The paper goes in before the plate

What a yacht refit class survey is not

A yacht refit class survey is not the survey an owner commissions to price the work. It is a rule-based attendance by a society that will endorse or withhold a certificate at the end. The distinction matters because class makes its demands of the yard rather than of the owner, and most of them are for paper produced before anyone cuts steel.

Class-approved yard is a phrase with no single meaning, and it is worth asking which approval and to what scope. A welding shop approval names processes, positions, material groups and thickness ranges. Thickness measurement and in-water survey are separate certificates again, held as service supplier approvals, usually by firms other than the yard. The approvals are a list, not an adjective.

Where flag asks more than class

Class is a rule set covering structure, machinery and the systems that keep her afloat and moving, and a surveyor reads the work against it. Flag is the statutory side. The flag state decides which certificates it issues itself and which it delegates, and a society acting as its recognised organisation signs only those.

An item can satisfy class and still fail the flag's code. On a yacht in commercial use at twenty-four metres load line length and above, Red Ensign Group Yacht Code items are generally read against the code in force when she was built: means of escape, watertight closures, and the fire boundaries an interior change has quietly moved. A significant alteration can bring the current provisions into play instead, and the flag's reading of that line governs. A bulkhead shifted for a larger owner's cabin is a joinery job on the drawing and a statutory one on the certificate.

What falls due inside a yard period

The five-year special survey cycle is published, and in outline not negotiable. A renewal, or special, survey at five years. An intermediate, carried out at or between the second and third annual surveys. Annuals with a window either side of the anniversary date, and two bottom surveys inside the five with a maximum interval between them. Tailshaft surveys run on their own clock and rarely land where the rest does.

Outstanding conditions of class are the other half of it. A condition is a defect the society has accepted for a stated period on stated terms, with a date by which it must be cleared. Naming them in a tender pack is covered in writing a yacht refit specification. Closing them is the yard's work, because each needs evidence a surveyor will sign.

Who is allowed to take the readings

Ultrasonic thickness measurement counts only if the firm and the operator count. The measuring company holds a service supplier approval, the operator holds a recognised NDT qualification, and the gauge carries a current calibration record. Readings come back on the reporting format the society requires, tied to the structure they came from, and class reads them against its own diminution table.

Each reading is set against the as-built scantling, and past a stated proportion of the allowance the wastage counts as substantial. Spot readings then turn into extended measurement and closer examination, with staging up in a ballast tank at short notice. Before any of that the obligation is ours. We stage the compartment, needle-gun the plate back to bare metal, and rig lighting into a space that has none. A plate not cleaned back cannot be read, and no surveyor accepts a figure taken through scale.

The file before the arc is struck

We cut nothing on a classed structure until the repair proposal and the sketch come back approved, and that turnaround belongs in the programme, not in the optimism at the front of it. The welding procedure specification sets the process, the consumable, the joint preparation, the heat input and the sequence, supported by a procedure qualification record: a test piece welded to it and destructively tested.

A welder's certificate covers one process, a range of positions, a material group and a band of thicknesses. Outside those it does not apply, and it lapses. Most schemes also ask for continuity, evidence of welding in that range within the preceding months. What a certificate is for is taken apart in yacht refit services in Turkey.

We will not weld ahead of an approved procedure, and we will not cut plate against a verbal agreement with a surveyor. On a live job that waiting is measured in days, and it falls in the week the compartment is open and trades are queued behind it. It is still the cheaper of the two mistakes.

On the blocks

Under the waterline, survey and refit work are the same job. The sequence is agreed with the surveyor before she goes on the blocks, and his attendance is booked when the slot is, set out in planning a yacht refit in Turkey. A tailshaft survey may mean full withdrawal, or run under an approved regime for an oil-lubricated stern tube, trading withdrawal for seal condition, oil analysis and clearance records kept over years.

On the blocks the work reads as small operations with a surveyor standing at each. Clearances taken by jacking and recorded against as-built. Crack detection at the shaft cone and the keyway, where a shaft actually fails. Rudder stock and pintle clearances measured with the rudder supported rather than hanging. Sea valves opened for inspection and closed under his eye.

Where the traceability chain breaks

Plate and pipe arrive with a mill certificate traceable to a heat number, to EN 10204 3.1 or, where the society requires its own endorsement, 3.2. Before the plate is cut the number is transferred by hand to each piece, so an offcut fitted three weeks later is identifiable.

The chain breaks at the boundary between companies. A specialist brought in for a coating or a shaft works inside the same file, and his certificates sit in the yard's hands rather than his own. The common stopper is simpler: owner-supplied material lands on the quay with nothing traceable on it, and a certificate cannot be written afterwards. Material that cannot be tied to a heat number is tested or replaced before it goes in.

What the district does not shorten

What this district inherited in cranes and trades is taken apart in what the Tuzla cranes were built for. Commercial ships live under class permanently in a way yachts do not, so in Tuzla the certification apparatus is resident rather than visiting. RINA, Lloyd's Register, DNV and Türk Loydu are represented in Turkey, and Türk Loydu is based here. Approved thickness measurement and NDT firms hold their approvals here for the same reason, and a welder's continuity requirement is easier to hold where steel work never stops between yacht seasons.

The society's timetable runs at its own speed, and nothing on this side of the fence alters it. An approval can come back for redesign. Opening a compartment for one survey item can produce three more, each closed with evidence before the certificate is endorsed. The file work is charged hours, and a yard that says otherwise is either not doing it or not costing it.

Written at the yard in Tuzla. The survey items described here are the ones we prepare for and the ones our own file has to answer.