Gibbs & Cox frequently provides design, engineering and program management services to streamline production on complicated projects. We develop work products that are tailored to the specific needs, standards, and capabilities of the shipyard and provide personnel that remain on-site throughout the fabrication and construction of our designs. This liaison staff is able to quickly answer questions and resolve problems from the production floor, while reaching back to our home offices for additional design and engineering support as needed.
Gibbs & Cox designs are producible, capable, and competitive for construction for worldwide shipyards. Our services include work products that are tailored to the specific needs, standards, and capabilities of the shipyard facility and personnel performing the work.
Shipyard support (frequently referred to as ‘Production Support’) services typically include:
Our large talent pool and our staff’s diverse skill sets allow us to place personnel on-site all over the world, either on a full-time or part-time basis, as necessary, to support our projects.
With offices along the East Coast of the United States, on the Gulf of Mexico, and with a new location in Australia, G&C prides itself on having available resources all over the world.
Over the course of Gibbs & Cox’s nine-decade history, the firm has established strong working relationships with classification societies all over the world.
Our familiarity with the rules and staff structure of classification societies allows us to pursue the most efficient channels to obtain class approval on our solutions. Our engineers regularly work with classification society representatives to discuss the interpretation of rule sets or to receive special exceptions to specialized applications for the development of optimized engineering solutions.
Though we may finalize a design on paper or computer prior to the laying of the keel, design changes inevitably happen on the shop floor. Whether these changes are caused by an owner’s decision, the discontinuity of a product, or the recent availability of a superior component, design modifications can result in interferences, either immediately adjacent to the local modification, or far downstream in an unexpected feature or system.
Gibbs & Cox maintains comprehensive project models and records and are able to adapt projects to proposed changes and solve associated interference problems, minimizing the impact to the overall project workflow and schedule.
Gibbs & Cox understands that all builders and shipyards operate differently, have access to different materials and resources, and are required to deal with varying sets of rules and requirements.
We are able to tailor our designs to meet the specific requirements and standards of each yard and adapt the details of our production design packages to suit the builder’s needs.
Production details that often need special attention in the detailed design development include:
Gibbs & Cox uses the ShipConstructor design software suite to develop and manage hull, deck and superstructures for metal vessels.
Whether designing in steel, aluminum, or even titanium, our parametric processes of designing hull forms and structures allows master project files to build and manage databases of parts that update and track changes in real time, adjusting part geometries, numbers, assemblies, and even bills-of-material to make book-keeping and fabrication of components simple and streamlined.
Our in-house composites experts have extensive experience designing and optimizing arrangements and scantlings based on the characteristics and properties of fiberglass, kevlar and carbon fiber.
Further, when our composites experts team up with our metal-construction specialists, Gibbs & Cox is able to develop safe, robust, and efficient designs that rely on the interaction between metal parts and composite parts, such as the mating of an aluminum deck and superstructure with a composite hull.
ShipConstructor software is used to design and manage jig sets for construction of cold-molded hulls, decks, and superstructures, outputting CNC cut files that builders can use to turn stacks of plywood into temporary molds.
Like all of our other shipyard-support products, these production packages are tailored to meet the specific builder’s needs in terms of production methods and materials, and with regard to the level of detail included in the jigs.