Iron Pump Marine
Pump Spare Parts
CNLB & CNLe centrifugal · BDV piston · QT propeller · Ellehammer ejectors
Iron Pump families a spare parts RFQ can reference
Iron Pump builds water and oil pumps and ejectors on four principles — centrifugal, piston, propeller and vertical turbine — from Søborg, north of Copenhagen, and also supplies fire-fighting pumps and fire water pump systems. The fire water business came with the Ellehammer ejector activities in 2017, and the maker describes each system as a main pump and a feeding pump, so a request for one needs both plates. It does not build screw pumps, gear pumps or separators, so a plate reading IRON on a screw pump is a different machine and a different enquiry. The six groups below are what a buyer actually meets on board, and they need six different shapes of request.
CNLB
The heavy-duty in-line frame, built for continuous running and pulled out from the top. Between the motor and the impeller it carries a flexible coupling and a double bearing arrangement, which means the wheel runs on the pump's own shaft in the pump's own bearings. Duties named by the maker are fresh water, sea water, bilge, brine, fuel oil and oil handling. A CNLB list therefore has a shaft, bearings and coupling parts in it from the start.
CNLe, CNLe/DHBe and the DHBe 400-series
The light-duty in-line frames, all top-pull-out but not all built alike. CNLe is close-coupled: the wet end hangs on the motor shaft and the pump has no bearings of its own. The DHBe frames are spacer-coupled instead and carry a bearing of their own. The maker states that its e-series complies with EU Directive 2009/125/EC on ecodesign. Because the motor is structurally part of a CNLe, a CNLe enquiry drags the motor plate in with it; on a DHBe the spacer coupling and the pump's own bearing go on the list instead.
CHV, CN, CNL, CNDV, DHB, ON, QH, QV, QVK, RSM and the rest
Not all of these are history. QH (horizontal in-line), RSM (self-priming, horizontal and close-coupled, with integrated priming and air separation) and QV/QVK are current Iron Pump centrifugal ranges, listed beside QVKDV, CMe and the DHBFe series, and the maker names their media as fresh and sea water, bilge and brine, with diesel and oil on the QH. The rest — CHV, CN, CNL, CNDV, DHB and ON, and strings such as CNLCHV, DHBS, QVP, QVKL and RS — turn up in service and in third-party parts listings. Iron Pump publishes no type key, so neither the letters nor the figures after them are decoded here: copy the whole string, with every number either side of the slash, and send the serial with it.
BC, BDV and BDHV
BC is the smallest frame, double-acting and self-priming, internally geared with an external belt drive, and the maker names it for boiler feed, hydrophore, bilge and oily bilge service. BDV and BDHV are vertical two-cylinder, double-acting, self-priming pumps with interchangeable cylinder liners and an integrated safety valve, on bilge, ballast, general service, oil transfer and fire duty. On its piston pump page the maker traces the line to the 1930s, when Knud Arnesen, the founder's son, developed several pump series that it says are still in production. The liner is the point: this is a family where the bore is meant to be renewed, so a worn-bore report is a liner and piston question rather than the end of the pump.
QT and QTe anti-heeling
The QT range works on the propeller principle and is built to reverse rotation so that flow reverses side to side across the vessel. The maker dates its first anti-heeling pump to 1952 on its product page and to 1953 in its company timeline, and puts the QT units in operation at more than 3,000. QTe places the motor horizontally on top and drives through belts, which the maker says gives access to the wear parts without removing the motor. Flange options are DIN, ANSI and JIS. On a duty that runs both ways there is no permanent suction side and no permanent pressure side, and a belt-driven QTe carries a drive-side parts list that only the BC belt drive shares on this page.
Ellehammer S, P, BV, V, T, B, A and SLIMPOWER types
An ejector has no moving parts, and since 2017 this range has been Iron Pump's, still presented under the Ellehammer name and still engineered and built in Denmark. Standard construction is bronze, with aluminium bronze, cast iron and stainless steel options; shipboard uses are ballast stripping, bilge and sewage. Nothing wears here in the way a pump wears, so the parts question is nozzle and diffuser geometry and material, plus the driving-water connection. These type letters belong to the Ellehammer range and are not part of Iron Pump's pump nomenclature.
