Week 2

Fun Fact: Cutting in a straight line is difficult.

Allow me to start this post off by saying that my family comprises of many many plumbers. I grew up on job sites running through would-be walls and generally turning construction sites into my own playground. I thought I understood pipe-fitting and the such...how hard could it be?

Turns out, I was wrong. 

My second week on this internship was devoted to the craft of pipe-fitting. Never heard of it? Pipe-fitting is the act of running piping through the ship in a manner that doesn't have too many leaks . (Read: very tricky job) I spent Monday through Thursday in the apprentice classroom with new-hires (Read: already highly trained professionals from previous shipyards) learning the art of piecing pipe together. That is, I learned the book work and how to read a systems drawing for pipe. Trying to visualize a ship is second nature to me at this point after completing the Freshmen Lines Project . (For non-naval architects, this is a project where we are instructed to draw, by hand, 3 x 2-D pictures of a 3-D object, namely, a fishing trawler)

Example of Ship Lines

 Pipe systems in three dimensions was a whole new ball game. There was no general structure to be imagined when reading the drawings: it was akin to finding the pattern of a bowl of overturned spaghetti. 

Imagine putting simply this system on paper and how convoluted it would look...

Well, Friday came and I found myself in the mock-up, or testing facility, staring at two open flanges that I was to fit pipe for. The thing about cutting pipe is that first you have to measure. Well, my partner (a very patient first-class pipe-fitter) measures with a collapsible measuring stick.

Similar to this one but with less numbers visible from years of use

She measured her pipe runs and had the necessary math completed by the time I had taken 2 accurate measurements of the 10-ish I needed . Side note: I way prefer normal tape measures. After figuring out the sizes of pipes I needed, I then scoured the pipe yard for the type of pipe i needed, marked them, and then cut them. Or rather, tried to cut them. I 've used a grinder before to cut metal. cutting pie was much harder. The ends of the cut never matched up it seemed and everything was a bit too big somehow. Long story short, I am no future pipe-fitter, but I have a very healthy respect for those that are.