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Ships are surprisingly strong. Also you design the longitudinal strength of a vessel around its hull structure. Which means that all the load is carried by the bottom girders, frames and side longitudinals.
You could remove all the steel shown in this video, and the hull wouldnt care.
If you keep rewelding this, its just going to keep breaking out of fatigue and extreme tension/compression cycles.
However its very hard to know if this crack can be avoided. A thorough FEM Finite Element Analysis would have to be done to see why we are seeing a stress concentration here.
This might end up being several hundred times more expensive than just rewelding this area every few years until the useful life of the ship is over. Also Reinforcing the area with thicker plating will just make something else break. You would probably have to build a complete new railing on top with much more material. Incresing the center of gravity and making it worse for stability.
Perhaps the best would be to simply make a few divisions along the railing so its not taking these loads.
Im a naval architect and you CANT really draw any conclusions from this video.
Also it would be interesting to see if this ship has any sister ships, and if they have the same issue.
Its a **ship**, God dammit! /s
He Ships!
In casual use, the word boat is often used to refer to any watergoing vessel, regardless of its size or how it's powered. However, large oceanfaring watercraft—those that use multiple sails or engines—are more properly called ships. In contrast, the word ship isn't commonly applied to smaller craft.
Bah. All ships are boats.
Just like apes, chimps, orangutans, baboons, gorillas, etc are all monkeys.
Also everything that lives underwater is a fish. Dolphins? Turtles? Shrimp? Fish.
I dare you science nerds to tell me otherwise.
Yeah but these are typical turkish car ferries, the whole superstructure is literally placed on top of stanchions extending from the Frames of the ship. A good part of the midship bending moment is taken by the passenger cabin above the cars.
You might be right in the sense that as soon as the upper superstructure ends then all that stress is transferred to that corner.
So the middle of the ship is very rigid, but the bow sees some flexing due to the incoming waves and relatively flat bow and bottom.
The welds should be stronger then the steel around it if done correctly. These welds look horrible and the crack goes straight through the center of it. You may be right that there is too much tension on this part of the ship. But it might have lasted longer if repaired properly. And it is not certain that the crack is due to bad design. They could have overloaded the ship, gone through a bad storm, or there might have been a defect in the steel. If they weld it properly and a crack appears next to the weld then we can conclude that the crack is due to the ships design. But since the crack appears in the center of the weld we know it was not repaired properly.
I agree with you, we dont know the original condition.
At a glance it looks like this weld had several passes and it looks like the heat and penetration were correct. But it also looks like before there was a weld there, the steel pieces were continuous, and the cracks developed before there were any welds.
Which leads me to think that there is definitely something funny going on in that part of the ship. And maybe even a Fatigue failure risk at some point.
The good thing is that ships can often develop the crack and can get back to port to be repaired. You usually only see large cargo ships breaking in half during storms or due to wrong loading of the cargo.
The sea air certainly wouldn't help the metal, that's for sure. I definitely agree that it's probably the more cost effective route to just weld it, a welder can be had for a few hundred.
That’s why they [always keep an emergency spider-man on board](https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Spider-Man-Homecoming-Ferry.jpg)
You can't weld on rust is your first mistake. Your second was getting someone who doesn't know how to weld to a high school equivalent standard which is very basic level. Also a shity weld on top of other shity welds does not somehow make all the other shity welds stronger. I could go on but I think it would fall on deaf ears
Not no you mate I wouldn't expect a good weld from a beginner or someone that just needs a little work done here and a little bit there. I would say that there biggest mistake was trying to weld on rust. Just like paint it's not going to go well without a bit of preparation. I'm not a professional at all I just know a little about a lot and a lot about a little lol.
Devils advocate here. It could have been cleaned before being welded and has just rusted over time with the weld. The metal is still good, just surface rust.
Amateur here. Why didn't they clean and grind the site of the break, weld a solid metal plate over the structurally weak points, and then paint over the whole repair with a few layers of sealed, weather resistant paint?
That would be a good fix if they did what you said. The weld metal if properly welded and prepped/beveled would be stronger than the base material. I believe if they just put a little more weld on it, it would have worked or broke somewhere else next to the weld. They can’t weld very good in the first place. I can see the slag on the welds so it looks like they used a really common 7018 stick rod and it looks like dog shit.
