RecompetedThe Crane Company the Marine Corps Kept Coming Back To
Alloy Crane & Machinery started in 1953 as a one-man welding shop outside Savannah. On Tuesday it won a $24 million Blount Island ceiling for the Navy's over-the-shore gear, more than every federal prime award it has booked since 2008 put together.
In 1953 a one-man welding shop opened outside Savannah under the name Alloy Welding Service. Residential work, commercial work, a torch.
Seventy-three years later that shop holds the contract for keeping the Navy's over-the-shore gear running for the Marine Corps.
Blount Island Command awarded M6700426D1003 on Sept. 22: a firm-fixed-price IDIQ with a $24,000,000 ceiling and a three-year ordering period.
The scope is intermediate and depot maintenance on the Improved Navy Lighterage System and the rest of the Maritime Prepositioning Force equipment that gets cargo across a beach when there is no port. Four proposals came in.
The winner was Alloy Crane & Machinery LLC of Garden City, Georgia, which is still family owned and still certified woman owned.
Every federal prime award USAspending carries for Alloy since 2008 adds to $22.94 million across 36 records. One contract just cleared the whole book.
Eleven Years of One-Year Jobs
Alloy's first work for contracting office M67004 was load test weights in September 2014, $432,250.
A basic ordering agreement followed in July 2015 for corrosion control, repair and logistics services on the Improved Navy Lighterage System, and after that came a decade of side connectors.
Those are the fittings that lock lighterage modules into a causeway. They live in salt water, carry the load of a ferry with a vehicle on it, and come apart for overhaul on a cycle.
Alloy has overhauled them under a fresh contract number almost every year since 2016. SIDE CONNECTOR SET ALPHA OVERHAUL in 2020, SCOR II in 2023, SCOR III in 2024, reading the FPDS description lines straight down.
Each was its own award, one year at a time. The ladder runs $620,948 in 2016, $1.48M in 2018, $1.77M in 2020, $2.38M in 2023, $2.88M in 2024, $4.30M in 2025 (chart below).
Twelve years of that comes to $19.68 million.
The Set-Aside Got Wider and They Held It Anyway
Now the part worth sitting with.
From 2018 through 2021, Alloy's Blount Island awards were women-owned small business sole source, and FPDS records a single offer on each one.
The office competed SCOR II as a WOSB set-aside in September 2023 and got two offers. The 2024 IDIQ, same set-aside, drew one.
Then Blount Island went to market properly. The SEABOSS sources-sought notice posted to SAM on Jan. 15 under M6700426Q1001, NAICS 811310, with its set-aside field reading NONE, and responses closed a month later.
The vehicle that came out the other side was a straight small-business set-aside.
The presolicitation went up July 30 and the RFP issued Aug. 5 as M6700426R0002. The signed SF 1449 shows block 10 checked at 100 percent small business, and proposals were due at 4 p.m. on Sept. 4.
So the pool widened between 2024 and 2026, and the incumbent went from being the only quote in the room to beating three other proposals.
Eighteen days from proposal deadline to award, for what it's worth.
What a $24 Million Ceiling Actually Buys
Read the contract before you read the number.
Section B sets a total minimum of $1,000,000 against the $24M maximum, caps orders at $8 million per year, and repeats the same language across three CLINs: a base ordering period and two more.
None of it is priced. The Q&A published with the RFP says offerors submit "a base labor rate and the build of indirect rates (Fringe, Overhead, G&A and Profit) for a fully burdened labor rate by skill set," and that the government supplies the CLIN amounts itself.
Work arrives as job orders written off Condition Found Reports, managed under DFARS 252.217-7028 over and above work, with the contracting officer accepting or rejecting Alloy's estimate before a dollar of cost is incurred. The government intends 100 percent inspection of everything delivered.
That is a ship-repair mechanism bolted onto an IDIQ. The award is a hunting license, and the hunting runs three years.
Section M matched it. A FAR 15.3 best-value tradeoff on technical methodology, past performance and price, with the two non-price factors combined outweighing price.
On a competition where price is a rate card, past performance is most of what is left to differentiate. Alloy brought eleven years of it on the exact equipment.
One more line from the PWS is worth your attention if you ever chase this work: the contractor's primary facility has to sit within 50 miles of Marine Corps Support Facility Blount Island. Alloy's own site lists four: Savannah, Augusta, Charleston, and Jacksonville.
Final Thoughts
The familiar version of this story ends with the runway. A small business rides sole-source awards until the set-aside comes off, the requirement consolidates, and someone with a bigger past-performance volume takes the work.
Blount Island ran it the other way. The office kept the jobs small and single-source while the requirement was small, opened the field when it rolled everything into one vehicle, and the shop that had been doing the work showed up and won it on the merits.
If you are building a bidders list for Navy lighterage or over-the-shore sustainment, there is now a Garden City crane shop on it with a competed award and a $24 million ceiling behind its name.
Thanks for reading.