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OT ?: Building Liberty ships for the war effort, 1941

And to think....all those people who did that were racists born into white privilege and evil to the core. But rejoice!
There is no doubt the puddles of liquid fat we have nowadays - the young people you see on TV smashing out windows, stealing Nikes, tipping cop cars, multiple facial piercings, each one softer than goo - they'd have no trouble jumping right in and welding up a few battleships just like they did in 1941. If I were the Chinese, I'd be licking my lips.
 
More to the point, Greg (ignoring your word dribble) - who'd have thought that the grandchildren (not many greats, unfortunately) of those same men and women would be actively undermining Democracy and promoting a distorted, racist Fascism, all led by the least competent man on Earth?

How damaged your thinking is. How debased your view is. How sad...
 
I'm sure the OP appreciates your personal opinions on a non political topic. GregSY, I don't know if they could weld up a battleship but I bet most of them would understand the basics of fluid mechanics that keep one afloat and upright. The puddles of liquid fat are between your ears.
 
Good grief.

Does. Every. Single. Thread. Have. To. Degenerate. Into. Politics?? :willy_nilly:


Grow up......... or go to Facebook to fight. :rolleyes5:
 
They learned a lot about ship design and welding vs riveting ship hulls with the Liberty ships. A number of identical products tested under a wide variety of conditions yielded a lot of very good statistical data. With riveted ships a crack would only propagate to the edge of a plate and stop. With welding the cracks just keep growing - at the speed of sound in metal. I have a picture somewhere of a Liberty ship at a dock in New England that cracked apart while moored, wasn't even underway. And I mentioned square corners in windows causing fatigue cracks.
 
One broke in half some 40 miles from here ....Rufus King ,on its first voyage in June 1942....the captain ran it aground off the lighthouse on South Stradbroke Island .....The water was dead calm ,and stayed calm for six weeks.,most of the cargo was salvaged including B24 s in crates,and medical supplies for the Pacific war......Now nearly 80 years later ,the last remains disappered a few months ago,although the front half had already floated free when it ran aground ,and was used a marine workshop in New Guinea for the rest of the war.....The captain and crew were "clapped in irons" and flown back to the US ,to stop any word of the hull breaking getting out. The story was spread that the captain was a German sympathiser,to cover up the incident......Too late ,because residents of the nearby village had watched it going aground already broken ,and talked to the crew as they waded ashore.
 
It was exciting times. I had a steel fab instructor who told us of him starving in Vancouver BC in the late thirties. He could not support his family so he joined up. He had completed basic training in the Canadian Air Force and was stationed somewhere on the Prairies but at least he could send money to his wife and family.
One day he is told to report to the commanders office. "Private Scott we understand you are a ship fitter by trade." Next thing he knows he is discharged and told to report to the yard in North Vancouver where he worked six days a week and as much overtime as he could handle.
He said that lend lease aircraft carriers would show up and they would do a refit for the British navy. All the electric bomb hoists and aircraft hoists were pulled out and replaced by hand chain hoists. He said there were mountains of these hoists on the dock and wondered where they all went.
He said the liberty ships were bare bones with almost no wood trim anywhere. The toilet was a trough that you sat over and the water was running along under your butt and then it led overboard.
One shift in the evening they were working and the crew of the destroyer was inside watching a movie. The crew could not hear the movie so the commanding officer came out on deck and ordered them to stop work. Everyone on the repair crew came in and watched along with the destroyer crew. When the movie was over the destroyer crew went to bed and Scotty said that they went back outside and proceeded to rivet and hammer all night long. He wondered how the crew slept but they didn't miss the movie.
And a final description from an old timer came buy a little shop I was in and I was using the burning table. He was watching and I noticed my pressure was dropping from a low oxy tank. I quipped that maybe I should heat up the bottle and he smiled and said "charles law". I asked him how he knew and he revealed that he was a steam engineer in the Pacific working as merchant marine.
He said they didn't see much but they knew something was happening when a marine would show up on the catwalk above with a pigstick. A pigstick was a sawed off shotgun and the marine was there to stop anyone from getting ideas of abandoning their post in panic.
Exciting times.
 
My father was a merchant mariner who made many Atlantic crossings on Liberty ships. In a winter storm on the open seas, a deck crewman reported a crack in the deck plate just forward of the ships bridge. They chipped at the crack a bit, and discovered a V-joint filled with welding rods, covered by a thin cover of weld. Since there was nothing they could do to remedy the problem, they continued, with the crack growing larger every day. After unloading in Leharve, Army welders worked for several days to fix it. Then they loaded with shale ballast in Cardiff, and sailed home.
 
More to the point, Greg (ignoring your word dribble) - who'd have thought that the grandchildren (not many greats, unfortunately) of those same men and women would be actively undermining Democracy and promoting a distorted, racist Fascism, all led by the least competent man on Earth?

How damaged your thinking is. How debased your view is. How sad...


