A journalist from one of the crane’s industry’s top magazines was treated to a sneak peek at how our market-leading UNIC mini spider cranes are made at Furukawa Unic’s factory in Sakura City recently.

Tim Maughan travelled 25 miles outside of Tokyo to the Furukawa Unic manufacturing plant to write a piece for International Cranes & Specialized Transport. Deputy General Manager of the overseas marketing department, Shinji Mitsuya, and the rest of the Furukawa Unic team showed Tim some famous Japanese hospitality on his trip and took him on a tour around the 145,000 square metre factory.

280 staff work at the Sakura City plant where robots help to weld, assemble and paint crane parts, 70-80% of these parts are also made on the premises. Furukawa Unic started to develop mini spider cranes in the early 80s and are renowned for their strict quality control and meticulous product testing.  Both truck-mounted cranes and mini spider cranes are made on their efficient production lines at this site, including the world’s most compact and the world’s strongest mini cranes, the UNIC URW-094 and UNIC URW-1006.

To demonstrate how versatile Unic mini cranes are, Shinji San proudly showed some photos of UNIC’s favourite jobs, including a shot of GGR’s UNIC URW-706 on top of The Shard in London. Under the brand name of UNIC Cranes Europe, GGR Group has been the official European master distributor since 1994.

Take a look at this month’s mini spider crane feature in the March issue of International Cranes & Specialized Transport to read Tim’s article. To find out more about GGR’s range of UNIC mini spider cranes for hire and purchase visit the UNIC Cranes Europe website.

All images are courtesy of Tim Maughan