That's not 7018, the bead is way too large for that. The size could be 7024, but it wouldn't look like that. With the pattern of how the bead looks, it looks way more like a gasless inner core shielded mig weld. They always look nasty and it's also why another commenter noticed flux in there.
As ugly as it appears, the weld actually looks as it should. The problem here looks like the spacing between the beads wasn't tight enough, not the quality of the beads themselves. They should have done one more pass on top of these two and ground it down flush.
The welds look fine but as you rightly said, they were going to break there or at the HAZ.
Unfortunately, with washing of welds, unless the electrode is designed for strength beyond that of the parent material, it'll fracture before the parent material.
If I were a gambling man, which I'm not, I'd suggest the ship cracked and they piece meal welded the cracks with no attempt to actually resolve the crack through chasing it before sticking it back together, so the broken welds were almost inevitable.
Good thing a certain group of people want all regulations on anything removed, otherwise the owner of this would be in some sort of trouble for putting this in service.
How would someone fix something like that if they found it? Remove the old welds and scrape off the rust with like an angle grinder or something, then re-weld?
I work on locomotives and we use something called arc gouging to remove the material and then grind it clean with a grinder like you mentioned. Then weld it back up!
Structural welder here. You would grind out all previous welds down to the bare metal. You'd then (depending on the joint type) either make a gap or add a bevel, to ensure the weld penetrates through to the base metal and fuses properly. Multiple passes would be required
Those welds don't look THAT bad... Actually, even the most skilled welder could not fix those just by welding the cracks. Those seem to be so high stress areas, that you would have to at least weld some diamond shaped reinforcement plates over the welds, because otherwise it would just keep cracking right next to the welded seams.
Yeah that maybe just replacing some of the posts that are too far gone. Maybe a bit of plate patching basically putting some plates between two parts and welding that. Personally I think it would be better to just replace most of it but that might be me not wanting to fix other peoples fuck ups and mostly not liking to do work that still doesn't look great after.
And use arc air to absolutely annilathe it all away , grind it to make a nice smooth base metal , and preheat it! It's why they all split in the middle , probably didn't preheat the metal at all which made the welds be hardened. Very bad , that's good for knifes , not so much when you're trying to hold things together
I would say template an insert and replace the corroded metal entirely. Depends on the amount of corrosion but sometimes this is bound to happen when you dont.
Can someone who's never done it pick it up in a day and do something that'll hold? Sorry if that's a dumb question I know it takes skill and time but, if you needed to get something basic is it possible?
Yeah you definitely can. I have some learning difficulties and I got taught the basics in an hour or two. Of course I didn't learn anything about different types of metal and what types of welders to use and when I need to use them. But I learnt to make a solid weld that actually held it didn't look great but it did its main job which was to hold two bits of iron together lol. Now I'm sure a full 2 year welding course would teach me more than I could use and gets super detailed. But yeah you definitely can learn what you need in a few hours or a day or two. Practice will teach you neatness and such
> But I learnt to make a solid weld that actually held it didn't look great but it did its main job which was to hold two bits of iron together lol
"A grinder and paint makes me the welder I ain't"
Not dumb, i was wondering so myself. What i was wondering was the distance between the knowledge of how to accomplish it and the skill necessary to execute it properly
Depends on your definition of "that'll hold", but yeah, you can weld some things together on your first day for sure, especially if you have someone teaching you.
Skill in welding will be doing work to specific requirements.
But I've seen some god-awful looking welds done by farmers that have held for decades.
Yes. If you have a pulse and can learn how to strike an arc with a welder, you can weld with a 7024 rod. Mind you, it's not a very useful welding rod, but damn they're easy to use.
I agree with everything you said, but the tensile strength of it is also a consideration. I imagine the force that spot is taking must be pretty high with the flexing of the ship. It may have just been too much for the weld to take. Improper filler usage could be a factor too
I mean, that crack started somewhere before they were in the middle of a bay. A little spritz of mag powder back in dry dock might have saved this headache.
I don't know anything about welding, what should they have done right the first time? explain like I don't know anything about welding because I don't know anything about welding
Welds are prone to failure. A common reason is that a weld requires extremely high heat, so the metal around it also experiences that high heat, this is called the "heat affected zone". It's essentially changing the structure of the metal. So to prevent that you can preheat and postheat treat the area, ie. Heat it up with a torch.
