[BITList] negative GMt

[fs]

more rigs
while working for Western Offshore I stood by the Wodeco 8 built in 
Taiwan and followed that by the Wodeco 9 built in Japan originally both 
ships were to be built in Taiwan but after our experiences with the 8 it 
was decided not to build the 9 there maybe its their eyes but every 
thing one looked at was out of square a door way would have the top and 
bottom sloping in different directions and both sides also out of 
square, with even the light switch sitting cock-eyed to the side it was 
an insult to ones eyes
Another thing that became apparent when we tried to drill was that she 
had a negative GMt which meant that she wouldn't sit upright in the 
water, to get round this the rig was ballasted down past her marks which 
of course didn't do much for her water tight integrity. She had (the 8) 
Duel Engine room & Bridge engine and anchor controls but when we came to 
commission them nothing worked on checking the connections everything 
seemed to be connected ok at the SCR Panels/engine room/and bridge, on 
further checking it was found that even though the cables were connected 
at these points they were in fact different cables the bridge drawings 
showed 40 odd 30core cables going from the bridge to the SCR panels and 
of course the SCR drawings showed the same cables going to the bridge 
likewise with the cables to the engine room so the shipyard had 
duplicated all the cables to each compartment connecting only one end of 
each set of cables and stowing the ends of the other set on the cable 
trays, it proved quite interesting getting this lot sorted out as this 
type of thing was also repeated with a multi-core cable leaving a piece 
of equipment and along the way to its destination being fed into a 
junction box which would have been ok but when the cable continued from 
the junction box to its designated piece of equipment instead of 
connecting like core to like core i.e. #1 ~ #1 #2 ~ #2 they had 
connected the cores as they orientated off the core which would have 
been ok if they had the cables installed using the same hand i.e. 
clockwise to clockwise instead of clockwise to anticlockwise after 
sorting all this out quite a lot of it on location over a period of 
months as we had had to sail to meet our contract specs, (There where of 
course the same type of things with the piping e.g. a pipe would come to 
a water tight bulkhead and be flanged off continuing on the other side 
of the bulkhead but as we found the hole though the bulkhead had not 
been cut) we had to go back in to the shipyard after a year to have the 
warranty work done I for one said that everything was perfect as I 
certainly didn't want hundreds of their hands running around changing things
frank