Yanmar and Other Marine Engine Spare Parts: Vital for Every Shipping Vessels during Drydock

Blog | January 20th, 2020

As a rule, there’s no excuse for a lack of spare parts in a ship drydock. It’s different at sea. There’s no way to access a distribution network out there, not unless a helicopter is available, so engineers keep rooms filled with important spares and parts that wear out faster. That’s just common sense, right? With that being said, drydock facilities should never be blindsided by a lack of spares.

What is a Vessel Drydock?

It’s a structure used to repair or maintain a vessel. For smaller boats, there’s a mechanism that can pull a hull out of the water so that it can be inspected for damage, repainted, or repaired. Since larger ships can’t be manhandled, a different type of drydock is utilized. In the truest sense of the word, a dock is flooded when a ship berths, then the water in that enclosed slip is drained until the boat is entirely exposed to view. After the heavy hull comes to rest on a dry platform, it’s secured so that workers can gain access to its normally submerged workings.

Genuine Spare Parts for Major Repairs

Implementing a standard maintenance routine, the drydock workers scrub barnacles from the hull, inspect the anodizing nodes, and paint over repaired scrapes. There’s the work that can be carried out using available welding equipment and hull repair kits, then there are the assignments that require fully functional replacement parts. Exposed for the first time in who knows how long, the propeller and shaft seals might be showing serious signs of ocean-going fatigue. Even with a lake-skipping boat, a ship owned by a weekend fisherman, the propeller could’ve struck a rocky formation recently in a rain-depleted reservoir. Still functional but now causing serious engine output surges, the fuel consumed by the ship is surpassing its normal fluid-sipping dispositions, so the skipper wants a new propeller.

Ships don’t enter drydock facilities often. They can be expensive to use, and then there’s the fact that there’s usually a queue of ships waiting to gain entry. As soon as a boat does slip into that facility, a long list of awaiting repairs slaps into the hand of the drydock owner. A mountain of postponed repairs, jobs that couldn’t be done while the vessel was sailing, now require immediate attention. Again, welders working there receive their fair share of the work, but not every job can be fixed with a weld or fastener tightening tool. For that propeller, a whole exterior mounting system and propeller might be recommended. The spare parts must be on-hand. Either that, or the boat will be confined to an awaiting slip until the parts arrive. Delays like that leave boat owners feeling exasperated. For larger vessels, such lengthy periods of inactivity are absolutely unacceptable.

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