Harland & Wolff Ship Broken for Scrap

The linked photoset from this weekend’s Guardian:

April 12 2008: Belfast, UK: The MSC Napoli cargo ship lies in a dry dock at Harland and Wolff ship builders as it is dismantled for recycling. The ship was grounded off the English coast after getting into difficulties during bad weather in January 2007. After she was split into two pieces, the largest front section was floated to the Harland and Wolff shipyard for recycling in August 2007. After the removal of approximately 80 cubic tonnes of waste oil and other pollutants 150 workers began the task of cutting up the high grade steel of the Napoli by hand. The steel is then smelted locally in Belfast and will most likely be used for ship building. The whole process will be finished in three to four weeks.

This is one for Jasper seeming he spent his apprenticeship in the shipyards of Glasgow. I’d like to say he’s bored us rigid with his tales of welding ship floors, but we still don’t have a clue from day to day what he’s talking about. Think of it as a blessing in disguise.

But I’m also pretty confident it’ll get everybody who swarms round The Tinbasher for out-of-date scrap steel prices hot under the collar, too.

Who was it who said change should be incremental?

Obviously some lardy fool.

I managed to upgrade The Tinbasher to WordPress 2.5 on Saturday, albeit with a couple of oddities thrown in to panic me enough to polish the shiny pate of resolved despondency, but not quite enough that I panicked a hole through my pants.

But rather than bed it in and check to see if everything was fine and dandy, I did a cursory check of the important stuff, and all seemed present and correct.

Now although it seemed much leaner and zippier out of the box, instead of playing around I went out and bought a nice new HP M8430F Quad Core PC running a 64-bit version of Vista Premium . The bugger is frighteningly sharp.

So, running the new WordPress on it is something akin to a personal blogging nirvana.

Anyway, I’ve got a lot of media extending to do and other computers to transfer files from, so I’d better crack on. I have to sort out how incompatible some of the incompatibilities are with older versions of software that I’ve got. Not a huge learning curve, but it’s a bit of searching and head getting around - for want of a less peculiar phrase.

So, if you see anything freaking out on you, or you have any cute 64-bit Vista tips, do be a love and leave us a comment.

Syd Mead futuristic illustration for United States Steel

This is part of an absolutely marvellous flickr set of what United States Steel thought the future might hold. It’s a touch more optimistic than their British counterpart, Corus, who only managed to inspire the dystopia that is Blade Runner with their monstrosity of a steel plant in Port Talbot.

However, USS obviously didn’t figure current prices into the equation.

[cap doff]

I always get mightily confuddled by various steel grades and types. Oh, I have the basics from 304 to 316 down pat, but when our Steve at Steel Strip mentioned to me that he’d started selling small quantities of spring steel I had to scurry off to Wikipedia to find out what spring steel actually was. All we get is this paltry stub:

Spring steel is a low alloy, medium carbon steel with a very high yield strength. This allows objects made of spring steel to return to their original shape despite significant bending or twisting.

Silicon is the key component to most spring steel alloys. An example of a spring steel used for cars would be AISI 9255 (DIN and UNI: 55Si7, AFNOR 55S7), containing 1.50%-1.80% silicon, 0.70%-1.00% manganese and 0.52%-0.60% carbon.

Most spring steels (as used in cars) are hardened and then tempered to about 45 on the Rockwell C-Scale.

According to Machinery’s Handbook, “The spring materials most commonly used include high-carbon spring steels, alloy spring steels, stainless spring steels, copper-base spring alloys, and nickel-base spring alloys.” According to the same, the most widely used spring steel is ASTM A228 (0.80–0.95% carbon) known as “music wire”.

I presume we’re not talking about slinky spring steel?

It makes a change to hear of somebody prepared to service the little guy…..as it were. Here’s Steve’s raison d’etre and combined mission statement:

Whilst steel mills regularly insist on minimum order quantities of up to 5 tons, and stockholders upwards of a ton, we have recognised the need of smaller engineering companies who may require as little as a single sheet to complete a project, or to replace a part in an aging piece of plant.

It can be frustrating and time consuming for an engineer to spend hours on the telephone trying to source small quantities of spring steel, only to find the supplier loses interest the moment he realises the small quantity involved. To be honest it’s as a big a problem often for the supplier as for the customer! Not for us.

So, if you’re looking to buy spring steel in small quantities I’d recommend you go and have a word with Steve over at Steel Strip as he’s a top bloke. Or, you can give him a bell on +44 1952 290313. (Yes, he can ship worldwide.)

Oh, and I can assure you I’m not on any commission. I just like it when people aren’t trying to stiff smaller companies - especially when they happen to be a mate.

Have you had the pleasure as yet of partaking in the new web tv extravaganza that steel behemoth Arcelor Mittal have put together? If the header is to be believed then it could very well be called Inside Transforming Tomorrow.

Not only that but there’s a blog to tickle your fancy as well. It looks fabulous. But, as we all know, looks can often be quite deceptive fellows.

I mean, for a start off there’s that damn pic above. It isn’t some kind of spoof, I can assure you. And neither is the following post that I found: Shop floor Safety audits: we focus on people

Is there anything more rewarding that (sic) helping to save a life? Our colleagues here at the Luxembourg Headquarters had the opportunity to learn some days ago that everyone in our Group can do it! How? Thanks to what we call a ‘shop floor audit’. Let us explain to you how that works.

Seriously, I’m not making this up.

Diving into a freezing lake, or charging into a burning building with little thought to your own personal safety possibly warrants a pat on the back and a couple of column inches in the local paper, but implementing a few health and safety measures to ensure people don’t get squashed by a fork lift truck doesn’t.

At Butler Sheetmetal we’ve saved at least three lives by pointing out that sticking one’s noggin inside the hydroform could cause a few problems.

Anyway, I’m sure once the exuberant upbeat tone of the PR department has run its course there’ll be some right riveting stuff going on…..and I’m not being facetious either.

For the time being, it’s corporate answer to The Day Today.