TIGHT SCHEDULE AND OBSTACLES CHALLENGE BARNHART TEAM

Time is money during an outage, so the clock was ticking for a Barnhart project at a steel mill in Alabama. Barnhart had just five days to remove and replace a 146,500 lb. pinion stand. But before the project could begin, Barnhart had an extremely tight window of only 35 days to complete engineering, fabrication, testing, and scope of work.

There were several challenges. The pinion stand was located outside the radius of the overhead crane. Floor obstructions around the pinion stand prohibited a 4-leg gantry/slide operation for removal and the ability to position the slide system below the stand.

To get around the obstructions, Barnhart fabricated two- 3’ jack housing stands to fit into the extremely limited floor space. The engineering team designed a cantilevered slide system that could be assembled off-site and installed over the pinion stand in one piece, saving critical outage time.

Utilizing the custom fabricated set of jacks and the hook of the facility’s overhead crane, Barnhart successfully slid the pinion stand from below the 500-ton slide track to pipe stands within the radius of the overhead crane for removal.  The reverse order was executed for the rough-set of the new pinion stand.

Our crews were commended for handling some of the unexpected challenges of the project, while adhering to the project schedule.