Cranab Crane Service Repair Manual

Cranab is a brand of the Swedish company Cranab AB of the same name. The entire Cranab product range, which includes timber grabs and forwarder and harvester booms, is manufactured in Vindeln, in the middle of the forests of northern Sweden.

The proximity to the forest allows Cranab AB to be in constant contact with professional foresters, which in turn helps in the design and testing of products. Each new Cranab product undergoes long and comprehensive testing in real forestry conditions in northern Sweden.

Cranab booms and crane equipment for professional forestry have been developed, manufactured and sold by Cranab AB since 1963. However, the production of cranes for the forest industry began earlier - in 1959, when the future founders of the company, the Jonsson brothers, began producing cranes according to individual orders for ABS Service.

Cranab products began to be exported in 1964, with the first export – a hydraulic forestry crane with a grab – being sent to Finland. In 1967, the export market outside the Scandinavian region was expanded to Yugoslavia and France.

In the 1970s, Cranab already occupied 85% of the Finnish market. Since then, Cranab has continued to expand and today is one of the world's largest manufacturers of grapples and booms, distinguished by high quality and reliability. This can be seen in the example of such familiar equipment as a forest grapple. All forest grapples, produced by dozens of companies, are similar to each other and differ only slightly in design and price.

Let's consider just some of the design features of Cranab grapples:

1. All fingers are expander-type, which allows for a 4-5 times longer service life compared to conventional ones (of the same diameter and length).

2. Large diameters and working lengths of fingers (even on a small grapple with an area of 0.26 sq. m, the diameter of the body finger is 60 mm, and the length of its bushing is 70 mm).

3. All grapples have an additional body stiffener. 4. All grippers have reinforced finger lugs, which, together with the large finger diameter, is of decisive importance for the rigidity of the jaws and their durability.

5. One hydraulic cylinder, which reduces the probability of failure by 3 times compared to grippers with two hydraulic cylinders.

6. The jaws use a thick-walled pipe of a larger diameter, which gives greater rigidity to the jaws and significantly increases resistance to cracking at the ends of the jaws.

It is quite clear that most of the above differences significantly increase the strength and reliability of the grip, and this also inevitably leads to an increase in its metal consumption, and this directly affects the cost of the equipment and its final price for the consumer.