Water-driven ejectors built by Körting Hannover are covered on Körting marine ejector parts.
The ship is part of the part number
Most pump makers identify the machine from the machine alone. Iron Pump asks for the vessel as well, and it will treat a whole pump as a spare part. Both of those change how a request is written.
The maker's own after-sales route asks for five things: the pump type or model, the serial number, the vessel's IMO number or name where it is relevant, a part number if one is to hand, and a description of the part. It states that the serial number is normally on the pump nameplate, that the nameplate is usually mounted on the pump or on the pump unit, and that a photograph of the nameplate or of the existing part helps; its after-sales enquiry form goes further and will not take a spare part request without the vessel name and the pump serial number. The unusual field is the ship. A Danish yard package was built against a hull, and the machinery file follows the hull rather than the pump, so on a plate that has corroded or been painted over, the vessel identity is often the shortest way back to the right drawing. It is worth sending even when the plate is perfectly legible, because it is the field the works itself works from.
The second half of the inversion is stranger still. Iron Pump publishes a replacement-pump route in which the customer can take a unit that is 100% identical, so that existing spares on board still fit, or the same pump with current seals and bearings. Either way the maker states that the unit keeps the original external dimensions and interfaces, is interchangeable at 1:1 and is classified as a spare part, so no new class approval is required. For a superintendent that changes the arithmetic on an old CNL or DHB, because a whole-pump answer is normally a class conversation and here the maker says it is not. This page raises it as a second route to check alongside the parts route, not as something Vessel Core offers in place of parts, and any decision still rests on the ship's own class arrangements and on what the survey requires.
Between those two facts sits the practical problem: the name on the plate is the least reliable field on it. The business was established in 1906 as Maskinfabrikken IRON A/S and trades today as IRON Pump, so a pre-war or mid-century Danish pump can carry a plate reading IRON, or Maskinfabrikken IRON, with no "Pump" on it at all. The reverse case, covered below, turns up as often. Who owns the business today appears on no nameplate either. So the request is built on the type string, the serial and the ship, and the trading name is treated as a clue about the decade rather than as an identification.
What comes off an Iron Pump unit at overhaul
Listed roughly in the order the machines are worked on: the in-line centrifugals first, from the casing joint inwards to the bearings and coupling, then the piston frames, the propeller sets and the turbine columns, and last the ejectors, which are stripped for geometry rather than for wear.
- Casing joint gaskets and cover joint sets
- Impellers, closed and semi-open patterns
- Impeller nuts, keys and locking washers
- Casing wear rings and impeller neck rings
- Pump shafts and stub shafts
- Shaft sleeves and sleeve O-rings
- Gland packing sets, lantern rings and gland followers
- Mechanical seals, seal seats and elastomer sets
- Stuffing box covers and seal housings
- Bearing housings, bearing covers, deflectors and lip seals
- Ball and angular-contact bearings, in pairs where fitted
- Flexible coupling elements, coupling bolts and spacers
- Motor stool and bearing bracket fasteners on coupled frames
- Motor-side mounting flange and shaft extension parts on close-coupled frames
- Cylinder liners for BDV and BDHV piston frames
- Pistons, piston rings and piston rods
- Suction and delivery valve assemblies, seats and springs on piston frames
- Integral safety valve components on piston frames
- Belts, sheaves and tensioner parts on QTe drives and on the BC belt drive
- Propeller wheels, hubs and blade fastenings on QT sets
- Line-shaft sections, shaft couplings and column bearings on CVLS turbine columns
- Column pipe joints and the column sealing arrangement
- Ellehammer nozzles and diffusers, with their body joints
- Flange bolting sets and gaskets to DIN, ANSI or JIS faces
System-side items often renewed at the same visit — suction non-return valves, mud box and sea chest strainer elements, and the driving-water line to an ejector — belong to the piping rather than to the pump, so they are identified and quoted separately from the items above.
