Cutting stiffeners manually: way too many redoes in bending and assembly

Vyborg Shipyard is a leading shipbuilding company in Russia specialized in the building of drilling platforms and icebreakers. Since it was founded in 1948 there have been more than 200 vessels built with a deadweight capacity of up to 12000 tons and a total displacement over 1,550,000 tons.

For this and all their previous fabrication work Vyborg used to do the profiles’ nesting and cutting manually, using design drafts on paper. Those were timely processes often resulting in further production delays and bending and assembly errors. Often numerous redoes were needed which led to critical delays in production and extra manpower needed. Vyborg could not afford the prolonged production time and redoes any longer. It was affecting negatively both the company’s resources and the potential customers’ interest.

‘We were using cutting drafts on paper, after which the materials were cut manually too. This resulted often in assembly errors. It was difficult to maintain a tight production schedule.’
Alexey Shadrov – Head of Design Engineering

Fabrication glory: accurate cuts for perfect fitting results and five times faster fabrication!

After a thorough research Vyborg set their mind on HGG’s PCL 600 – our innovative and highly productive stiffener profiles cutting machine. With the PCL 600 Vyborg can now execute all their profiling works of beams and stiffeners (bulbs, strips, angles and T bars) for icebreakers, offshore oil and gas drilling rigs and other vessels. Equipped with a robot arm the PCL 600 realises high quality cuts, which result in fast and easy fitting. Vyborg is no longer busy doing redoes, which significantly increased their fabrication speed.

After the successful integration of the HGG plasma profile cutting line (the PCL 600) into their fabrication process, Vyborg reflects on their production process gains: ‘Having the HGG cutting line has greatly improved our productivity speed – around 4 to 5 times! We can now execute orders much more quickly that makes us a much more attractive choice for potential customers’.

 

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