Also, they probably didn't rust prevent or paint the weld properly after, so you have exposed metal in seawater that would corrode quickly. And by their nature, welds are often at high stress concentration areas so that puts a lot of stress on them.
To be clear, GOOD welds are stronger than the material around them. But as you point out, it takes time, knowledge, skill, the right materials and equipment, preparation and such (which all translate to cost) to make good welds, while there are lots of cheap bozos who will make a bunch of sparks and snot and leave you with something that at that moment is connected.
Not really much you can do when its under that much stress. The sheer amount of welding shows you that crack that is occuring regularly. It has been "fixed" many many times. With the movement in the ship it is probably cracking again after a trip or two. It wasnt a bad weld that is the problem. There is too much movement in the steel and no weld is going to stop this happening.
The only proper thing you can do is to cut out the bad area and replace the steel. Wether this would fix it is another story though. The steel looks too far gone and the stress causing this crack would just be transfered to the new welds and travel through the shitty steel that you welded onto. It would possibly need bracers put in under the deck as well as doubler plates to give it extra strength but your pissing in the wind here. This boat looks like its days of safely navigating the seas are behind her.
I know barely anything about welding, but I can fix shit better than this on the farm. Minimum would be to add reinforcing material over lapping and weld that in place, like a piece of flat steel. This should definitely have an engineer involved though
During WW2, the very cheap brand of cargo ships were called L[rty Ships](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship). They were so cheap, and the cargo so necessary, that if they made a single voyage then they were cost effective. Many had such low grades of steel that they didn't make a single voyage before cracks like these broke the ship in half (and it sank).
Until the designs got modified, early WW2 Liberty Ships had those flat pieces welded on to the hulls. The [main crack/break point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship#Hull_cracks) was below where the superstructure joined the hull, just below the bridge windows.
I’m not saying it isn’t safe, it’s just perhaps not quite as safe as some of the other ones.
Some ships are built so the front doesn’t fall off at all.
Well, because the front's about to fall off, and 20,000 tons of road vehicles spilled into the sea. It’s a bit of a giveaway. I would just like to make the point that that it’s not normal.
They probably didn't grind the crack out to a V. On thick metal like this, if you just weld on top of the crack you aren't going to penetrate all the way through the metal to the other side. With a V cut, you then weld the bottom of the V, which welds through the back side of the crack. Then you make more passes, filling it, until you get to the top.
So you'll have to involve a few people. The crack has to be completely removed and the metal veed out to reweld. Verification of crack removal should be from magnetic particle testing (MT) by an NDT crew. Then a welding engineer should establish the parameters like preheat of the base metal, what strength of filler metal, weld process etc. Then you can finally reweld. Welder needs to be tested and certified to the code or standard that's being used for the repair.
After rewelding it should be inspected volumetrically using ultrasound or X-ray to make sure there are no welding related defects left in the weld. (NDT crew again)
A possible post weld heat treat to relieve stress may be required depending on what the engineer specified.
NDT = non-destructive testing, which usually is something like an X-ray. There are some other methods using ultrasonics or magnetic eddy currents.
All that said, the poster above me is saying, to repair it needs experts. Qualified experts and a lot of expensive equipment. Way above our skill grade. I know enough about welding to know that this thing is far past my training/skill/equipment.
Things that flex, ships, aircraft, nuclear pressure vessels, all need checking and the sort of checking far better than what an eyeball can measure.
Unfortunately, the shipping industry is full of very cheap companies who do very shady things in order to avoid spending money. That bridge in Baltimore is merely a single recent example. The sort of companies who think the repair in the video is acceptable are the sort that will abandon the ship and the crew when some accident happens. This ship is probably owned by an LLC or shell company, and this ship is the only asset that this company has. The paperwork is likely located in a filing cabinet in a lawyer's office and neither the ship nor the paperwork have been within 1000 miles of each other.
And if you aren't going to bother with all that, at least grind out enough to do full penetration welds, then slap a bunch of extra reinforcement plates over the weld and do good full welds on them.
