An installation crew shows up on the date the equipment order was placed against. The shaft is out of tolerance. Nobody agreed, months earlier, whose survey was supposed to catch that first. That's the most common delay claim on an elevator job, and it happens because the equipment spec sets a tolerance for a shaft another trade builds, with no owner assigned to checking it.
Conveying bids fix the easy end without much trouble: capacity, speed, stops and cab finishes are sitting right there in the elevator or crane spec. What decides whether the bid holds up is the boundary between the equipment and the building around it: the hoistway, the pit, the machine room, the runway beams someone else builds to a tolerance the spec imposes but doesn't own. Below is where that boundary sits, drawn from real Canadian ICI tenders with elevators, cranes or both.
Yours, without much argument
- Elevators, complete: supply, install, cab finishes, controls and commissioning per the spec, covering capacity, speed, stops, door sizes and finish schedule. The best-documented part of the bid.
- Cranes and hoists: bridge cranes, monorails and hoists per the equipment schedule, with capacities, spans, duty classification, controls and end stops. Read duty class carefully: the same span at a higher class is a different machine.
- Regulatory inspections and licensing: TSSA or equivalent design submissions, inspections, licensing. Real cost, real schedule, not automatic paperwork.
- Maintenance period: the warranty term plus response-time commitments, extracted as actual months, not assumed as a standard warranty.
Three places this goes wrong
Freight and specialty lifts
Freight elevators, vertical platform lifts and dumbwaiters carry the same rigour as a passenger elevator, but they're easy to under-read: often a shorter section, or a single line naming a capacity with none of the finish-schedule detail a passenger cab gets. Extract each one with its own capacity, commissioning and inspection requirements rather than assuming it rides along with the main elevator's paperwork.
Temporary use for construction
A construction-use agreement letting the contractor run the permanent elevator during the build, instead of a separate temporary hoist, is common enough to expect on almost any multi-storey job. It's where real cost hides. Hour metering, cab protection, and the condition the car has to be returned to before turnover are usually in there, and none of it is free. Extract the actual conditions rather than treating "temporary use permitted" as a one-line exclusion.
Hoistway tolerance: who verifies it, and when
The spec sets plumbness and dimensional tolerances for the hoistway. The hoistway is built by another trade entirely, and the survey confirming it meets those tolerances before installation begins doesn't have an automatic owner. That's the scenario above: crews arrive on schedule, the shaft is out, and nobody agreed in advance whose survey was supposed to catch it first. Confirm who verifies, and when, before the equipment order goes in against a fixed install date.
What isn't yours, even sitting right next to your work
| Item | Whose it is | What you still need to pull out |
|---|---|---|
| Hoistway & machine-room construction | Other trades | The tolerance and dimensional requirements your spec imposes on them: extract explicitly so the interface is visible to whoever's pricing the shaft, not just to you. |
| Pit ladders, divider beams, sill angles | Misc metals | Nothing material, but they can't finalize without your shop drawings, so the sequencing is a coordination item. |
| Power feeds and disconnects | Electrical, to the machine room or disconnect | The provision list the spec demands of Division 26: pit lighting, GFI receptacles included. Extract it; it's a scope requirement you're imposing on someone else's bid. |
| Runway beams | Structural steel | Alignment tolerance, not just presence: a beam slightly out of alignment is a crane that doesn't track once installed. |
Also check
A few items sit outside Division 14 entirely and get missed for exactly that reason. Pit conditions, meaning waterproofing, sump pumps and pit ladder requirements, are things the spec imposes on other trades rather than performs itself, but a wet pit discovered after installation is a warranty fight nobody wants. Load testing and commissioning evidence (test weights, witnessed testing, the documentation package the AHJ or owner expects at handover) are deliverables worth confirming up front, since a commissioning requirement found at turnover is a schedule problem, not a paperwork one. Crane duty classification is worth a second look here too: CMAA class and cycle rate change the actual machine being priced even when span and capacity look identical to a lighter unit. And regulatory notification lead times (TSSA design-submission and inspection timelines) can run long enough to set the critical path on a fast-tracked job, rarely where the schedule assumes they are.
Before the number leaves the office
Read the elevator or crane spec specifically for what it demands of other trades (hoistway tolerance, electrical provisions, runway alignment) because that list is your scope even though none of the work is yours to perform. Confirm who surveys the hoistway before the install date is fixed, and cost out what a temporary-use agreement takes in hours and protection. Four names carry most of the coordination: electrical for feeders and pit services against the provision list, structural steel for runway alignment, the general contractor for hoistway turnover condition and temporary-use terms, and misc metals for pit ladders sequenced against your shop drawings. The equipment schedule is the easy half of this bid.