Quincy Shipyard LNG tanker aluminum sphere skirts

Double- and triple-tempered A537 steel barely meeting 20 ft-lb spec; shipyard cut Charpy samples from the rare high-toughness plates, used the rest in production, and the actual ship welds were tested only via runoff tabs that bore no relation to the shipboard joints.

However, down at Quincy Shipyard — which is no longer there, but they built ships during World War I and certainly were busy in World War II building Liberty ships — in the mid 70s when I worked for a steel company, they were building liquid natural gas tankers. They put in a mammoth crane to lift these big aluminum spheres, up to six to eight inches thick, made in South Carolina and brought up by barge. The crane would drop five of these into the hull. The skirt — basically a cylinder holding the sphere — had to be a low-temperature steel, minus 60 Fahrenheit fracture toughness. There wasn't a really good steel available, so I was working on developing a new steel for that skirt.