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

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.

Quincy as the construction site for the LNG tankers whose steel Tom developed. Shipyard "now closed, turning into a parking lot for imported cars." Referenced again in §8 as the origin of the tail-shaft case.

Steel has an Achilles heel — many steels, as they get colder, go through what we call ductile-brittle transition and become brittle at low temperatures. So I had to develop a steel that could be welded and maintained good toughness at minus 60 degrees. They were building these ships down at Quincy shipyard, right down here in southern Massachusetts. At the time it had just been sold by Bethlehem Steel and was owned by General Dynamics. It's now closed, and they're turning it into a parking lot for imported cars and stuff. The Coast Guard said you have to meet twenty foot-pounds. It turns out the average toughness of the steel after they had heat treated it the first time was just like 20.2 foot-pounds. Every now and then they would have to do a second normalization heat treatment to get a finer grain size to give you toughness, and sometimes they would do a third. They would scrap the plate if they couldn't get a toughness above twenty foot-pounds after three tries.

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.