A place to share stories of the old ways and new technology used in ship maintenance.
Chipping hammer and wire brushes be damned, here is how to remove rust today:
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The idea of a 1KW hand-held laser must really excite [pun intended] the Health and Safety types.
Cheers,
Earl
When I watched the video I thought “Wow” that is a cool tool to have. I can just imagine the AB’s on deck setting on a bucket zapping the deck. Of course I don’t have a couple of hundred thousand dollars to have such a toy so it’s back to the needle guns and chipping hammers.
Yeaaahhh. My crackerjack gang of sailors can barely operate a power washer. A laser? That would be rich.
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Those videos are better than porn. Half the ship’s been watching them. It’s causing a work slowdown!
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How soon before it gets weaponised Mr. Spock?
Hell I can’t even get a small sand blaster like they have at Harbor Freight. I have all the air in the world and sand is like $5 for 50lbs.
Seems like a no brainer, but something about permits or some other bull…
This caught my eye when it came out, but I don’t think it’s any kind of replacement for the scaling hammer. It does an impressive job of removing light surface rust, but doesn’t look like it’s cut out for heavy lifting. The cost is also pretty staggering, IIRC.
As sand blasting gets more cost prohibitive especially in tanks and the like this technology could rely shine combined with robotics could help eliminate some of the confined space problems we are starting to have. It’s a long way off though
If they can get the cost down to something reasonable and make it rugged enough to last, this laser that vaporizes the paint and scale with no waste to clean up and dispose of, will become a fantastic innovation.
I’m pretty sure I saw several vacuums set up on a couple of those videos so I’m thinking there is waste to deal with. Also quite a bit of vapor is visible. It’s cool as hell, don’t get me wrong. Especially that “war of the worlds” noise it makes!
I don’t know if it can be made cheaper, but to make it “Roughneck proof” would be a tall order.
Very nice indeed. I could use that to spruce up my BBQ gill. Which raises another problem. How long would a tool like this be on the ship before it grew legs?
Looks interesting but I never see it being used by ships force. I can just see it now, What do you mean, the AB cut his what off and with what Lazer.
The future of system visualisation for maintenance is already here. It is called Mixed Reality and let you visualise any vessel, machinery or system on board in 3D from the comfort of your office, whether that is ashore or onboard:
Isn’t this how they trained the guys who installed a plug in a pump tell-tale hole?
I think they were trained in a different kind of “mixed reality”. (The Navy kind)