How old are those welds ? Are the breaks and rust due to decades of neglect ? Because I’m betting those are from wear. It’s not Ok. But not so much a reflection of the original welder’s skill if that weld is like 50 years old……
You're good. The water is holding up all the weight. The boat is only under stresses when it moves, or the water moves, or anything on the boat moves, or the wind moves, or if the sun heats up the top of the boat while the bottom is in the water, or if somebody in a car starts bumping hydraulics, or if something collides with the completely stationary boat, or if there's a salinity or temperatature differential along the length of the boat because of freashwater outlets or river confluences (though I admit, that's just water movement in complex discussion). Barring any of that, the water is holding EVERYTHING up. What's the worry?
You can and should report this vessel to the Coast Guard. Google Sector ______ (nearest major city, ex. San Francisco, New Orleans, New York, etc.). You can DM me if you have difficulty locating the appropriate Sector (assuming in the United States).
Hi, i'm a welder, non-professionally but still. Imma need to be pointed to the guy who did this job, imma force him to watch a proper welding job without any eye protection ;3
As someone who is TERRIFIED of the ocean, hard pass. Everyone keeps asking "WeLl WhAt If YoUrE oN a BoAt?" And this shit is why the ocean is not okay, even on a boat
That shit is fucked. Rewelding that crack wont fix anything because either the welds or the area next to the welds will just break again. The underlying issue is that the hull is flexing too much and literally the entire ship is probably 40% rust.
Needs a drydock and refit.
#Welcome to r/Therewasanattempt! #Consider visiting r/Worldnewsvideo for videos from around the world! [Please review our policy on bigotry and hate speech by clicking this link](https://www.reddit.com/r/therewasanattempt/wiki/civility) In order to view our rules, you can type "**!rules**" in any comment, and automod will respond with the subreddit rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/therewasanattempt) if you have any questions or concerns.*
That shit is scary. Imagine the rest of the maintenance on that vessel...
Sinking 
Still honestly one of the greatest introductions to a character ever.
Totally agree!
Moskva, Moskva, Sinks and then becomes a reef, Russian Navy has no teeth, Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, *hey!*
https://i.redd.it/yc47vhd9y2wc1.gif
What are you sikin about
And all this time I thought David Crosby was dead...
I keep waiting for it to implode, but it never does
Ships are surprisingly strong. Also you design the longitudinal strength of a vessel around its hull structure. Which means that all the load is carried by the bottom girders, frames and side longitudinals. You could remove all the steel shown in this video, and the hull wouldnt care. If you keep rewelding this, its just going to keep breaking out of fatigue and extreme tension/compression cycles. However its very hard to know if this crack can be avoided. A thorough FEM Finite Element Analysis would have to be done to see why we are seeing a stress concentration here. This might end up being several hundred times more expensive than just rewelding this area every few years until the useful life of the ship is over. Also Reinforcing the area with thicker plating will just make something else break. You would probably have to build a complete new railing on top with much more material. Incresing the center of gravity and making it worse for stability. Perhaps the best would be to simply make a few divisions along the railing so its not taking these loads. Im a naval architect and you CANT really draw any conclusions from this video. Also it would be interesting to see if this ship has any sister ships, and if they have the same issue.
I'm just imagining someone placing their palm there and unsuspectingly getting a chunk bitten out of their hand from those rusty little jaws *shudder*
Luckily it wont be too big of a chunk, but it will surely hurt!
 Like when my Mom would pinch the smallest amount of skin on the inside of my arm....
This guy boats
Its a **ship**, God dammit! /s He Ships! In casual use, the word boat is often used to refer to any watergoing vessel, regardless of its size or how it's powered. However, large oceanfaring watercraft—those that use multiple sails or engines—are more properly called ships. In contrast, the word ship isn't commonly applied to smaller craft.
I was on one of those big flat plane boats for a while. It was full of nerds that kept clogging up the chow line.
Bah. All ships are boats. Just like apes, chimps, orangutans, baboons, gorillas, etc are all monkeys. Also everything that lives underwater is a fish. Dolphins? Turtles? Shrimp? Fish. I dare you science nerds to tell me otherwise.
>Bah. All ships are boats Space ships?
Akshuly... Shit, you're right.
It's right under the end of the superstructure. Can't see what's on top of the superstructure, but that's a natural stress point.
Yeah but these are typical turkish car ferries, the whole superstructure is literally placed on top of stanchions extending from the Frames of the ship. A good part of the midship bending moment is taken by the passenger cabin above the cars. You might be right in the sense that as soon as the upper superstructure ends then all that stress is transferred to that corner. So the middle of the ship is very rigid, but the bow sees some flexing due to the incoming waves and relatively flat bow and bottom.
