Defense
Navy Brows and Gangways
HPS Fabrications builds brows, bridges and gangways for the US Navy, including work on Ohio class submarines. A brow is the walkway between a vessel and the pier. It moves with the tide and the load, it is walked on by people rather than driven over by machines, and it is one of the few structures on a waterfront where a failure is immediately a casualty.
| Customer | US Navy |
|---|---|
| Sector | Defense |
Access is safety equipment
A brow is the walkway between a vessel and the pier. People use it every day, in the dark and in weather, carrying things.
That makes it one of the few structures on a waterfront where the failure mode is immediate and human. Everything about how it is built follows from that.
What the design has to absorb
A ship is not a fixed point. It rises and falls with the tide, it changes draft as it loads, and it lists. The brow has to stay usable across all of it.
- Movement: the geometry has to work at the extremes, not just at the mean
- Footing: safe underfoot when it is wet, iced or oily
- Corrosion: permanent salt-air exposure, which is why it is coated in our own booth
- Weight: light enough to handle, stiff enough not to deflect alarmingly under a crowd
Related Navy work
Brows sit alongside the rest of what we build for submarine and surface programmes: ventilation hatch houses and escape trunk cofferdams.
More on defense fabrication, or request a quote.
In the shop and on site
An aluminium truss brow leaving for delivery 
Common questions
Navy Brows and Gangways: questions buyers ask
How many of these have you built?
A great many. Brows, bridges and gangways are standing work here rather than an occasional job, which is the reason to bring one to us: the tenth is built the same way as the first.
What makes a brow harder than it looks?
It is a moving structure that people walk on. It has to accommodate tide, draft and list while staying safe underfoot in weather, and it lives in salt air, so the coating is structural rather than cosmetic.
Can you work from our drawings?
Yes. We build to print, and we also design from a requirement when the drawing does not exist yet.
Do you coat them as well?
Yes, in our own booth at our second facility. On salt-air service that step decides how long the structure lasts, so it is not one we hand to an outside coater.
Talk to us about a defense project.
Send a print or describe the problem. Either works.
Request a Quote