Quincy Shipyard liquid natural gas tanker construction (mid-1970s)

Five or six LNG tankers built at Quincy with aluminum spheres on steel skirts. Coast Guard required 20 foot-pound Charpy; Sparrows Point plates averaged 20.5 — "just barely making it." Shipyard then cherry-picked 30 foot-pound plates for the weld-test runoff tabs. Foam insulation failure led to Coast Guard non-certification; ships sat unused for years off Newport.

Typical steel fracture toughness in the mid-'70s — I'll give you an example. Down here they were building LNG tankers at Quincy shipyard. Quincy shipyard is now an auto-import area — they bring in autos from Japan and Europe — but at the time they were still building ships. They were building these huge aluminum-sphere LNG tankers. You have to have a sphere held by a cylinder. The spheres were aluminum, and the skirt, the cylinder that was going to hold the sphere, was steel. I was working on a better steel for that, because the heat conduction would go down to lower temperatures, and we needed a better material with high toughness at lower temperatures, that was easy to weld. The Coast Guard requirement was 20 foot-pounds to get that toughness.