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Ship Production

Lecture 6 – History

Case Study:

Shipbuilding in North East England

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NE Shipbuilding:Sunderland on the River Wear

Newcastle on the River Tyne

Major centre for UK shipbuilding from 1800 to 1980s

Shipbuilding history is full of stories of boom and bust….

NE Shipbuilding:

Sunderland developed initially as a coal port.

The first recorded shipbuilder was Thomas Menville at Hendon in 1346. By 1790 Sunderland was building around nineteen ships per year.

Major development of shipbuilding in NE England due to Napoleonic Wars and ships for carrying coal in 1820s & 1830s.

Sunderland became the most important shipbuilding centre in the UK in the 1830s and by 1840 there were 65 shipyards.

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NE Shipbuilding:

Bartram yard on Wearside – built the Barque James Craig in 1874. Now restored & part of Australian Heritage Fleet.

Barque James Craig:

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NE Shipbuilding:On Tyneside, Charles Palmer established a yard at Jarrow in 1851 and built its first iron collier 'The John Bowes' in the following year. It was the first ever sea-going screw collier and was built for shipping coal to London.

Palmers were also famed for building the first rolled armour plates for warships in 1854.

Other Tyneside yards included:

William Smith & Co who launched the 1600 ton Blenheim in 1848.

W.G.Armstrong, the famous northern engineer gained interests in the Tyneside shipbuilding firm of Mitchells in 1882 and the company of W.G.Armstrong, Mitchell & Co was formed. The yard built battleships as well as a ship called The Gluckauf, which was arguably the world's first oil tanker. It was launchedby the yard in 1886.

NE Shipbuilding – Wooden Ships:Wooden ships relatively small. Clipper length approx. 61m (200ft).

Later vessels reinforced with iron limited to around 91m (300ft).

Difficulty with obtaining heavy scantlings and long lengths of timber.

Also not uniform in strength.

Midship section with massive keel construction and preponderance of material in bottom compared with deck.

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NE Shipbuilding – Wooden Ships:

NE Shipbuilding – Iron Ships:1830s construction of iron ships began. Advent of steam propulsion meant that more inboard space for machinery and bunkers was required.

Midship section reflected wooden construction with most material at the bottom and relatively light at top of hull girder.

Cast or wrought iron was used. Wrought iron - made by working red-hot solid iron bars - is almost pure iron, with very little carbon. Consequently it is not brittle, and will bend rather than snap. Cast iron is very versatile, as it can be poured into moulds when molten and cast into complicated shapes, but is very brittle.

It should be noted that wrought iron is very corrosion resistant.

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NE Shipbuilding – Wooden Ships:

NE Shipbuilding – Steel Ships:Advent of the Bessemer process in 1856 (Sir Henry Bessemer 1813-1898) for producing steel. Bessemer wanted a material that was as malleable as wrought iron, but could be cast in moulds to make strong cannons.

Steel was therefore easily worked though very strong.

Its introduction was accelerated by an early regulation of Lloyds Register that 20% less metal was required in ships built from steel than in those built from wrought iron.

By 1890 steel had replaced iron in shipbuilding.

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NE Shipbuilding - Technologies:On Wearside, last wooden ship built 1880, last sailing ship constructed 1893.

Yards needed to alter their premises by building boiler shops and engineering works.

NE Shipbuilding:Another major pioneering development in marine engineering was the steam turbine invented by Charles Algernon Parsons.

He patented the first steam turbine on Tyneside in 1884.

In 1894 Parsons' Marine Turbine Company launched 'TheTurbinia', a famous vessel powered by steam turbines.

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NE Shipbuilding – Boom Times:Shipbuilding's boom years came in the early 20th century stimulated by the build up of demand for warships and ship repair yards.

In the early 1900s, the yards of Sunderland employed over 12,000 men, a third of the town's adult population.

NE Shipbuilding – Boom Times:

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NE Shipbuilding – Boom Times:

NE Shipbuilding – Boom Times:

Japanese Battleship Russian Icebreaker

HMS Superb Yacht Cumbria

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NE Shipbuilding – Bust:In the 1920s and 30s, after the First World War, demand for shipping reduced.

From producing an average of about 80 vessels per year, the yards on Wearside only delivered a total of 30 ships for the 5 year period between 1931 and 1935.

Unemployment in Sunderland stood at 30,000.

NE Shipbuilding – Boom Times:Another shipbuilding boom occurred in the lead up to and during the Second World War.