At least I have some thinking. You? You poop on the past yet seem entitled to celebrate it, as if it is some other civilization from some other galaxy. Torn down any statues lately? Spray painted any veteran's memorials? Those pigs are your spawn. You have no right trying to rally around the past. Hang your head in shame.
 
My father was a merchant mariner who made many Atlantic crossings on Liberty ships. In a winter storm on the open seas, a deck crewman reported a crack in the deck plate just forward of the ships bridge. They chipped at the crack a bit, and discovered a V-joint filled with welding rods, covered by a thin cover of weld.

I've heard of such things before, the shipbuilders were under incredible pressure to get them out to sea asap, and some clowns cut corners that could have been disastrous. Glad your dad's ship didn't come apart.

Speaking of welding ships, a Materials Science prof I worked with at MIT was an expert on welding and such. He mentioned to me that (sort of like the Saturn F1 main engines) nobody alive now knew how the heck the heavy plate armor was welded onto battleships and the like during the 1940's. Not sure if it was due to metallurgy or technique, but according to him at that time (mid-90's) it wasn't possible any more.

Can't say if that was truly the case, but this was an acknowledged expert, so I believed him. Gosh, how long ago that feels now, but it's only ~~25 years.
 
My grandfather was a gunner on a Liberty Ship during World War II. He joined the Navy in 1939 because he new he would be drafted and thought the Navy would be a safer bet for him.

His younger brother was later drafted and being fluent in german they made him a paratrooper. He was killed a few days before d-day trying to link up with the French Resistance.

Anyways little did gramps know that a mariner on a Liberty Ship was one of the most dangerous deployments during WWII because of the propensity for liberty ships to sink in a couple of minutes after being hit by a torpedo. Grandpa had 3 liberty ships sunk out from under him. The first one was off the coast of Greenland in heavy seas. They were carrying a load of poles similar to telephone poles. The poles were crashing down on the lifeboats and grandpa was sure they were not going to make it. A merchant ship made one last search and found them. The last one was off the coast of Galveston Texas. They limped into the harbor and gramps spent a couple of months in recovery at the hospital. The Navy decided he had been through enough and made him a petty officer in charge of the Navy store towards the end of the war. Grandpa was really good with math and should have become an accountant thats why they put him in charge of the store. He could have reenlisted but instead went home to farm and raise beef and managed or owned quite a few sale barns in the area. He lost his arm a year later in a farming accident. Pretty amazing to go through all of that only to be crippled by a thrasher.
 
My father was a merchant mariner who made many Atlantic crossings on Liberty ships. In a winter storm on the open seas, a deck crewman reported a crack in the deck plate just forward of the ships bridge.
My metalwork teacher told of guys stealing lengths of small bar from the machine shop to drop in the bottom of the weld prep. I have encountered idiots less than thirty years ago boasting of doing that on field welds of large mine equipment on new assembly.
I worked for a manager who told of working in an East Coast shipyard during WW2 as a young kid. He was chewed out by the foreman because he was not welding enough for his shift. He figured out that the rest of the guys were taking some of their rods from the tool room and throwing them in the chuck. The management was keeping track of the number of rods used by each man but not the amount of weld done. You never get quality if you rush a welder.
 
I read about british warships,the plate armour was attached with a complex system to absorb shock .....the ship I was reading about ,the contractors who built it ,(Armstrongs?)should have provided a insulated bulkhead between the coal and the boiler stoking area,but instead of the specified filling ,the double wall was stuffed with old newspapers and rags.When hot ash was drawn from the furnaces and placed against the bulkhead,the paper caught fire,then the coal .....seems two other ships were built the same ,and both also had paper instead of insulation.
 
I am still not sure exactly what it means but you can rent the craneway at the kaiser shipyard in Richmond Califorina, home of many liberty ships. You rent the crane way and they set up a party with tables and dancing for the wedding. Late in the war they built victory ships, one is still based there, afloat.
The shipyard was basically abandoned as soon as the war ended. It is now the Rosie the riveter national museum. Ford built a assembly plant there before the war they made jeeps and landing craft there during the war.
Bill D

Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

Facility - The Craneway Pavilion

SS Red Oak Victory Ship | WWII Museum | Richmond CA

Ford Motor Company Assembly Plant - Wikipedia
 
I heard this story from a welder who worked in the local shipyard during WWII building Liberty ships. In trying to gain time on the schedule, management decided that when joining the keel plates to the hull plates more welders could do the job faster. Welders were practically shoulder to shoulder. The plates required multiple passes to complete the joint which was essentially a perimeter weld along both sides of the hull. The amount of smoke and fumes was choking. Along about the time the welding was near completion a loud groaning sound started and then a very loud "explosive" sound happened and the plates that they were standing on shook. The crack all along the joint was wide enough to stick your hand through it in places. The joint was repaired with a different weld procedure which added more time but did not crack.
 








 
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