Alconza’s 24-hour Service received a WhatsApp message in the middle of the night from their service partner in Brazil, advising that one of their service engineers had had the misfortune of losing an M6 Allen screw inside a generator. This service engineer was carrying out preventive maintenance tasks and, literally as he was finishing his work, the aforementioned screw slipped from his hand… Bad luck, but surely, we have all had something similar happened to us.
The vessel departed Brazil heading Spain that same day and thus Alconza’s Customer Service went ahead to have everything ready for her arrival in Algeciras, with an ETA of December 2nd.
Prior to her arrival, as they always do, the team put together the necessary tools, port access and safety documentation and thoroughly studied the alternator specifications, which in this case was not Alconza’s. Upon her arrival, our service team immediately jumped on board and, using digital endoscopies, telescopic magnets and a whole load of patience, spent all but half a day searching for the screw, which unfortunately was nowhere to be found.
We knew “Murphy” tends to be present in this type of events, so we took the decision of completely dismantling the generator’s non-drive end (NDE) after notifying the chief engineer, so he had all necessary equipment to dismantle the bearing, bracket, exciter, all of which are really heavy components, available and ready in the engine room in order not to lose a single minute during the quick stop of the vessel in Algeciras.
Once the generator was dismantled and being able to reach its interior, finding the lost screw was a question of minutes, which put smiles on the faces of everyone, from our service engineers to the chief engineer, who was quite impressed at the speed of our service.
Having removed the screw, it was time to rest a bit, as the following day was going to be full on assembling the generator again before the ship was due to depart that same night.
With great effort, our technicians completely reassembled the generator and left it ready to start up.
We kept our partner informed almost real-time, as well as the Maersk superintendent, who from his office in India was also fully aware of the progress of the works.
It is a great satisfaction for us to be able to support, in this case, a services partner, even more when due to bad luck they needed our help across the ocean.
