Torpedo tube welding distortion control

Tom's first bachelor student (named only as "John"), graduated 1977-78, went to Electric Boat. Solved the distortion problem in welding ~30-foot torpedo tubes by real-time dial-indicator monitoring during circumferential welding, varying start point of next pass, grinding out and re-welding where needed, leaving only a clean-up skin pass.

In fact, I had a student — my very first student, a bachelor student who graduated in 1977 or 78. He went to work for a company called Electric Boat. One of John's things in the 1980s was the submarine torpedo tubes — these long tubes, like 30 feet long. They have to be very straight. They'd weld these things together, they'd have distortion, and they'd have to go in there and bore it out, machine it. John taught them: they could weld the circumferential welds, and as they're going around in circles, rotating the whole pipe, you have a little dial indicator at the far end and you can see when it's going out of the centerline, distorting. He would monitor that while they're welding, and he'd change where he would start the next weld on the next pass — this is fairly heavy wall — to try to bring it back to the centerline. If he couldn't do it, he would actually go in there and grind out part of the weld and re-weld it to bring it back. He could weld those things by being careful, monitoring as you go, to control the distortion, so all they had to do was a skin pass in welding to clean the thing on the inside. So you can do things to control the distortion.

Student-of-Tom anecdote. Balanced-weld procedure (alternating clock positions around the circumference) developed for ~40-foot-long torpedo tubes to control distortion.

You have to balance welds. If you weld a groove weld all from one side, then go fill up the other side, it never comes all the way back. You're better off welding partway on one side, flipping, welding partway on the other, and alternating. One of my students, John Galati, his first job at Electric Boat was developing ways to weld the torpedo tubes — about forty feet long. They had to weld several tubes together, and he balanced the welds on either side as he was going around the circle. You might do a weld at three o'clock, change, go to nine o'clock, balance the welds around the circumference to get rid of the distortion.