riveting for ship's plating in 1890

Would anyone be able to tell me or direct me to a good source for information as to whether (in 1890) riveting at a shipbuilding berth would still have been done by hand? I can imagine that hydraulic riveting might have been used in boilermaking, within controllable conditions and for steel and iron plate of a limited size. Pneumatic riveting would not have been used as it was not invented until 1894? The scaffolding around a ship, at that time, amounted to de-limbed conifers, with the crudest support for the men working high along a ship's side. There were cranes, in the form of jibs on uprights, for the lifting of the one to two ton plates, but no system that would have allowed for the portability of what would have been fairly gigantic hydraulic riveters (if they existed). The Lusitania of 1907 was hydraulically riveted for the most part. I am trying to get a word impression of the correct riveting process in the building of the first Canadian Pacific "Empress" liners, delivered in 1891 from the Vickers (then Barrow Yard) at Barrow-in-Furness.

Most of the riveting on these was probably done with hydraulic riveters.
They had huge deep throat "C" clamp style riveting frames, some with throat depths of up to 30 feet.
Hand riveting was done, but usually only in tight spaces and for assembling oddball combos where the machines wouldnt reach. And, even the "hand" riveting was usually done by air or mechanical hammers.

Most of this riveting, mechanical or hand, was done with hot rivets. Heat em, squish em.

Somewhere I have a few books showing riveters of that age- amazing, huge machines. Mostly water hydraulic, not hydraulic oils.

Remember, the industrial revolution was at least 100 years old at that point, and there were the forerunners of many of our modern fab machines being used- steam hammers and presses, mechanical ironworkers, rolls, shears, and punches, and gas welding.

My friend Steve is doing his best to bring riveting back-
Riveted structural steel

I agree, most rivetting would have been done as "power rivetting", using a "C" frame type of rivetter. Sometimes, this was called a "bull rivetter". In that era, hydraulic machinery using water as the working fluid was common. I was in a very old plate fab shop about 28 years ago, dating to pre 1900. They had a heavy brake, plate punch, and plate shear of that era, hydraulic, still using water. What they had that was also original was a "dead weight accumulator" in the hydraulics. This was simply a mechanical version of the modern "bladder" gas charged hydraulic accumulators. It consisted of a vertical cylinder mounted on the floor. The piston rod stuck straight up, and a massive dead weight was supported on the piston rod. There were two guide bars for the dead weight. A triplex power pump ( 3 plungers, open crankshaft, driven by an electric motor thru gearing) provided pressure to the system. When the shear or brake needed to make a stroke, the accumulator provided pressurized water at sufficient flowrate and volume. Otherwise, the triplex pump would only have allowed a very slow stroke to be made.

In that shop, they had a room with a huge water storage tank, the accumulators, and the triplex pumps. There was a stove in one corner of the room. The foreman explained that in the old days, in winter, that shop was not heated. The men on the floor relied on coke fires in makeshift stoves for localized heat. To keep the accumulator, pumps, and water storage tank from freezing, they had a separate room with a coal fired stove. In sub freezing weather, the cylinders and piping on the shear, punch and brake were drained at each day's end. As time went on, the shop was closed in and heated, so freezing of the hydraulics on the punch, shear and brake was no longer an issue.

In this same shop, the foreman showed me kerosene torches still on the tool crib shelf. A kerosene torch is made of soldered "tin", and looks like a watering can with a wick stuck out the spout. The kerosene torch predated the battery powered flashlight. It was used by shop men to see what they were doing when there was insufficient daylight or the work cast shadows.

The foreman had been there perhaps 35 years, so he would have started there in about 1948. He told me when he started in that shop, there were boilermakers and ironworkers who'd started there 40 years ahead of him, or sometime around 1908-1910. The foreman told me he had heard from those guys what it was like to work in a steel plate shop making tanks, hydro turbine penstocks, dam gates and similar when they started. The conditions would have been similar to a shipyard as the work has a lot of similarities.

One thing I recall from my own younger days was working with older men who'd been in rivetting gangs. These men had worked as either ironworkers or boilermakers. Universally, they were hard of hearing. Most were also what used to be called "punchy", a condition most usually associated with boxers. "Punchy" meant a person had a variety of tics and twitches. Men who rivetted often exhibited this sort of thing, aside from being hard of hearing. These were guys who'd been in field rivetting gangs, using the air rivetting guns.

