep them tracking straight along an I-beam.
Why Renting Beats Buying for Most Operators
The equipment described above is, by any measure, a significant capital investment, and even a modest professional setup runs well into six figures, and a serious one runs to several million dollars. For most contractors, the math behind renting versus buying is not particularly close.
Capital preservation. The single biggest reason to rent is that the money stays in the business. Capital tied up in a yard full of rarely used jacks is capital that cannot bid on the next project, hire the next crew member, or cover payroll during a slow quarter. Renting converts what would be a massive capital expenditure into a predictable per-job operating expense that gets billed directly into the project, which is exactly where it belongs.
Right-sizing for every job. No two structural moves are alike. A small farmhouse relocation needs nothing close to the equipment required for a 600-ton industrial relocation. When you own a fleet, you are perpetually paying for either too much or too little, too much equipment sitting idle on the small jobs, or not enough capacity when the big one comes in. Renting lets you build the exact tool kit each project needs without compromise in either direction.
No maintenance, no inspections, no storage. Heavy hydraulic equipment is high-maintenance by nature. When you own, all of that, along with the storage facility, the climate control, the painting, and the eventual replacement, is on you. When you rent, the equipment shows up project-ready and inspected, and goes back when the job is done. Your crew runs the move; the supplier deals with the wear.
Geographic flexibility. Our rental fleet supports projects across the country, which means a contractor operating in multiple regions does not need to truck a yard's worth of equipment cross-country to take a job. Equipment can be delivered to the project, used, and returned without the overhead of a permanent regional cache.
Lower insurance and liability exposure. Owned heavy equipment carries its own insurance burden, both for damage to the equipment itself and for the liability associated with operating it. Rental contracts often bundle elements of this coverage, and even when they do not, the absence of the asset on the books simplifies the insurance picture considerably.
Avoiding obsolescence and depreciation. Specialty hydraulic equipment depreciates predictably and meaningfully. Buying means absorbing that depreciation. Renting passes the depreciation problem to the rental company, which has the scale to absorb it across a fleet that is in near-constant use. For a contractor, paying the rental rate is almost always cheaper, on a per-hour-of-actual-use basis, than owning the equipment outright.
Tax treatment. Without diving into specifics that would be the province of an accountant, rental expenses are typically treated as straightforward operating expenses, fully deductible in the year incurred. Owned equipment requires depreciation schedules, Section 179 considerations, and a more complex tax footprint. For most operators, the rental treatment is simpler and friendlier to cash flow. (Anyone weighing this seriously should run the numbers with their CPA, every operation's tax picture is different.)
Convenient Structural Moving Equipment Rentals
Structural moving is a discipline where the right equipment is the difference between a clean, on-time project and a disaster on the news. The Buckingham rental fleet — from our dolly systems and unified jacking machines down to the humble skate, gives operators access to the entire toolkit without the capital, storage, maintenance, and depreciation headache of owning it.
For all but the largest, busiest heavy machine and structural moving outfits, that math points clearly in one direction: rent the gear, bill it into the job, and put your capital where it actually grows the business.
