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Ships had always been custom-built. To mass-produce ships meant teaching a whole industry new tricks. Every ship had to be an exact replica of her sister. A State of Washington propeller had to fit on a shaft made in Wisconsin for a hull launched in Oregon.
As logical as this was, it was not easy at first to convince U.S. shipbuilders. Old-line plants with cramped space (and cramped habits) lagged a little. But newer-comers like Henry Kaiser and California Shipbuilding Corp. took to the revolution like hairy radicals, shucked their coats and went to work.
In the mold lofts, men cut templates (wooden patterns like the paper patterns of a dress) to Gibbs & Cox specifications.
In fabricating shops as big as armories and filled with the din of metal pounding on metal, men laid the templates on steel plate, cut out precise pieces which they bent into precise shapes.
In thunderous assembly shops men welded the shapes into ships' bows, sterns, houses, sections of hull — 35-50-ton assemblies which giant cranes lifted and placed on trucks.
Giant cranes, like a lady longing sugar, delicately lifted the huge assemblies and set them down in the ways. Ships took shape in the space of a few hours.
On long racks were hung hundreds of twisted pipe lengths ready to be placed in their special places in the ship's belly. In warehouses were stored valves sent from Massachusetts, winches from Ohio, the thousands of small parts which manufacturers had faithfully fashioned to minute specifications, ready to be carried aboard, bolted or welded into place.
There is an Ideology behind this procedure. It consists of reducing the total number of man-hours that go into a ship, while at the same time increasing the. number of man-hours that can be worked in one day—fewer man-hours but more at a time.
Gibbs set out to cut the amount of labor that goes into a ship by the usual methods of mass production—designing parts that are easier to make, devising easier methods of putting them together. Shipbuilders, shown the way, figured out how to weld joints from one side instead of both, for example: built small ships upside down, etc.
To make it possible for more men to work on a ship at one time, operations are subdivided and spread widely over a shipyard. Thus more men can work on a ship at once than if most of the work had to be done on the ways and in the crowded interior of a ship under construction.
The two principles of construction go hand in hand. Both make it possible with simple training to make butchers and bakers into shipbuilders because each man has to learn only one operation instead of the dozen or more operations which an old-fashioned shipwright had to master.