I drank a lot of beer with those oldtimers back some 35 years ago, and I heard their stories. In the shipyards, the rivetting gangs were often put on a "piece rate" pay scale, meaning the more rivets they drove, the higher their day's pay. It got the men working at a breakneck pace. The record for rivets driven in a single shift in a shipyard was quoted on this bulletin board. If one considers the thousands of rivets that are needed to put a ship together, aside from the need for speed to keep from driving a cold rivet, it was necessary to drive the rivets at an incredble pace. I know with air hammers and a good crew, a rivet can be driven in something like 30 seconds or a little less. with hand hammering, I can;t imagine how fast the rivets were driven. Just to keep ahead of the cooling of the rivets, they had to be moving fast.

In the case of ship building, as noted, all the seams and construction possible was laid out to be done using the power rivetters. These were hung on jib cranes on trolleys, so they could be easily moved into position to rivet the work. As few rivetted joints as possible were left to be done in place by "hand driving". Pre pneumatic tools, hand driving meant what it said. It was a case of having to swing a hammer to drive the rivets. Typically, a rivet snap, which looked like a sledge hammer having a rivet set machined in one face would be held on the projecting shank of the rivet to be driven. One or two men with rivetting hammers would then swing their hammers, striking the rivet snap. A bucker used either a heavy bucking bar or some arrangement of leverage to hold the head of the rivet in place against the plates or flange of a ship's framing.

For an illustration of hand rivetting using the hammers and rivet snap, "The Bull of the Woods" cartoons has a good depiction. It shows a crew rivetting a box girder for a bridge crane using hammers and a rivet snap.

Even after pneumatic rivetting hammers were in common use, it was simply more economical and a better job to lay things out for the use of the power rivetters.

I have an old children's book from about 1912, called "Victories of the Engineer". It was written for perhaps adolescents and goes into surprising detail. It follows the construction of a passenger liner in (possibly) John Brown Shipyard. One of things shown is the rivetting of the hull plating and frames. A picture shows the "building shed and ways". In the picture, numbers of jibs with power rivetters are visible.

I've been in a crew and driven some rivets for locomotive tender frame and boiler work. I have also seen structural rivetting done on bridge repair work when I was a kid. In both cases, rivetting has to be done quickly. The rivets are driven into holes that are deliberately oversized (usually by reaming once the seam or connection is assembled). The rivetting process must then upset forge the rivet shank so it fills and locks in the rivet hole thru the joint or seam. To do this, the rivet has to be at a good forging heat when it is driven. The head is also upset forged when the rivet is driven. As the rivet cools fromt he forging, it draws in and really pulls tight on the joint or seam. A test of how well rivets are driven is to sound them with a hammer. A properly driven rivet has some rebound to the hammer and sounds a good note. An improperly driven rivet (driven with the rivet steel too cold, usually from takng too long in the driving) will often be loose in the joint and will not give a rebound to the hammer. It will sound "dead". Aside from whether the rivet sounds OK, there are the issues of how the head was formed: is it off center, not fully formed, etc ? It is hard enough to drive rivets using hand held air hammers. Pre-pneumatic tools, one can only imagine what it took to drive rivets properly. To try to upset forge a piece OF 5/8" OR 3/4" Diameter steel in one heat with hand hammering is what driving a rivet comes down to. My own guess is that in the pre-pneumatic tool days, rivetted joints were made up with smaller diameter rivets and more of them.

The other issue to consider in building a ship's hull is the calking of the seams. When a rivetted seam is made up, it is not necessarily watertight, no matter how hard the rivets draw the plates together. Calking of the plates is done to seal the seam. It is done by driving a chisel along the edge of a plate overlapping another. This forces some of the overlapping plate into the plate it laps against. Calking was done on boiler work, tank work, hydroelectric turbine casings and penstocks, and ship's hulls when rivetted construction was used. Miles of seams had to be calked, and calkers used air hammers with calking chisels for the purpose. In the days before pneumatic tools, calking seams had to be done using a hand held chisel and hand hammering. Even if the driving of rivets was mostly done using power rivetters, the calking was still a job requiring endless amounts of hand hammering.

