Roads near Auckland's $1.4 billion Waterview motorway project will close late tonight to enable delivery of part of a giant tunnelling machine that has arrived from China.

The New Windsor entry point to the Southwestern Motorway and a section of Sandringham Rd Extension will close for five hours from midnight as the part is trucked from the waterfront, where 97 containers into which the $54 million tunnel-boring machine was packed for its voyage from China are being unloaded.

Transport Agency contractors will spend three months reassembling the 2300-tonne machine with its 14.46m-diameter drilling head in a deep trench at Alan Wood Reserve, before the first of two 2.4km motorway tunnels are drilled.

Sandringham Rd has to close so a culvert can be reinforced to take tonight's extra heavy load. Apart from further closures on Sunday night, the Transport Agency expects to be able to receive most of the containers without disruption during more than a week of nocturnal deliveries.