MacGregor has been awarded further contracts for the delivery of the world’s biggest twin cargo-handling cranes to Chinese-Polish Joint Stock Shipping Chipolbrok. The company is looking to gear up four more of an 11-ship series of 1990s-built general cargo ships with MacGregor technology.

The GL cranes have a combined SWL of 150 tonnes at 20m and 90 tonnes at 28m, and are believed to be the world’s largest shipboard twin cranes. They will feature the well-proven CC2000 control system and be able to operate simultaneously when luffing, slewing and hoisting in both single as well as twin modes at maximum loading and speed.

MacGregor’s involvement with Chipolbrok goes back to the early 1970s, and last year MacGregor retrofitted three other ships in the series with similar cranes. “Chipolbrok is one of the leading operators of general cargo ships between Asia and US as well as Europe, and the increasing demand in the market convinced the company to go ahead with further investment in MacGregor technology, which is in the region of €2.1 million per shipset,” said Mr Kenneth Mellin, Sales Manager, Crane division.

The four ships, Jia Xing, Wieniawski, Chong Ming and Szymanowski, will be retrofitted with the new twin cranes starting with the first ship in autumn this year and finalised with the last ship in October 2008. The cranes will be manufactured at MacGregor’s long-term partner plant Nanjing Lüzhou Machine Works in China and installed and commissioned in a shipyard in the Yangtze Jiang area.