FIGHTING SHIPS

Out into the gray Atlantic, laden with tools for all out offensive warfare, sailed the convoys. Week in, week out, squat fighters and tankers head into the winter seas with cargoes of food and munitions for the expanding front lines of the United Nations. Shepherded by fast destroyers and corvettes, these ships of freedom sail on over the dark horizon into the dangers of tempest and the tide. And And was all I could see. Just a bit of flaming wreckage which sank very quickly, and a handful of men, their faces black with oil, shivering on a raft. And away off in the distance was a light boat looking for them, bouncing about like a walnut shell. They're doing real things out there. You're doing real things, too, Dick. Yeah? How? You're helping to build a ship, aren't you? Ship? It might as well be frying pans as ship plates. But, Dick, the steel plate you make, they're just as important as the gun. Why, if it weren't for you Yes, I know. But when you do the same job every day, you sort of lose sight of what it means. You mustn't feel that way, Dick. I know, dear, but if you could only see what they did with our stuff. Bye, honey. That's the trouble with the whole thing. I face going to ship. But we're so far away from ships, we lose sight of them. Seems funny, though. You'd think doing the same thing all the time would bring you closer to it. But I guess it just becomes a habit. Like you biting your nails. That's the way it is now. If we could only find out just how they use the plates we make. Hi, Dick. What's eating you, anyway? Huh? Oh, nothing. Just thinking. And these are the side shears where the plates get their final trimming. Planet Watson to Bangor. How are you? Fine. What's this plate for? Just an order number to us. Just a number, eh? Yes. You can't get very close to a number. How do you mean? You taking the paper this morning? That story about the convoy? We feel a lot of it here. How do you feel? Good. If we only knew what this ship this was for or where it goes on the ship, we'd feel a lot better. Well, it'd be a bit tough to tell you that. Yes, I guess so. But I think we can arrange Yes? we might have a chat. How would you like to see a ship launched? A ship that's got some of your plates in it. Would I? Sure I would. Is there a fat chance of that? Well, we'll see. There she is. Better take a good look. So, that's the baby. Well, when do I start? Hold on now. You see those triggers there? When the time comes, there'll be men standing by to cut the rope. Isn't she ready yet? Don't sound so glum. There's quite a bit still to do, but you'll be in at the final. Come on. It doesn't say. Other things. Sure, they just have to be built before you run. You think I don't know that? That one weighed about a ton and a half. They come as high as 13 tons. They cast them all in one piece. They pour it, huh? Just like we do at the mill. Not exactly. You see, you make ingots, but they have to cast a whole propeller with delicate curves, sharp edges, and so forth. So, they pour it from the bottom up, as it were. That cuts out splash and helps the mold keep its shape. That's it. Then they break the mold, chip the rough casting with a cold chisel, and it's ready for machining. First, they lop off the top of the screw with a precision cutter. Then they take it to the pitch planer. The pitch planer is very ingenious. It's a machine that planes the surface of the propeller along the exact pitch or angle of the blade. This particular one was designed and built in just 3 months, right here in Canada. After all the other machining is finished, they sand it. This gives the propeller a very high polish and a better bite. The engines, of course, have to be big stuff, too. Even for a 300-ton merchant freighter. A big marine engine weighs nearly 150 tons. Why, that's tremendous. Yes, but it has to do a great deal of work. Drive the ship, turn it, and reverse it. The auxiliary motors have to be firmly attached to the main engine with eccentric and connecting rod. How long does it take to build one? Oh, it varies. About 3 months is good. They have to machine the base and level it. Then they have to get the main bearings better. Then the crankshaft goes in, and believe me, that's some crankshaft. It weighs over 18 tons. Then the business of dropping the cylinders into the columns is pretty tricky. That single operation may take a crew of men several hours. Bit different from a land engine. Well, it has to turn a shaft maybe 90 ft long and 18 in wide, and don't forget it's got a propeller on the end of it. Then it's got to drive a 1,000-ton vessel through the sea at better than 20 mph. But what gets me about these engines is the delicate work that goes into the pressure gauges and valves. They pour these gauges from small carbon arc furnaces. The temperature in there is around 3,000° F. A bit of a steel mill in that. Maybe. But the tooling is a lot more precise, if you'll pardon me. And drilling the correct movement for the gauge is work that can be done only by people with a watchmaker's skill on the lathe and the boring mill. The same applies to the assembly. Each gauge is calibrated separately and tested under steam against the master gauge. You see, they have to be absolutely accurate. You mean men's lives might depend on the right head of steam at the right time? Most certainly. The same as they might depend on that pump there. Pump? I thought they only used them when the ship was full of water. Not at all. They use them for pumping out the bilges, for maintaining balance, and of course, for making fresh water out