Back in March it was announced that the management team of Morris in the UK had bought out the UK, Singapore and Thailand operations of the company from its US parent company. The US parent, also called Morris Material Handling, remains in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The new shareholders will have been eager to get off to a flying start, winning major contracts. Among those contracts that have come their way are the supply of massive rope drums to a steel producer and cranes to a pumping station in Egypt.
The drums
Cranes are critical to the manufacturing and processing operations of Corus, the Anglo-Dutch steel producer, so it always has to keep its own stock of spare parts. At its Port Talbot plant in Wales, 500t-capacity cranes are used for lifting 350t of molten metal. Any breakdown can have severe financial repercussions.
At Port Talbot, Corus has a spare parts replacement programme for its cranes, some of which are more than 30 years old. Needing a pair of replacement crane rope drums, it turned to the Loughborough, UK-based Morris Material Handling.
These drums are among the largest components that Morris has ever delivered. They are 4.3m long and have a diameter of 1.5m. The spur gears are more than 3m in diameter. Each of Corus’s 500t cranes are fitted with four of these drums. Precision engineering and machining is crucial to ensure that they will operate safely and reliably, if and when they need to be installed. Engineers from Morris and Corus cooperated on refining the design of the original drum.
Morris delivered the contract through its Morris Allparts division, a specialist service for manufacturing and supplying parts for cranes not originally manufactured by Morris.
The pumps
Morris is currently engaged in delivering five cranes to one of the largest pumping stations in the world – an order that the company will be working on until the end of the year.
The Mubarak Pumping Station is being built in Egypt by the European Japanese Consortium, led by the Anglo-Swedish contractor Skanska Cementation International.
The structure of the pumping station is 140m long, 40m wide and more than 50m high. It will house 21 pumps when completed and the cranes are now being installed.
All the cranes are from Morris’ 5-5000 series. Of the five cranes being installed, two are 130t-rated overhead travelling cranes, one is a 130t-rated Goliath crane and the other two are odd leg Goliath cranes each with a lifting capacity of 30t.
Morris is installing the cranes as the project is completed, stage by stage. The two EOT cranes have already been installed and the 130t Goliath and the two odd leg Goliaths were shipped to Egypt in July.
These three cranes are to be mounted on top of the pumping station. The Goliath will lift pumps from the pump room to the loading bay, and the two 30t odd leg Goliaths will be used to lift gates within the station. These two odd leg cranes each have a maximum lifting height of 60m.
