Boat lifting: boat maintenance with an inflatable system

Ship maintenance is an essential practice for shipyards or boat rental companies. Indeed, the maintenance of a vessel is an investment that will allow to extend as much as possible the life of the boat and its equipment. Regular maintenance also ensures that the boat fleet is fully operational during the summer season and thus ensures turnover. It is therefore carried out with care to ensure perfect safety.

To carry out this inspection, charter companies use different means to check the condition of the whole boat depending on where they are located. Sometimes they even have to lift the boat to access the lower part of the hull.

However, accessing the underside of the boat and lifting such a load is sometimes very complex and requires the use of many material and human factors. In addition, to ensure that the boats are held securely during lifting, time-consuming and expensive solutions are used. These means extend the maintenance time, delay the launching of the ships and waste a lot of money.

This is why a simple, fast and cost-effective lifting solution is an important asset for shipyards.

Facilitate the maintenance and the boat lifting

In Turkey, the leading shipyard in Fethiye was looking for a lifting solution for the maintenance of their boats. In fact, their main activities is the chartering of vessels, especially catamarans dedicated to tourism. They have to carry out several maintenance operations throughout the year on their boats to extend their life.

The aim being to test all the accessories, the operators must access the underside of the boat to reach the propeller. Thus, a lifting system is needed to facilitate maintenance on the underside of the vessel.

To overcome this problem, the company uses dry docks or cranes, which are very expensive. In addition, this type of maintenance prolongs the maintenance time, preventing the boat rental for several days and subsequently causing significant financial losses for the company.

Therefore, seeing their loss of time and money to access the lower part of the ship, it was necessary to find a new lifting solution. Furthermore, as the summer season approaches, the boat rental company needs a quick and efficient solution to reach the propeller without using a complete lifting solution.

This solution had to be:

Simple et quick to use to reduce the maintenance time,
Appropriate to each rental boat (weight, height, etc.),
Resistant,
Flexible to not damage and deteriorate the hull,
And adjusted to the center of gravity to prevent the toppling of the boat.

RDF underwater lifting units: Pronal solution

The rental company turned to Pronal to provide a surface buoyancy solution: an RDF lifting unit. We produced an RDF with the following features:

Diameter: 2 600 mm,
Length: 6 100 mm,
Materials: PVC / PU / or Nitrile coated fabric,
Capacity: 32, 000 L,
Inflation: air,
Lifting capacity: 8 tons,
Inflation pressure: 0.083 bar maximum,
Temperature resistance:
- Coated fabric PVC -20C°/+50C°,
- Coated fabric PU -25C° / +100C°,

Accessory: an inflation line.

Slide under the catamaran, the RDF lifting unit is inflated with a compressor. Once inflated, it can lift a load of up to 8 tons.

Taking into account the ship’s center of gravity, it keeps the catamaran on the surface without tipping. This allows the operator to carry out maintenance and boat lifting on site safely and quickly.

The lifting unit is also useful for vessels that are losing buoyancy.