of sea water. Say, that's quite an idea. Yes, it comes in very useful. They make a condenser out of copper tubing, pump in the sea water, and vaporize it with live steam. Then they cool it off and distill drinking water from the mixture. Then they pump what's left overboard. Sure, but what works the pump? Usually it works off the steam pressure of the ship, but sometimes off the generators. Of course, the lights. Not only that, the cooking, the winches, the ammunition hoist, and the degaussing girdle, don't forget that. Why, a large battleship has enough power to light the whole city of Hamilton, and these generators do the job. They're run off the steam by a prime mover. No wonder there's so much wiring in warships. About 37 mi of it in a small trawler alone. Every wire has to be insulated with rubber. They mix raw and reclaimed rubber, and then cut it up in chunks for the sausage machine. A sausage machine? Well, it looks like one. They feed the wire and the rubber through a sort of mincer. It comes out all covered and ready to be baked in the furnace. Then it can stand up to salt air and water. They have neat ways of braiding it all together, too. They find any number of strands and cover them with cotton. If you can imagine a sort of mechanical knitting bee, well, anyway, that's how they do it. One of the things we seem to think of more in connection with sailing ships than with modern ones is work places. But it's still a very necessary part of the game. There are lots of rope still needed it board ship, and they all have to be spliced. End splices, eye splices, long splices, and they're all done by hand. Sometimes, rope is used as a buffer to prevent wood from wearing away by rubbing. But nowadays, there's another problem to tackle, splicing wire cable. The principle is just the same, but it's a lot tougher to do. In the store room, that's what they used to call a ship chandlery, you'll find the spare parts for pretty nearly half the insides of the ship. Pump, bucket, bath fitting, wheelbarrow, coils of rope, and life belts, lamps, fire extinguishers, fenders to keep the ship from rubbing too hard against the jetty, flag, hatchet, even a complete set of bells, engine telegraph, wheel, and bolt. The binnacle is a compass housing. It's like a floating city. You mean it will be a floating city. I hereby name thee His Majesty's Canadian Ship Cobourg. So, you would have to just send it out to sea like she was, eh? Oh, just a minute, fellows. I didn't say that. Give him a break, fellows. After all, this guy makes steel. Yeah, you'd look pretty silly in a steel mill, Charlie. Suppose you tell us what happens after a launching. Then we'll all know. Well, it's pretty straightforward. There's always the odd bit of welding and amount of paint work before she's ready for the test run. That's when she really gets put through the hoops. They may give her 4 hours full power, and they'll take her out of port, no matter how dirty the weather is. Many's the time I've seen waves break clear of her bows. I've seen her bucking headwinds like a regular bronco, and up on deck, you'd think maybe it was a storm in mid-Atlantic. But on the bridge, everything's as calm as if we were in port. Captain giving orders, engine room taking them, and the whole thing going like clockwork. It may be a corvette, or a trawler, or a minesweeper. It's all the same. They plow through the water like sharks. Turns out to be an acceptance run. That certainly sold a lot for your shipbuilding. For our ship building, you mean. We've all done something for those ships. The boys who make the propellers, or the engines, or the pumps. You with your steel. Yeah, don't hold out on us. What about that steel you make? Well, it's not very much to talk about after seeing 150-ton engines, but well, it goes something like this. We put the iron ore into a blast furnace with coke and limestone and heat for about 9 hours. Then it's drawn off. First, the slag. That's the part of the ore that's no good. It's like lava from a volcano. Then the iron. Then it goes from the blast furnace to the open hearth, where we make it into steel. In the open hearth, we keep the hot metal at nearly 3,000° for about 10 hours, and then it's poured off in a big ladle. That's called tapping a heat. The big ladle takes the hot metal and pours it in the big molds, which form ingots. Take the ingots to what we call blooming mill. And there they roll them into slabs for us at the plate mill. We get them, we heat them up again to about 2300°. Then we roll them into plate to the size specified on the order. Anywhere from about 3/8 of an inch thick to an inch and a half. That must be pretty tricky getting it down fine when you've got a chunk of hot steel that size. No, there's a dial on the roller that tells us how thick we got. And a couple of fellows sitting up in sort of a signal cabin. They control the rollers. It takes 17,000 amps to turn those rollers. Enough to light your home for nearly 5 years. And the pressure is 75,000 lbs to the square inch. That's a man of jello if you ever got under it. After the boys at the roller have got through with it, the plate is marked. Then it comes to us at the shears and we trim it off square. And I guess that's about all. And a pretty big all at that. Yes, sir. We're all pulling on the same end of the rope in this business. And don't forget this. A ship's only as good as the builders can make her. As good as the builders can make her, fellows. That's what he said. Ford's mill, man. I you, me. All of them. We're the builders and don't let's forget it. Hey.