In A Shipyard
When Bent To Shape
Keel and Haul
Launching A Ship
Fittingout The Hull
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KEEL AND HULL

The lowest part of the ship, the KEEL, does not rest on the slipway itself, but on piles of blocks, the keel blocks, laid at intervals along the centre line of the floor. To prevent the hull toppling over, and to ditribute the weight, two more rows of blocks are laid parallel to the keel blocks, one on each side of them and 20 feet or 30 feet away. This arrangement gives the workmen room in which to move about beneath the hull.

The HULL of a ship is held together by an enormous number of rivets. One great liner, for example, had four million rivets in her and they weighed 700 tons. The outside of a hull is rough, on an orderly pattern, with rows of rivet heads. Every rivet on the outside of a ship must be perfectly watertight, and is carefully inspected after being put in place.

Whenever possible, the closing of a rivet, that is, the forming of a head on it, is done by an hydraulic riveter, which exerts a squeeze of 30 tons to 40 tons, and does its work neatly in a few seconds. In some places, however, the operation is done with hand hammers or light mechanical hammersusing compressed air. A riveting hammer makes a terrible din, so that a slipway is hardly the place for a person suffering from disordered nerves !

Could we shorten days into minutes, we would see the framework growing as if by magic, while a small forest of scaffold poles is erected on each side of the hull to support working platforms. Then we should see the slipway invaded by the plating gangsand the bottoms and sides quickly covered by plates. Then decks and bulkheads would appear in the interior, and at last the ship's hull would be complete.