Grupo Servicios Maritimos, an Argentinian company offering a variety of services related to the maritime, inland waterways and port activity, operates a fleet of ten tugs, two container feeders and six pilot/service launches, as well as a number of barges.
A frequent headache for the Buenos Aires-based operator, however, was the excessive tailshaft bearing wear rates experienced on some vessels operating conventional rubber bearings in a mix of sea-, brackish-, muddy-, and freshwaters.
The company looked for an alternative solution and in October 2020 contacted Thordon’s authorized distributor in Argentina, Marine Logistics SA, with a request to install Thordon’s robust, low maintenance water-lubricated RiverTough tailshaft bearings to the 1975-built Candela S.
The Tandanor Shipyard in Buenos Aries completed the work to the 44.7m(147ft) long, 543gt push boat in December 2020.
Marine Logistics’ Hernan Lopez recalled: “Being an old boat, this did not appear to be a simple installation. The 303mm(12in) diameter tailshaft and rubber bearing were both showing considerable wear, along with excessive bearing clearances. Another problem was that the shaft liner was a different diameter from that shown on the drawings.
Impressed by the attention to detail shown by Marine Logistics and Egnard Bernal, Thordon’s Business Development Manager for Latin America, Grupo Servicios Maritimos decided to include Thordon SXL rudder bearings and Thordon Pucker Seals on the purchase order.
RiverTough tailshaft bearings, run in combination with hard coated nickel-chrome-boron(NCB) shaft sleeves, routinely outlast rubber bearings by a factor of two or more in the abrasive water conditions encountered on South American waterways.
Thordon SXL rudder bearings, meanwhile, operate without grease, above and below the waterline. SXL offers high abrasion resistance and can also withstand high shock loads, improving the wear life of the bearing.
Similarly, the Thordon Pucker Seal, is manufactured from a tough self-lubricating polymer, designed to keep out abrasives such as sand and grit from the rudder trunk.