After watching this video, how does one ram a mold and withdraw a pattern when the ship is swaying to and fro in a storm let alone pour molten steel into a mold? Has every ship in the US navy have a foundry on board or is it only on aircraft carriers?
HT1 would have your full answer but I would imagine the larger vessels like carriers as well as the maintenance tender vessels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repair_ship
I don't know if this is one of those cases, but some jobs can only be done when in port or calm seas.
we never poured underway, but we often rammed molds just prior to entering port, as soon as the ship was on shore power we fired up the furnace and poured before going on liberty, all the ships that had foundries where rather large and did not rock that much, welding on a moving ship was much more difficult then any foundry task I ever had to do. long transits such as from Hawaii to Japan, was very boring for the Foundry crew, we had no foundry work , but had to look busy, we had some silly clean and well painted foundries because of this. I remember do just stupid stuff like taki9ng all the ingots (several tons ) out of storage and cleaning out and repainting their storage locker and returning them, just to keep busy. riddling all the sand in the shop about 8 ton just to keep busy V/r HT1 P.S. tenders and repair ships where known to be unable to do many of their functions while underway, so we normally went place to place and stayed in one location much longer then other ships, My first deployment we where anchored just outside of the persian gulf tending ships for 4 months we made alot of tampions, because the Gunners would forget to remove them before doing their daily test on the Guns which was basically just firing a primer they would loose the Tampion over the side and need a new one
You guys ever notice how "epic" the background music sounds on these old films? Also, HT1 - were aviation metalsmiths taught to cast metals too? If so they must've had quite a skillset between learning sheetmetal work, welding, casting, and presumably some electrical too.
to the best of my knowledge no. but back then not alot of replaceable cast parts on a plane. if you ever get to Noaa who flies the hurricane tracking planes directly thru hurricanes . their mechanics perform almost battle damage level repairs to their planes regularly . very impressive work V/r HT1