On board marine vessels there are many different pumps, and having uniform marine pump parts helps maintenance efforts on board sailing vessels since there are fewer parts carried on board the vessel. Since marine pumps range in different sizes it would not be practical to have marine uniform pumps but some parts of the pumps may have uniformity to each other thus reducing the parts load require to be carried on board vessel.
This is a technique that is used on many different machinery products manufactured companies and it is aimed at keeping the maintenance stocks fewer and easier to manage on board marine vessels. There are many pumps require on board modern marine vessels today with specialized vessels having up words of a hundred plus pumps on each vessel. These may be running in shift or continuously as the vessel is on voyage. Each pump is serviced before setting voyage but mechanical failure cannot be ruled out and many pump fail while on voyage, since determining which pump may fail may be impossible but pump failure is inevitable so it is important than maintenance parts for the main pumps on board marine be stored ready for repair of failed pumps at sea.
Considering some marine vessels have dozens of different pumps for different operation it would be would be unpractical to have unique parts for each pump, this would constitute to having hundred of different parts for pumps on each vessel. The problem would escalate even further if one was to image that different ship manufacturers used pumps from different companies each having its unique replacement part. For this reason uniform marine pump parts are used on different marine pumps.
This should be not confused to mean that the pumps are uniform or all the parts are interchangeable but some main marine pump parts are similar thus reducing the parts load on board marine vessels. Internal pump parts like roller bearings, bushes, brushes and many other electrical components inter fit on different pumps irrespective of their size difference.
Considering the sheer number of different parts needed on a vessels parts store it only practical to keep some marine pump parts uniform, there is an added problem of having unique marine pump parts, on board marine vessel, the vessels are built to sail vast distances and spend most of the sailing life visiting different nations around the world. This poses a problem of not finding unique parts in the countries ship yards thus causing wastage of time while waiting for the parts to be imported. Docking a vessel for prolonged periods would result in paying huge amounts of port or ship yard charges something that all ship companies would not like to do unnecessarily.
Uniform replacement parts have been adopted in most manufactured machinery, quality of each part may very but the
uniformity of the part remains and it can be used on different machines. Electrical components such as motor have also adapted to this uniformity on some replacement part of the motor such as the roller bearing, brushes and shaft size making it possible to interchange some parts from one motor to another. Having uniform marine pump parts has been adopted by the shipping community and manufactures to improve the convinces of having uniform replacement parts on board the vessel parts room thus reducing the replacement and maintenance parts require on board a sailing vessel.