Joe Michaels

There's a fun series on BBC about the Titanic...
Here's part one, the part on riveting starts around 36:00
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXNzjAxIrvU
Pretty fun show.

I learned a bit about the Titanic while helping install the Titanic exhibit in Seattle's Pacific Science Center. One of the exhibits was film of the riveting operations on the hull. The first portions of the hull were hand riveted. A film clip showed very young boys catching the glowing rivets tossed up from forges used to heat them. The rivet was quickly picked out of the conical tin catcher with tongs and inserted into the hole. The driven head was then formed by quick, synchronized blows by half a dozen workmen surrounding the rivet. About half way through the building the hull, they switched over to the new experimental C clamp riveting machines. A look at the hull piece in the exhibit revealed a rather wide range of driven head quality. They really had no choice but to settle for the shape of the head at the point the rivet cooled to much for additional shaping.

This is fascinating stuff. I have a couple questions.

What does it mean to "upset forge" a rivet?

It looks like one side of the rivet already has a head on it when inserted into the hole. How was that head formed?

If this is hijacking the thread, I apologize to the OP.

-Ryan

Grey Rider said:

This is fascinating stuff. I have a couple questions.

What does it mean to "upset forge" a rivet?


-Ryan

Click to expand...

Hi Ryan,

That's where they form the other side of the rivet. (Mushing out the small diameter end with hammer and or dolly)

The Large head is formed at the rivet factory.

Think mushroom w/ stem

Al

Thanks, Al. How did the rivet factory make the other head? Some kind of hot rolling operation?

-Ryan

The rivet and bolt factories had machines which "headed" bar stcok by upsetting.

The basic machine took a piece of round bar stock that was heated to a forging heat, and gripped it in a pair of jaws with half-round openings. Cams closed the jaws so they put a hard squeeze on the round stock. Once the jaws had closed, the heading die was pushed against the projecting end of the bar stock. This die was basically a rivet set, having the shape of the rivet head machined into it. A crankshaft and con rod working thru a crosshead brought the heading die in against the projecting end of the bar stock. Enough bar stock was left projecting from the jaws holding it to allow for this heading operation.

following this operation, the finished rivet may have been put back into a furnace and given a full annealing.


A blacksmith often made rivets and bolts as needed. It was a simple operation:
1. take a piece of bar stock of the desired diameter and cut to length, allowing for the forming of the head. There were rules of thumb for this, usually allowing 1.5 x stock diameter for a round head rivet. A fancier approach is to do a volume calculation for the head, then calculate the length of plain shank required to equal the head volume.

2. Heat the end of the stock to be headed to an orange heat, quench the tip of the end, stand on the anvil and hammer down into the end to start upsetting a bulge.

3. Take another heat, invert the stock and place the heated upset end on the anvil and drive down into the anvil. A common problem with this type upsetting was bending or going eccentric or folding the upset area.

4. Place a "heading plate" on the anvil over the hardy hole. The heading plate was usually made by the smith and contained holes equal to the shank diameters. It might have squared holes for doing carriage bolt or plow bolt shanks. It's purpose was to catch the upset end and hold it so the upset end projected above the heading plate.

5. Take another heat so the upset end is at an orange heat. Drop into the heading plate to the heated upset end projects. Take a hammer and form a rivet head- can be done freehand using a ballpein hammer, or with a rivet set.

We've made long rivets this way for special jobs. A common enough shop skill used to be hand rivetting. I learned years ago to form a pretty good round head on smaller rivets using just a ball pein hammer. It's quicker than one might think.

The trick with any rivetting is figuring the "heading allowance". The grip length of any rivet is the length of the shank passing thru the plates or flanges of structural members to be joined. The heading allowance must be figured so that enough shank projects to form a full head. Too much heading allowance is just as bad as the head will never form so that it seats and grips right.

Some of the bigger railroad shops had a battery of heading machines to make specialized jobs like boiler staybolts or mudring rivets. Firms making common grades of bolts use similar heading machines and most often do it cold. Higher strength bolting like A-325 grade structural bolting may be headed hot. Heading machines run like machine guns, cranking out rivets or bolt blanks faster than an eyeblink. Making a single rivet at the forge can take a few minutes.

