Mobro Marine Inc. recently created a parts division to support its crane sales, rental and service operations, which is located in Jacksonville, Fla.

Billy Harper, parts manager, explained that Mobro originally didn’t have a separate parts department.

“They would deal in parts when a customer called them, and they were a Kobelco crane dealer,” Harper said. “Where I came from, I had contacted all the manufacturers, and had arranged it so that when the company that was the distributor for all these manufacturers went out of business, Mobro would take over as the distributor. So when that company did close its doors, Mobro hired my parts department crew to run the parts operation up here in Jacksonville and take a load off the Green Cove Springs facility.”

Harper has been in the parts business for 30 years, and Tony Cruz, his other parts man, has been in it for about 32 years.

“I will find parts for any crane,” Harper said. “Besides Kobelco, we’re also a distributor for Terex, which includes American cranes, P&H cranes, Koehring cranes, Northwest cranes, Bucyrus Erie cranes, Demag cranes and Bendini cranes. We also do Rudomatic taglines, and we’re an official dealer for U.S. Tsubaki, which is a crane distributor for track chain or sprocket chains. We’re very versatile. We can find parts for almost anything.”

Harper said that the company’s area is worldwide, with customers as far as the Netherlands, Bermuda, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Cuba.

He has good selection of stocked parts, but also knows where to find the parts he doesn’t have.

“If the item moves quite a bit — let’s say six times in a year — then I try to put it on my shelf,” Harper said. “If I get a hit one or two times a year, then I don’t think it’s worth putting it on my shelf… if the factory stocks it. We’re just really good at finding hard to find parts. Tony and I have been at this a long time, and we’ve got a lot of contacts out there. I was just talking to a customer working on a Grove crane, and I’m not a Grove dealer, but he wants me to find the part for him because he knows that I can find it.”

In addition, Harper said that if someone is looking to do a major crane rebuild, Mobro has a large stock of long lead time parts that the manufacturers don’t keep in stock anymore.

For more information, call 904/733-1822 or visit www.mobromarine.com.

This story also appears on Crane Equipment Guide.

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