First winches for 14 tug order underway
Ibercisa is manufacturing the deck machinery for 14 tugboats under construction at the Armón Shipyard in Spain.
Ian Cohen and José Mata, representing the Authority of the Panama Canal, recently visited the Ibercisa manufacturing facility to oversee the construction of the two winches for the first vessel.
These winches, which have been custom built for the owners to the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) standards, are hydraulically driven and will be situated at the bow of the vessel, with a capacity of 150m of 80mm synthetic rope.
Both winches have a pull of 20 tons on the first layer at a speed of 11m per minute and a second speed for manoeuvres carried out by the cabiron, reaching a pull of 4.10 tons and 16 metres per minute. The static brake capacity is 210 tons.
Given that these boats are operating 24 hours a day, the authority has chosen winches with an oil bath for the gears, as a help to reducing maintenance. The stowage roller is driven by an electric motor, which is controlled from the bridge and allows ‘criss-cross’ stowage.
The new Panama Canal will enable navigation for vessels of up to 365m in length and it is estimated that the annual traffic crossing the canal will rise steeply, with both larger volumes of traffic and bigger ships. The boxships expected will have up to 19 rows of containers as opposed to the present 13, with a heavier weight than the present 85,000 tons now allowed.
This requires that both the tugboats and their deck machinery be both powerful and reliable. It is hoped that the new Canal will be operative at the end of 2014 and this will be the first tugboat to operate from the new terminal.
It is not the only delivery by Ibercisa to the Armón Shipyard, as they have supplied a number of units for vessels built at this yard. Of particular interest is the recent delivery of a stowage winch for spare wire with a capacity for 1,600m of 83mm wire, electrically driven by a 90kw motor and brake with frequency converter. This winch is for a tugboat presently under construction at Armón and has a gearbox with three sets of gears, a first layer pull of 26.9 tons, with 34.9 tons on the overcharge. The machine is for a VO85 vessel and is the first delivery of a set of nine boats on order.
