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Cranes & Lifting

MacGregor’s new fibre-rope offshore crane in final stages of construction

MacGregor has announced its fibre-rope offshore crane is now approaching the final stages of construction.

Work started on the company’s crane range in 2016 and it has a cooperation agreement in place with UK-based Parkburn Precision Handling Systems, aligning the companies’ respective strengths in offshore crane technology and fibre-rope tensioning technology.

Designed and built to DNV GL specifications, the FibreTrac crane has a MacGregor storage winch with capacity for 4,000m of 88mm rope. It will have a SWL capacity of 150 tonnes.

Ingvar Apeland, MacGregor’s vice-president of business development for advanced offshore solutions, said the company is confident in the technology and keen to demonstrate the crane’s capabilities, that last year we entered into a program to build, certify and validate it.

“I believe it will be one of the most advanced fibre-rope knuckle-boom cranes that the market has seen,” Apeland added.

“Fibre-rope’s main advantage over traditional wire-rope is that it weighs very little in water, so the quantity of rope paid out has no appreciable impact on the load experienced by the crane.

“This means that a 150-tonne SWL fibre-rope crane can lift loads at depths of 3,000m that would require a 250-tonne SWL wire-rope crane.”

Using a fibre-rope system, smaller cranes, and consequently smaller vessels, are capable of undertaking a much wider scope of work, enabling owners to embark on a wider range of contracts.

The FibreTrac crane will also have a rope monitoring and management system in place, to maximise rope lifespan and provide clear lift-line status information for the operator at all times.

The crane is scheduled to come to market this year. Its deepwater capstan, provided by Parkburn, has been undergoing testing in the UK prior to being transferred to MacGregor’s Kristiansand, Norway, facility where the crane is being assembled.

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