What has to be sent before an Iron Pump line is quotable
Pump wear parts are dimensional, not descriptive, and on this maker two of the fields that settle them are not on the pump at all: the vessel it belongs to, and the arrangement it was built in. The list below is written in the order it is easiest to collect at the machine.
- The type string copied from the plate exactly as it stands, including every letter and both numbers either side of the slash
- The serial number — normally on the pump nameplate, mounted on the pump or on the pump unit
- The vessel's IMO number, or the ship's name with the yard and hull number if you have them
- Which arrangement you are looking at: the motor sitting directly on the pump with the wheel on the motor shaft, or the motor above a coupling with the pump carrying its own bearings
- A square-on photograph of the pump plate, and a photograph of the motor plate beside it — on a close-coupled unit the motor frame, shaft extension and mounting flange are pump data
- The impeller outside diameter measured across the wheel with it out, plus the eye diameter and the hub bore with keyway width
- The wear ring bore and the matching wheel neck, with the clearance you actually have; if the pump is still together, say so and say what it is doing instead
- The casing material and the impeller material together, as a pair, with the duty the pump is on — sea water, brine, bilge, fresh water, fuel or oil
- Whatever is cast or stamped on the removed part itself — pattern numbers, alloy marks, arrows — photographed against a rule
- The shaft diameter under the sleeve and the sleeve length; if the pump is packed, the packing cross-section, the ring count and the position of the lantern ring
- Where a mechanical seal is fitted: its own type marking, the face pairing, the elastomer and the working temperature, and whether the unit was converted from packing at some point
- Bearing designations and clearance codes exactly as etched on the ring faces, and whether the set is a pair or a single
- Suction and discharge bore with the flange standard and pressure rating, and the direction of rotation viewed from the driver; on a reversing anti-heeling set, say that it reverses
- On a CVLS column and on an Ellehammer ejector the type string alone is not an identification — for the column give the length, the number of bowl stages, the line-shaft bearing spacing and the sealing arrangement from the installation documents; for the ejector give the type letter and the driving-water and suction connection sizes
- The symptom in one line: discharge pressure fallen at unchanged speed, a gland that will not tighten out, a bearing running hot, a fire pump that no longer holds its test pressure, or an ejector that has stopped drawing
Tools for this equipment: the mechanical seal material code for the seal faces, the flange identifier for the suction and discharge flanges, and the affinity laws calculator when a centrifugal pump runs on another supply frequency. For a fire water system, the nozzle K-factor calculator gives the flow of a sprinkler, water mist or hose nozzle from its K-factor and the pressure at the nozzle.
OEM route and verified alternative on Iron Pump equipment
An Iron Pump list splits three ways rather than two, because one of the routes on this maker is a complete unit.
The first split is the usual one. Bearings taken off the ring face by designation and clearance code, gland packing by cross-section, O-rings, gaskets, fasteners, and the belts, sheaves and tensioner hardware on a QTe drive or a BC belt drive are size-and-material items, and a verified alternative route can be reviewed on them once the dimensions are confirmed. Castings and turned parts are not: impellers, casing wear rings, shafts, sleeves, the renewable cylinder liners and pistons on a BDV or BDHV frame, and the propeller wheels on a QT set all belong to one pump size and one build, and OEM-route review is normally raised alongside anything else. The Ellehammer ejectors sit oddly across that line — a nozzle and a diffuser have no wear mechanism and no catalogue cross, so the question there is dimensional and material rather than commercial, and it is answered from the removed part and the connection sizes.
