Lifting Two Coils at Once: C Hook Variants for Paired and Bundled Loads

A standard C hook moves one coil per crane pick. That is the right unit of work in most bays — but not all of them. Where coils leave the line in pairs, or where pipe goes out in bundles, the attachment and the material have quietly drifted apart, and every cycle costs a trip that did not need to happen. Two hooks close that gap, and they close it in different ways: one is a variant of the C hook, the other is a different arm on a machine you may already know by another name.

Your handling unit is not always one coil

The question worth asking is not "how heavy is the load" but "how many things move together". A slitting line that drops coils in matched pairs, a dispatch bay that loads two at a time onto a truck, a pipe plant that bands tube into bundles before it goes anywhere — in each case the material has already decided what the unit is. If the lifting attachment still assumes one item, the crane makes two trips for one unit of work.

Crane time is usually the constraint in a busy bay, not lifting capacity. Halving the number of picks is often a bigger throughput gain than anything you can do to travel speed.

Double coil C hook

The double coil variant carries twin prongs, one coil on each, so a pair moves on a single pick. A recent pair we built ran at 8 ton safe working load.

Three things set the rating, and all three matter:

• Both coils together must sit inside the hook's SWL — the rating is for the pair, not per prong.
• The crane must cover that plus the hook itself. A counterweighted hook is not light, and it is the figure most often left out of the sum.
• The two coils should be close in weight so the hook hangs level. The counterweight trims the empty attitude; it does not compensate for a heavy coil on one side and a light one on the other.

That last point is why this suits paired output rather than mixed storage. If coils come off the line as matched pairs, a double hook fits naturally. If they are picked at random from a yard, it will fight you.

Pipe bundle hook: a cradle arm, not a separate machine

A bundle is a different problem. Pick one up at a single point and it sags, the outer tubes work against the banding, and the load shifts as it lifts.

Here the answer is not a new machine. A pipe bundle hook is our container loading C hook fitted with its cradle arm — the same frame, the same upright, the same reach, with a long lower arm carrying a row of V-notch cradles in place of twin forks or a single coil arm. The cradles seat the bundle at several points along its length instead of letting it bend across one, and multiple lifting points on the top beam let the pick be balanced to the bundle actually being carried. The one pictured below runs at 15 ton.

If you have been quoting a "pipe bundle hook" and a "container loading hook" as two purchases, they are one machine specified two ways — and the arm can be changed for the cargo rather than the hook replaced.

Why the bundle hook is a container hook

That shared frame is not an accident of manufacturing convenience. It is where the demand comes from.

A container loading C hook has to be slim enough to pass a 2338 x 2280 mm door opening while carrying its load, and long enough to set that load at the nose of a box 5.9 m deep in a 20ft and 12.0 m in a 40ft. Those constraints belong to the container, not to the cargo — which means they are identical whether the arm is carrying a coil, a slab, a crate or a bundle of tube.

So once a machine exists that satisfies them, the only thing left to decide is what the load hangs on. Add "one pick per bundle" to the reach requirement and the arm form stops being a detail — it is the whole specification. The cradle arm is that decision, made for pipe.

Side-by-side

Working out your own case

Count two numbers over a shift: how many units of material actually move, and how many crane picks it took. When the second is consistently double the first, the attachment is the reason — and there is either a variant or an arm that closes the gap. Other long and awkward loads have their own answer; pipe lifting tackle covers the cases a cradle arm does not.

Send us your load weights, dimensions and how the material is grouped when it reaches the crane, and we will tell you which one fits — or that the hook you already have is right.

Availability in India

Designed and built at Pragya's Pithampur (Indore) works and supplied to rolling mills, service centres, and steel plants across India. Equipment is fabricated to the relevant IS standards, delivered by road to your plant, and installed and commissioned on site by our own engineers, who also train your operators.