"Modern Marvels" ship yard

[jeremy levine]

Anyone see this episode , if you can catch it they show the 125 hp. lathe used at Newport News ship works , along with some other huge tools.

[Mitchell Andrus]

Yep! One of my 'must see' shows. I also never miss 'How It's Made".

[Jeffrey Makiel]

Some years ago, I worked in a public shipyard. They had a lathe that was used for turning engine shafts for aircraft carriers that was soooo big that the operator sat on the cutting tool inside a booth to guide the cutter along!

-Jeff

[Pat Germain]

I used to work at Newport New Shipbuilding. I was a sailor assigned to the pre-commissioning unit for USS Theodore Roosevelt (a nuke Aircraft Carrier). Oh yeah, I saw some mighty big hardware while I was there, including the reactor vessels before they were fueled.

NNS also has one of the largest cranes in the world. (I think the largest is in Japan.) I lived and worked under it for many months. The Navy actually moves the crew aboard while construction is still underway. The also moves in an out of the drydock while it's in "shakedown".

NNS is actually a downright miserable place to work. It's dirty, noisy, dangerous and located in a very rough section of town. Just wanted to throw that in there in case anyone was thinking of submitting a job application.

[Ken Porter]

I haven't seen the lathe in person, but I've seen a huge lathe. I've also seen the press they use to flatten/bend 6" steel. I'm not sure if they have a wood shop there but I bet they have huge machines there as well.

[Pat Germain]

Ken, are you actually in the yard, or up in an office? Last time I was there, they had built a fancy new building with a pond around it to make it look like a ship moving through the water. It was strange to see because on the lot where that building sits used to be a bunch of crack dens.

My brother was a structural welder for NNS for a few years. He worked on the George Washington and the Stennis. After that, he had enough and left for something less stressful and less dangerous. He became a rodeo bullrider. Seriously.

[Ken Porter]

I'm working on the USS Carl Vinson right now. I'm a test engineer so I spend all my time in the ship. The building you're talking about is probably VASCIC. I've never been there but I'll get to go in a couple weeks for a school.

[Bill Lewis]

I've been to NGNN (Northrop Gruman newport News) shipyard before, and yes you can't even begin to descibe what "huge" means. Everything is on such a massive scale.
I've been to the keel of a carrier in the dock. And walked it from the bow to the stern. The thing is so large that it fills all of your field of view, so much so that you really can't take it all in, untill you start moving about, and even then you have to "work" at it to get pieces of the whole picture.

[jeremy levine]

I Tivo 'ed it just to watch it again. My family would go up to Maine when I was a child and I would force a visit to the Bath Iron works as often as I could. At the time (30+ years ago ) they had the largest crane in th western hemisphere.

[Jeffrey Makiel]

An interesting shop in the old shipyard was the Pattern and Mold Shop. They made all the unique casting patterns for the foundry using wood. These were the days when all the patterns were hand crafted well before 3- and 5-axis CNC machining became commonplace, as well as 3D CAD. Suffice to say, the pattern shop had just about every type of sanding machine I ever saw, as well as some very old and experienced craftsmen.

Wood molds are still used for casting of mostly unique parts. I understand that mahogany is the wood of choice. However, three dimensional routers are used to create the shapes which follow a series of programs generated from a master CAD drawing. Here are some pics of a recent casting for a large magnet that will be used in a fusion energy research device. The first picture shows all the mahogany parts (in color) that will be inserted into a 'core box' (in brown) which holds the whole mold together. The second picture shows a portion of the mahogany pattern. The third picture shows the resulting raw casting before the final machining process which brings the magnet within .020" tolerance. Each magnet costs $450,000 to make!

-Jeff

[Jeffrey Makiel]

I Tivo 'ed it just to watch it again. My family would go up to Maine when I was a child and I would force a visit to the Bath Iron works as often as I could. At the time (30+ years ago ) they had the largest crane in th western hemisphere.

It seems that every shipyard touted that they had the largest crane at one time or another. I think is was a demonstration of the local manhood!

In Philadelphia, the Naval Shipyard had a hammer head type crane that would install gun turrets on New Jersey class battleships. It was so big, that the head of the crane where the operator sat looked like a cape cod house. It was so big, that it never got used and eventually was painted with a red and white checker pattern as per the FAA to help line-up commercial aircraft approaching the Philadelphia International Airport!

-Jeff

[Jason Boushard]

lol guess where I am? NNGN I have duty today on the USS CARL VINSON or as we call it the USS CARL PRISON. lots of big stuff here lots of shipyard workers that use my spaces for toliets too (I am sure Ken isnt one of them). There are some hammer head cranes in this area but they look tiny compared to te gantry cranes they have here. Ken what do you look like so the next time I am doing baggage check I can give you a hard time lol.

[Keith Outten]

I spent some time in the Yard at Newport News...QID in the nuclear pipe shop. There were 30 thousand people working at NNS in those days and I hated the place.

.

[David Epperson]

Some years ago, I worked in a public shipyard. They had a lathe that was used for turning engine shafts for aircraft carriers that was soooo big that the operator sat on the cutting tool inside a booth to guide the cutter along!

-Jeff

AO Smith, a manufacturer of fiberglas tanks and pipe, has an old WWII torpedo tube lathe that has a 12' swing and is 44 feet between centers. And yep, it's got a traveling operator chair as well.

[Pat Germain]

AO Smith, a manufacturer of fiberglas tanks and pipe, has an old WWII torpedo tube lathe that has a 12' swing and is 44 feet between centers. And yep, it's got a traveling operator chair as well.

But does it have a template guide, like Norm's?