Crane and deck maintenance - the turnkey package

Regular maintenance comes part and parcel with lifting and pulling equipment - but as expert in this field, MDL AME can provide tailored turnkey support.

MDL BD Manager for AME Shaun Cooper explains how MDL's complete in-house capabilities translate into efficient annual and five yearly deck, rig and crane inspection packages.

Read the transcript below, or jump to the bottom of the page to watch the vlog!

"I’ve been in Aberdeen 25 years (you will notice my accent is fading and fast) and for 20 of those years, I’ve been involved in cranes and operational requirements of cranes and mechanical handling.

"Over the last two years, MDL has been more and more involved in crane work for various clients. We’ve done winch change outs on platform cranes; phased array inspections on vessel cranes; hydraulic work on cranes; fault finding; certain structural inspections on cranes and some modelling around that to ensure the integrity of the crane is good; and various mechanical handling projects around cranes to do winch change outs - so you know you can mobilise various pieces of equipment, and ensuring that when that piece of kit goes on to the platform, the platform is strong enough to take that piece of kit. So, it’s not just a matter of turning up with a temporary crane and going: 'Yeah that’s it.' It’s ensuring that the integrity of the platform has also been considered as well as the integrity of the crane.

"When vessel contractors put their vessels in [dock for maintenance] they are obviously on a very tight schedule and a defined budget - so they don’t want to be dealing with two or three different people effectively for the same piece of work. They want to be dealing with one and then you go and deal with sub-contractors - so they only have one stakeholder to deal with and that fits nicely with what they then can manage after everything else that’s going off on a vessel and during the docking.

"We certainly understand the criticality of vessels being operational, because that’s what we built our business on. We got the skillset from what we’ve done; we got the skillset from cranes point of view; from a technical point of view, we’ve got people - as we said - transferable skills that we can take into that, which removes a ‘one man fits one job’ sort of basis - they can do two or three different jobs.

"And as technology moves forward, there are certain tools that we can use like phased array and things like that, which speeds the whole process up. So, by using that technology, by using the knowledge and by using the crane condition evaluation to focus in on that you can do yearlies, you can do 5-yearlies, you can breakdown maintenance - you can do any these things."

Shaun Cooper, BD Manager - Asset Maintenance & Engineering