Customer's Challenge

A client’s pipe laying vessel was in need for repair on its key pipe-laying equipment, the stinger. Due to the work nature, pipe laying vessel’s stinger is often subjected to high loading in harsh sea condition in which caused the bushes in the brackets and locking load cell pins that were used to hold the whole stinger structure together to suffer damages. The client could not afford the time to send the vessel to a suitable shipyard in carrying out the stinger repair as it was in a mid of preparation for another charter.

Solution

Metal Machines was engaged and deployed a team of 8 personnel including a project engineer to well coordinate the repair job with the ship crews in meeting the demanding schedule.

Necessary job risk assessments were careful drafted and approved by vessel safety committee as this repair job had to run through 24/7 and with some of the activities were required to carry out just above the sea level.

The whole stinger is connected through 5 segments, therefore alignment together with machine set-up between each individual segment’s brackets are very important. After the alignment, each segment has 8 holes to be machined. Once after the the bracket holes had been machined to the required size; the bushes were fitted and welded before carrying out a final machining to fit the size of the new locking load cell pin.

Benefit

The commonly solution to this kind of repair is to dock the vessel in a port and perform the repair job of the part or structure on land. This would likely incur a huge lose due to the downtime by sailing to the nearest available port or shipyard which directly induce a huge cost for the repair works. In this case, the duration used to repair the stingers is only 5 days and vessel was able to continue with its charter preparation.
Metal Machines has a team which is well trained and ready to be deployed for the offshore repair or work.