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