Global Track Australia’s founder, Greg McKay, says that the new Global Track manual crane hook, recently redesigned, is almost ready to launch.

Global Track has been searching for a Chinese production partner for the hook in recent weeks. The project is being coordinated with a business partner based in Hong Kong.

“The crane and hook were developed before I took my partner on. We started the partnership August last year,” said McKay.

Global Track’s eponymous manual crane has been on the market for about 7 years, although two years ago it started producing the wind turbine maintenance hook, Turbo Hook, for taking pitch control motors in and out of turbine nacelles.

The idea for the Global Track manual crane came from McKay’s crane testing practice, when he found it was hard to find a crane that could move with a test load.

McKay explained the Global Track’s design features. “The pivoting movement stops jamming. Most cranes have to have a one-to-seven ratio of the end carriage length to bridge length to stop jamming, and they still jam.

“The end carriages are fixed to the bridge so the whole bridge has to move at once. With my system because it cannot jam due to the pivoting technology of the end carriages,” said McKay.

“This also gives my system a shorter end carriage, which allows the crane bridge to get closer to the end of the crane tracks, allowing better use of the floor space”

McKay said that the system moves 2t with 20kg effort, and may be used with 15m bridges.

The launch for the new hook, pictured as a plastic prototype, is planned for sometime after May, said McKay:

“The trolley has not been released and is due to be released now. I get the tooling on the 5th of May and will start production, I hope to sell 30,000 trolleys in the first the months.”

“As soon as I get some production we are packaging a set of components in a box as a sales kit these will be available at about $10.00 a set, although I do not have a firm price as yet may be more may be less but I doubt it will be less.”

Global Track products are available through direct sales, McKay adds. “Cranes are available from Australia and will be available from [China] shortly.”