The second split is the material pair, and it only bites on sea water. Sea water conducts, so a pump built of two alloys is a working galvanic cell in which the less noble part corrodes while the more noble part is protected, and the rate depends heavily on the area ratio between them. Sea-water pump practice uses that deliberately, coupling small noble internals to a large, thick-walled, less noble casting that acts as a sacrificial surface at low current density. The consequence for an order is blunt: fitting a more noble wheel or ring pair into an old casing enlarges the cathode and shortens the life of the casting it is bolted into, so on sea water, brine and ballast duty the casing and impeller materials are reviewed together rather than one at a time, and a substitution that looks like an improvement in isolation is checked against what it sits in. The third route is the maker's own: a replacement unit that Iron Pump classifies as a spare part and states is interchangeable at 1:1 with no new class approval required. That is worth putting on the same enquiry as the parts on a set where the casing is thin or the ring bores have been machined out more than once, and it is a question for the ship's class arrangements rather than an answer this page can give.
Iron Pump parts — questions buyers ask
What does Iron Pump need before a spare part can be identified?
The maker's own after-sales route asks for the pump type or model, the serial number, the vessel's IMO number or name where it is relevant, a part number if one is to hand, and a description of the part, and it notes that the serial number is normally on the pump nameplate. The vessel field is the unusual one: most pump makers identify from the machine alone, and this one identifies from the machine and the ship together, because a yard-package pump was built against a hull and the machinery file follows the hull. Where the plate has corroded or been painted over, the vessel identity with photographs of the pump and of the removed part will usually reopen the trail. Send both halves and the review starts on the first pass rather than the second.
The pump is stamped IRON, not Iron Pump. Is it the same maker?
Yes. The business was established in 1906 as Maskinfabrikken IRON A/S and trades today as IRON Pump, so older plates can read IRON with no "Pump" on them at all. The opposite case turns up as often: bilge and ballast-stripping ejectors on Danish-built ships frequently carry an Ellehammer plate, and that range has belonged to Iron Pump since 2017. Two quite different names on two quite different machines can therefore both be Iron Pump equipment. Copy whatever is actually on the plate rather than correcting it to the name you expect — the wording places the decade, and that is useful in itself.
Is replacing the whole pump a class problem on an old Iron Pump unit?
Not according to the maker. Iron Pump publishes a replacement route in which the customer can take a 100% identical unit so that spares already on board still fit, or the same pump with current seals and bearings, and states that the unit is interchangeable at 1:1 and classified as a spare part, so no new class approval is required. That is worth checking alongside the parts route on a set where the casing has gone thin, the ring bores have been machined out more than once, or the pattern is old. It is the maker's statement about its own product, not a Vessel Core undertaking, and any decision still rests on the ship's class arrangements and on what the survey requires.
Does the casing material matter when only the impeller is being renewed?
On sea water it matters a great deal. Sea water conducts, so a pump built of two alloys is an operating galvanic cell in which the less noble part corrodes and the more noble part is protected, and the rate depends on the area ratio between them. Sea-water pump practice deliberately pairs small noble internals with a large, thick-walled, less noble casting that acts as a sacrificial surface, so dropping a more noble wheel into an old casing enlarges the cathode and shortens the casing's life. The casing material and the impeller material are therefore treated as one piece of identification data rather than two. What Iron Pump casts them in is not published, so we ask for what is marked on the part rather than naming an alloy for you.
Why do anti-heeling sets and ejectors need a different request?
Because neither behaves like a one-way pump. A QT anti-heeling set is built to reverse its rotation so that flow reverses across the ship, which means there is no permanent suction side and no permanent pressure side, and the seal loading, the bearing loading and the blade wear pattern do not read the way a drawing of a one-way pump suggests. A QTe adds belts, sheaves and a tensioner that only the BC belt drive shares on this page. An Ellehammer ejector goes the other way and has nothing to wear at all, so "ejector spares" means nothing until the type letter and the connection sizes arrive; after that it is a nozzle and diffuser geometry and material question.
Is Vessel Core connected to Iron Pump?
No, and there is no agreement of any kind. Vessel Core holds no dealership, distribution, representation or partnership agreement with Iron Pump, and quoting a component against one of its designations implies no approval by the maker and no claim of interchangeability.
Submit your RFQ now.
Send your Iron Pump request — the designation as stamped on the casing (CNLB, CNLe, BDV, QT or an Ellehammer type), the serial number, and the components you expect to renew. Vessel Core reviews the supply route and prepares a structured supply quotation.