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NE Shipbuilding – Riveting:

NE Shipbuilding – Riveting:

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NE Shipbuilding – Welding:

NE Shipbuilding – Welding:

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Case Study:

Liberty Ships

Liberty Ships:Built in USA during the Second World War from a British design.

Used mass production techniques to increase speed of construction. Also used new welding technology.

By 1945, 2,770 Liberty Ships had been built.

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Liberty Ships:A revolutionary aspect of the Liberty shipbuilding program was that a substantial portion of ship construction was undertaken off the ways.

First vessel 244 days to build. Subsequent average reduced to 28 days with one built in 4 days 15 hours and 30 minutes.

Liberty Ships:Most yards had a linear 'conveyor belt' plan. Steel plates and shapes entered a holding area in the yard on its inland side, and passed through a large prefabrication area where major sections of the ship were constructed.

The sections were then transported on rails or by moveable cranes to one the ways, and large cranes lifted them onto the hull for final assembly.

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Liberty Ships:Welding constituted the bulk of this work. A Liberty ship contained almost 600,000 feet of welded joints, and welding labour accounted for about one third of the direct labour employed in construction.

Liberty Ships:Once the main structures were completed, the vessel was launched and moved to the outfitting docks nearby.

Another keel was typically laid on the vacant way within twenty-four hours.

Final painting, joinery and electrical work were then completed,and rigging and lifeboats added.

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Liberty Ships:A number of Liberty ships suffered catastrophic losses.

Liberty Ships:Low temperatures can severely embrittle steels.

Fatigue cracks nucleated at the corners of square hatches and propagated rapidly by brittle fracture. In earlier ships, the riveted plates acted as natural crack arresters. These were absent in the all-welded Liberty ships. The problem was solved by improvements in ship design and steel quality.

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Back to the NE of England:With the conclusion of the Second World War, when it became apparent that the shipbuilding industry in Britain was about to embark upon a massive replacement programme of shipping lost in that conflict.

It became clear that the layout and equipment of the shipyards would be inadequate if they were to remain at the forefront.

Major reasons:

• Welded construction.

• Larger vessels.

NE Shipbuilding – Welding:

• Welded construction.

This caused an evolution from the erection of the ship in singleplates and bars to the construction of large prefabricated units.

There are obvious advantages in doing a large percentage of the welding under cover with modern machine tools, one of the greatest being the continuous employment of the workpeople concerned during the inclement weather, a factor which had caused the loss of a great deal of production time in the past while ships were being erected piece by piece on the ' open' berths.

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NE Shipbuilding – Large Vessels:

• Vessel Size.

The tendency for the average size of various types of ships to increase also strongly influenced the re-organisation of shipyard layout.

Although existing berths appeared to be adequately long, their comparatively narrow width was in many cases the deciding factor in the size of ship they could build, while the lifting facilities with which they were equipped were not suitable for modern methods of ship construction.

NE Shipbuilding:

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NE Shipbuilding:

NE Shipbuilding – Bust again:In the late 1960s Swan Hunter, on Tyneside, built eightsupertankers including the Esso Northumbria, the first new-stylesupertanker in 1969.

But competition from Japan and Korea was intense, and the yards suffered from shrinking order books. From the early 1960s the yards struggled to find work.

Oil prices rose in 1973 & there was an almost immediate downturn in sea-borne trade. By the end of 1982, 84 million tons of shipping were laid up - a staggering 12 % of the total world fleet. There was little demand for new shipping. Yards allover the world are competing for a demand in new ships that is less than a third of their combined shipbuilding capacity.

Despite heavy investment in new technology and massive protests, Sunderland's last shipyards were closed down in 1988.

The only remaining yard on Tyneside is Swan Hunter’s.

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NE Shipbuilding

BBC Videos…

Further reading:

Moss, M. and Hume, J., Shipbuilders to the World, Blackstaff Press, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1986.

Smith, J. and Holden T., Where Ships are Born: Sunderland 1346 – 1946, Thomas Reed & Co. Ltd, Sunderland, UK, 1947.

Hind, J., Background to Ship design & Shipbuilding Production, Temple Press, London, UK, 1965.

Phillips-Birt, D., The building of boats, W W Norton & Co, New York, USA, 1979.

Baker, E., Introduction to Steel Shipbuilding, McGraw-Hill, London, UK, 1953.

Taggart, R., Ship Design and Construction, SNAME, New Jersey, USA, 1980.

Storch, R., Hammon, C., Bunch H., and Moore R., Ship Production, 2nd Edition, SNAME New Jersey, USA, 1995.

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Recap/Reflect