Austal USA Occupies New Panel Line Shop

Facility provides additional manufacturing space as well as office/meeting space Austal USA has received a Certificate of Occupancy from the City of Mobile for the newest addition to its Alabama shipyard - a Panel Line Shop. Located on the north side of Assembly Bay One, the Shop opens directly into the assembly bay allowing panels to be easily transported from the shop onto the production floor. The ground floor of the building, where the panels are assembled, is 200’ long by 45’ wide, totaling over 9,000 square feet. The second level will house offices and meeting/training rooms. The Panel Line Shop is an addition to the building where the two U.S. Navy Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) are under construction. The news follows Austal’s announcement earlier this month that it was celebrating the employment of its 1,000th employee. In addition to the Panel Line Shop, Austal is also in the process of constructing an addition to its southern-most assembly bay, where the second Hawaii Superferry vessel is under construction, to include a Router/Fitout Shop to be completed in December 2007. The building will house a recently purchased high-speed router cutter designed specifically to support aluminium ship construction. The equipment is operated with data from numerical cutting files of the required nested parts and enables the minimisation of waste and the efficient recovery of scrap material. This router technology has been developed specifically for aluminium plate material and delivers to the production team dimensionally precise parts with machine-cut edges. This dimensional accuracy in conjunction with the detailed pen marking of each cut part, removes the need for large lofting boards to fit the cut parts together. This state-of-the-art process will further improve the quality and efficiency with which the U.S. Navy's LCS as well as Austal’s commercial vessels are manufactured. Contact: Austal Phone: 61 8 9410 1111 Fax: 61 8 9410 2564 Email: pubrel@austal.com