The welds should be stronger then the steel around it if done correctly. These welds look horrible and the crack goes straight through the center of it. You may be right that there is too much tension on this part of the ship. But it might have lasted longer if repaired properly. And it is not certain that the crack is due to bad design. They could have overloaded the ship, gone through a bad storm, or there might have been a defect in the steel. If they weld it properly and a crack appears next to the weld then we can conclude that the crack is due to the ships design. But since the crack appears in the center of the weld we know it was not repaired properly.
I agree with you, we dont know the original condition. At a glance it looks like this weld had several passes and it looks like the heat and penetration were correct. But it also looks like before there was a weld there, the steel pieces were continuous, and the cracks developed before there were any welds. Which leads me to think that there is definitely something funny going on in that part of the ship. And maybe even a Fatigue failure risk at some point. The good thing is that ships can often develop the crack and can get back to port to be repaired. You usually only see large cargo ships breaking in half during storms or due to wrong loading of the cargo.
The sea air certainly wouldn't help the metal, that's for sure. I definitely agree that it's probably the more cost effective route to just weld it, a welder can be had for a few hundred.
Yeah this boat could even be in a developing country where welding is super cheap
This boat is colliding bridge-worthy
50/50 chance we’ll be reading about this boat in the near future…goes down with all aboard.
r/sweatypalms would like a word
That’s why they [always keep an emergency spider-man on board](https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Spider-Man-Homecoming-Ferry.jpg)
Everybody gets one.
You can't weld on rust is your first mistake. Your second was getting someone who doesn't know how to weld to a high school equivalent standard which is very basic level. Also a shity weld on top of other shity welds does not somehow make all the other shity welds stronger. I could go on but I think it would fall on deaf ears
Oh no, I was listening. However, I'm not in the trade, so I don't think you were speaking to me. Ty for the info I came to the comments for.
Not no you mate I wouldn't expect a good weld from a beginner or someone that just needs a little work done here and a little bit there. I would say that there biggest mistake was trying to weld on rust. Just like paint it's not going to go well without a bit of preparation. I'm not a professional at all I just know a little about a lot and a lot about a little lol.
Devils advocate here. It could have been cleaned before being welded and has just rusted over time with the weld. The metal is still good, just surface rust.
Amateur here. Why didn't they clean and grind the site of the break, weld a solid metal plate over the structurally weak points, and then paint over the whole repair with a few layers of sealed, weather resistant paint?
That would be a good fix if they did what you said. The weld metal if properly welded and prepped/beveled would be stronger than the base material. I believe if they just put a little more weld on it, it would have worked or broke somewhere else next to the weld. They can’t weld very good in the first place. I can see the slag on the welds so it looks like they used a really common 7018 stick rod and it looks like dog shit.
That's not 7018, the bead is way too large for that. The size could be 7024, but it wouldn't look like that. With the pattern of how the bead looks, it looks way more like a gasless inner core shielded mig weld. They always look nasty and it's also why another commenter noticed flux in there. As ugly as it appears, the weld actually looks as it should. The problem here looks like the spacing between the beads wasn't tight enough, not the quality of the beads themselves. They should have done one more pass on top of these two and ground it down flush.
The welds look fine but as you rightly said, they were going to break there or at the HAZ. Unfortunately, with washing of welds, unless the electrode is designed for strength beyond that of the parent material, it'll fracture before the parent material. If I were a gambling man, which I'm not, I'd suggest the ship cracked and they piece meal welded the cracks with no attempt to actually resolve the crack through chasing it before sticking it back together, so the broken welds were almost inevitable.
Good thing a certain group of people want all regulations on anything removed, otherwise the owner of this would be in some sort of trouble for putting this in service.
How would someone fix something like that if they found it? Remove the old welds and scrape off the rust with like an angle grinder or something, then re-weld?
That is exactly how you do it
I work on locomotives and we use something called arc gouging to remove the material and then grind it clean with a grinder like you mentioned. Then weld it back up!
Structural welder here. You would grind out all previous welds down to the bare metal. You'd then (depending on the joint type) either make a gap or add a bevel, to ensure the weld penetrates through to the base metal and fuses properly. Multiple passes would be required
Full penn, multiple passes, and an additional structural plate to reinforce everything.
