`WWII ship construction slugging welds`

Tom's account of welders at the end of a long shift throwing stub electrodes into the groove and welding over them, with no X-ray to catch the resulting defect in armor plate. Mechanism explanation for why the Liberty-ship welds had notches.

It turns out they failed for two reasons. The steel was somewhat brittle, so it was like paper as opposed to rubber. And they had notches, and the notches were due to welding defects. The welds weren't necessarily bad — they weren't perfect, actually. Sometimes during World War II, people would take the stick electrodes — if you've ever seen a stick electrode, that's what they welded the ships together with in World War II, mostly — and after a tired long day on a big thick weldment, they would throw a bunch of these electrodes into the groove and weld over them. And no one was doing X-rays to see that they had just put a huge defect into a piece of armor plate.

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