A properly driven rivet should have two heads that are very nearly identical if the driven head is to be exposed.

A type of rivet head used commonly on ship's hulls and areas where water flow required a "fair" surface was the "Liverpool head". A Liverpool head required the plate to be countersunk. A round head rivet might be poked thru from the inside of a ship, and the heated shank was driven into the countersunk hole. The rivetting gun had an almost flat rivet snap in it, just a slight concavity. It was finished by rolling the gun in a kind of conical motion so the finished head was lightly convexed maybe 1/16" beyond the line of the plating. We used to see Liverpool rivets on hydroelectric bulkhead gates. I've seen some Liverpool head rivetting on older ships' hulls as well. The more common rivet heads are the "acorn" head or round head. Imagine millions of these projecting from the sides and bottom of a ship. Each one is going to create eddying and added drag, with resulting loss of speed and increased fuel consumption. Ship's plating was formed to make what was called a "molded hull", with "fair" lines. rivet heads defeated this idea. The advent of welded construction in shipbuilding had to have been quite revolutionary on so many levels. It made putting a hull together so much easier and so much less labor intensive. It also made the hull better in terms of fuel economy.

I marvel at where we now are. I come from a generation that came in on the tail end of rivetted work. I've seen stick welding in widespread use when I graduated college. Now, I see flux cored wire welding laying down weld with far less post weld distortion than stick welding, and laying it down with a production rate that is mind boggling. I am one of the few people who thinks of the millions or rivets needed to build a bridge when I ride over it, and I think of the advances, using submerged arc welding or flux core wire welding and how it did away with legions of men and so much work. As an engineer, my work incorporates rivetting on odd occasional jobs, and it incorporates a lot of welding. I marvel at what work was done to build the old ships. I used to see the old ore carriers in the 1970's up on the Great Lakes. Plenty dated to the 1920's-40's. These ships had beautiful lines to them. They had what some call a "wineglass" or "schooner" stern. I used to look at the plate work on the sterns of those old ore carriers and wonder what naval architect designed the hull, how the loftsman laid out the curves and sections, and how the frames and plates were formed to what I call "compound curves". It was all done without benefit of CAD or CNC. I would look at the sterns and see these incredible curves sweeping and joining, with rivetted seams tying them together. I liken those schooner sterns to the lines on a properly built woman. Unfortunately, along in the 1970's, the new generation of diesel powered ore carriers started to appear. These were nothing but ugly utilitarian vessels. The sterns looked like something whacked with a meat axe. No molded hull design, no graceful curves whatsoever. In an era when people were thinking in terms of fuel economy and the bottom line, I wondered why these bluff, squared off hulls were built. They could not be as fuel efficient in the water as the old schooner sterns. With modern shipbuilding methods like CNC burning of plates from CAD files, and modern welding processes, it should have been easier to build a "fair" hull with some nice lines. I guess with the bottom line, the bean counters crank up projected fuel consumption over a vessel's life against buildng costs, and crank in the horsepower to move the loaded vessel.... and the ugly box of a ship hull design won out. The new cruise ships are just as bad, looking hardly like an oceangoing vessel ought to look. The oldtime ship design was something that looked right, and took more skill to build into a finished vessel than most people will ever realize. Every rivet was a testament to the skill and coordinated efforts of a rivetting gang. I am glad that people are trying to keep this type of thinking alive, as with the project to duplicate a chunk of "Titanic".

Joe Michaels

Joe Michaels said:

took more skill to build into a finished vessel than most people will ever realize.

Click to expand...

Great post, Joe.

I think the above quote probably sums up the evolution of industrial manufacture. Seems to me that everything has been evolving to a form that minimizes the skilled labor required to manufacture it.

Take machine tools, for instance. Self-acting tools (which many now call "manual") were invented in order to reduce or eliminate the need for skilled operators.

The great thing is that we live in a society that is wealthy enough that people can find the time to keep old skills, like riveting, alive. And give us something to study and marvel about.

-Ryan

The two attachments show a rivet furnace, portable as long as you had a line for the fuel oil, and a hydraulic riveter which was not portable. Both taken from the December, 1904 issue of Marine Engineering.