Over the last couple of years, we have doubled our capacity in our Workshop Tooling Department. Making room for more innovation and custom solutions. 

– I would definitely call us a problem solving division. We get a wide range of challenges throughout the year that we strive to solve, resulting in exciting and innovative solutions, Alexander Alme Rossebø opens. He’s head of our Workshop Tooling department.

From Saga Subseas headquarters at Killingøy, Haugesund, his department creates, builds and maintains subsea equipment for a variety of clients in the offshore and renewable sectors.

– Clients come to us with a task or a problem, and we can be their single-one-point of contact. We design, calculate, produce parts, assemble and do testing right here at Killingøy.

When Regular Equipment isn’t Enough

The types of challenges clients bring to our Workshop Tooling division varies a lot. Everything from needing to drill a hole in places where regular equipment just doesn’t do it. And other problems, such as needing solutions that make it possible to place equipment on seabeds with challenging conditions

– We’re talking project specific tooling where we use our great experience from working subsea to solve the problems our clients are facing, says Rossebø.

In one of our most recent projects we were contacted by a client that needed to drill a 200 mm hole in a 100 mm deep wall in a structure subsea. A dimension that is considered large for drill tools in general. Add the subsea part, and you get a real challenge.

– Controlling such a large force, and making it go through the structure in a controlled manner proved to be the main challenge of this job. It resulted in a big and strong tool, that also had to be very precise, says project manager, Christian Gade.

The new 200 mm drill tool weighs around 45 kilos in seawater, it will be deployed in a seabasket and then remotely operated by a ROV.

– Despite looking fairly straightforward, the final product is very high-tech. Making it possible to get the job done and give the results the clients were looking for, says Gade.

Everything Starts With a Draft

He takes us through the process of how these custom solutions come to life.

– After establishing the clients need, it always starts with sketches – both by hand and in 3D. Later on, we evaluate those with the client making sure that we live up to the standards they require. A close cooperation with the client ensures a good delivery, Gade explains.

The project with the new 200 mm drill tool is a great example of how the different divisions here at Saga Subsea works close together.

– In this particular project, the Workshop Tooling and Engineering departments have worked together to deliver the final product. The close cooperation across our departments is one of Saga Subseas biggest strengths. Most of our competitors do not have such a variety of competence in-house, says Gade.  

The total delivery took about four months from the time the request was made by the client to when the finished product was ready.

– It’s been a cool project to work on because we have implemented known ways of doing things, but in a new and much larger scale than usual. I think we have made a really good product, where we can use a lot of what we’ve learned in this process to help us develop further going forward, Gade continues.

Expanding to Meet Demands

Besides delivering custom solutions and doing maintenance work on tools, the Workshop Tooling department also has an impressive tool pool with products for rental.

– The competence in the division is quite wide from sales and the mechanical expertise to logistics. The latter one has become very important. Especially nowadays, when there’s high demand on equipment and we’re almost sold out on many items, Rossebø explains.

He especially points out our Subsea Baskets as a very attractive product.

– We strive to have the best baskets on the market at all times. These days we are expanding a lot in terms of our subsea baskets and their features, says Rossebø.

The baskets come in a variety of sizes. Most of them designed with doors that allows for safe entrance on deck and a single lift point that ease crane connections.

– And all of them are well equipped with pivot links to safely secure the cargo, Alexander adds.

The Workshop Tooling division has increased in turnover every single year for the last five years. Safe to say we have doubled our capacity and hired up to meet the growing demands.

The latest news is that we’ve expanded our workshop and storage area. This brings us up to 800 square meters of indoor facilities and outdoor storage.

– This expansion gives us room to take on even bigger and more complex projects. Based on how the market is now and contracts we’ve signed, we know that the workload most likely will keep on growing the next couple of years. Which means that we will have to strengthen the division further and hire even more people to match the growing demands from our clients.

If you face a challenge, Saga Subsea’s innovative solutions can help. Contact us to learn how we can deliver results for your toughest operational problems.