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| This hammerhead crane could lift battleship gun turrets. |
When Michelson was there we commonly interacted with ship fitters, burners, welders, pipe fitters and electricians. Other trades get into the act at one time or another: riggers, carpenters, crane operators, insulators and so on. The yard was so big that getting from one place to another was a chore. Yardbirds typically rode around on bicycles, going from shop to job and back for tools, parts and coffee breaks. The management probably got about a half day's work out of each employee per day.
Perhaps that inefficiency was why the yard was due to be shut down. Bubble charts and critical path scheduling was a thing of the future, but too late for the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It closed on June 30, 1966 after 165 years in business.
WW II shipyards could turn out a victory ship from keel to launch to fitting out in 60 days or less. Of course they were building ships, not repairing them, and the end product was always the same hull, but with with different names. And all 531 of them were built in private yards, not by the government.
Stainless steel razor blades had just appeared on the US market in 1963. For whatever reason, the navy exchange had the UK made Wilkinson Sword blades while civilian stores had none. Yardbirds tried to get us to buy blades for them from the exchange across Flushing Avenue in the receiving station. "See this beard? Only stainless blades last more than one time"! I think they intended to sell them.
One guy I worked with a few years later said that he had been an apprentice electrical worker at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during WW II. When checking out tools or technical manuals he always signed himself as "A. Schicklgruber". He said that was Hitler's real name. Nobody ever noticed this. Actually, his father Alois changed the family name to Hitler before Adolph arrived.
Besides yardbirds, there was a small flock of other characters in the yard. One guy, Mr. Nameless, was an engineer assigned to fix what whatever that was needed in survey control. "I'm from NASL, here to look at four strip chart recorders" he announced. I told him we were expecting a person from Mat Lab, not nasal. "It's not nasal, it's NASL, Naval Applied Science Lab. We used to be Mat Lab" he replied.
Mr. N expected me to fix the recorders and he would reinstall and test them. I told him that they didn't work, had never worked and I was not going to fix them. Nameless was not pleased. He had an attitude. I showed him where the strip chart recorders had been stashed for the last year. He took them back to his NASL lab.
Installed to record the Loran C readings from two pairs of stations and two receivers, the four were supposed to help prevent lane count (ten microsecond) errors. In practice none could be set for zero, full scale or to track in a linear fashion. They ate up rolls of paper, spilled messy red ink everywhere and recorded nothing. Unfortunately the recorders were on NASL's hit list to be fixed. They should have been replaced.
Before Michelson finally left the yard they were back, installed, chewing up paper, dripping red ink and recording zilch. Mr. Nameless Nasal had failed.
Later I learned that Mr. N was the guy who got all the crappiest jobs at NASL. The rest of the engineers thought he was a jerk. They hoped he would quit.
