At the beginning of April, a 10 ton forklift arrived in the car park at Reekie Machining, along with 30” to 48”, 12 meter carbon steel free issue pipes to be cut and manufactured into PUPs (partial unit of pipe)to be used on a gas pipe line.

Over the past four months, 383 PUPs have been manufactured; this has been a coordinated approach between the Insitu Machinists and those in the Machine Shop to carry out the work, keeping to the strict timetable to meet our customers needs.  The pipes were initially cut using a split casing pipe cutter, a machine generally used on site but being utilised here in the production environment, then having an internal and external 50mm bead of weld ground back from the machined face before weld prepped using both CNC and conventional vertical boring machines, machining out around the clock.

A technical issue arose with the 48” pipes ovality being up to 10/15mm out of round.  It was not possible with the standard equipment to machine a consistent root face as required.  Being solution focused at Reekie, existing tooling was modifying to fit on our vertical borer to follow the ovality profile giving the required root face within the tolerance requirements.

Prior to being sent out to the site, each PUP under went a magnetic particle inspection, (MPI), carried out by Scot-Test Ltd  to sign them off as having no defects.   The last ones left the yard on 18^thJuly 2018 and Reekie Machining Yard returned to normal, until the next time!

The picture shows a variety of sizes of the pups, some ready to be collected and those waiting to be weld prepped.