The method is extremely cost effective as dry berths can be built for a fraction of the cost of additional wet docking facilities.

For the simple yet ingenious marine lift, a docking cradle and block arrangement is prepared specific to each vessel and lowered into the water. The vessel is moved into place over the wheeled platform. The lift then raises the platform and with it the vessel out of the water.

Once at ground level, the vessel, on its wheeled platform, is pushed on rails to a transfer dock. Wheeled transfer trolleys then move the ship, again on rails, along a line of repair bays until it arrives at the desired location, leaving the wet dock free to accept other vessels.

During the last two years major refurbishment work has been carried out at the yard, including the replacement of existing transportation wheels with specially designed wheels manufactured and supplied by HMC Brauer in Milton Keynes UK. Originally seven different wheel sizes were needed to deal with all the different transportation requirements but Brauer's re-design has slashed that number to three.

Moving a large vessel around on wheels is no simple undertaking and the results of a structural failure would be serious. The original design had relied on bearing retainer plates to hold the wheels in place. The plates had been prone to failure because the load on the outward facing bearings forced the bolts out of place. By redesigning the bearings to face each other this problem was avoided and the Brauer wheels could be fixed to the axles by a simple block and U-bolt system which is simple and quick to change.

Also, Brauer's new design, employing a higher elongation steel, has reduced the number of broken flanges, thus extending the working life of the wheels.

In order to ensure that the radical solution was satisfactory, HMC Brauer undertook extensive trials of the simplified, double-flanged design. Now that reliability has been proved, over 800 wheels have been installed at Al Jadaf.

MJ Information No: 19637