We are regularly asked to complete marine machining jobs all over the UK. A recent job saw our on-site machining team make the trip up to Birkenhead to assist the team at Northwestern Ship Repairers and Ship Builders.

The problem they had was that the locking pins on one of their barges had become severely worn. Unfortunately, correcting this problem was far from straightforward.

The pins needed to be milled in the same plane relative to each other. What made this more challenging is that all the work needed to be done completely in-situ. This involved devising a system that facilitated the milling and measurement in exactly the right plane. 

To achieve this, we had to replicate the centreline of the jack-up leg by setting one of our modular line boring bars to zero zero readings off the leg location bore. Each horizontal centreline was then taken from the central bar to the pin location, ensuring that the bar itself bisected the vertical centreline exactly. By checking the alignment of each of the bars we were able to ensure with 100% accuracy that each of the pin heads were on the same plane relative to each other.

Once the modular bars were all properly located and set, the actual milling of the pin heads was relatively straightforward.

This is a prime example of the importance of expertise as well as having the right tools for the job. Our highly experienced teams of on-site machining engineers come across problems like this every day. They have decades of collective experience to draw upon and we are yet to come across a problem they’ve been unable to solve. 

A spokesman from NorthWestern Ship Repairers said:

‘M&A demonstrated their expertise in this area with an innovative solution that solved the problem with high accuracy’ 

We look forward to working with NorthWestern Ship repairers again in the near future. 

If you’ve got a difficult machining problem that you’d like to discuss with us, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.