Mooring bollards are a safety critical component of any port or dockside structure. Their function should be to reliably hold a docked vessel against its mooring lines during any ship to shore related operations. As ships get larger and freeboards increase, the service duty on bollards becomes ever more demanding and imperative.

Bollard Proof’s test rig is a portable device that can be delivered to the quayside. Unlike other current methods of testing bollards, such as pull-testing between adjacent bollards or hammer tests that record and analyse the resonance in the bollard, our system simulates an actual ship’s mooring rope that loads the bollard by pulling away from the quayside in a range of combined vertical and horizontal angles.

The test is conducted remotely from within a control van with umbilical line between the rig and the van. 

The rope that attaches to and pull tests the bollard is a short length, typically 2 metre low-creep synthetic rope. It pulls away from the quay, so the trajectory of a failed bollard would be seaward, although its energy would be quite small.

Clients, or their representatives, are welcome at our Test Centre in Cumbria to witness testing first hand. 

We can test new or removed bollards to customer requirements. Bollards will be bolted to an adaptable test bed and pulled at combined vertical and horizontal angles to their rated working capacity, or 10% beyond.