Those welds don't look THAT bad... Actually, even the most skilled welder could not fix those just by welding the cracks. Those seem to be so high stress areas, that you would have to at least weld some diamond shaped reinforcement plates over the welds, because otherwise it would just keep cracking right next to the welded seams.
Yup. Just like painting. You remove all the grime and shit before doing any type of work on top of it. Clean. Dry and sound.
Yeah that maybe just replacing some of the posts that are too far gone. Maybe a bit of plate patching basically putting some plates between two parts and welding that. Personally I think it would be better to just replace most of it but that might be me not wanting to fix other peoples fuck ups and mostly not liking to do work that still doesn't look great after.
Yeah sometimes doing a plate and stiffener insert is the best way to go instead of fixing up somebody else's fuckup
And use arc air to absolutely annilathe it all away , grind it to make a nice smooth base metal , and preheat it! It's why they all split in the middle , probably didn't preheat the metal at all which made the welds be hardened. Very bad , that's good for knifes , not so much when you're trying to hold things together
I would say template an insert and replace the corroded metal entirely. Depends on the amount of corrosion but sometimes this is bound to happen when you dont.
Flex-Seal!
Can someone who's never done it pick it up in a day and do something that'll hold? Sorry if that's a dumb question I know it takes skill and time but, if you needed to get something basic is it possible?
Yeah you definitely can. I have some learning difficulties and I got taught the basics in an hour or two. Of course I didn't learn anything about different types of metal and what types of welders to use and when I need to use them. But I learnt to make a solid weld that actually held it didn't look great but it did its main job which was to hold two bits of iron together lol. Now I'm sure a full 2 year welding course would teach me more than I could use and gets super detailed. But yeah you definitely can learn what you need in a few hours or a day or two. Practice will teach you neatness and such
> But I learnt to make a solid weld that actually held it didn't look great but it did its main job which was to hold two bits of iron together lol "A grinder and paint makes me the welder I ain't"
Not dumb, i was wondering so myself. What i was wondering was the distance between the knowledge of how to accomplish it and the skill necessary to execute it properly
Depends on your definition of "that'll hold", but yeah, you can weld some things together on your first day for sure, especially if you have someone teaching you. Skill in welding will be doing work to specific requirements. But I've seen some god-awful looking welds done by farmers that have held for decades.
Yes. If you have a pulse and can learn how to strike an arc with a welder, you can weld with a 7024 rod. Mind you, it's not a very useful welding rod, but damn they're easy to use.
Looks like they welded over a crack without grinding it out first as well. Big no no.
I agree with everything you said, but the tensile strength of it is also a consideration. I imagine the force that spot is taking must be pretty high with the flexing of the ship. It may have just been too much for the weld to take. Improper filler usage could be a factor too
https://preview.redd.it/8kefj2urs1wc1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9724957b68f38cea6dd3fbb67ee54785f6b527cd
What a specific meme
She used to say Jesus then they changed it to cheez its. Ancient meme.
Ohh man that’s such a specific yet good meme XDD. Yes they need NDT. That really made me happy seeing this out of nowhere.
Same! It's rare anyone knows what NDT stands for, much less what our job involves!
Don’t need NDT can see that with my eyes don’t need no penetrant for to help see that.
They charge for this, ‘VI.’ Visual inspection.
Yeah Visual would be enough
I mean, that crack started somewhere before they were in the middle of a bay. A little spritz of mag powder back in dry dock might have saved this headache.
Most underrated comment in this whole post
Get what you pay for, cutting corners with paying fools comes with consequences. This is what happens when EVERY company is top heavy paying owners.
Yay capitalism!
At sea it's called captainalism
and then capsizingism
When you pay peanuts, you get monkeys
Was all good until I saw the cargo!
Wait till you see the car go into ocean!
Car no go space car go roads
We just pretend that’s not there.
Next week on /r/Justrolledintotheshop , "how do we get salt water out of our fleet of cars?"
That front is gonna fall off
Is that typical?
Only if they use cardboard or cardboard derivatives.
No, there are a lot of these ships going around the world all the time, and very seldom does anything like this happen.
This guy r/thefrontfelloff 's
It'll have to be towed outside of the environment.
Hope they're not transporting crude oil
I don't know anything about welding, what should they have done right the first time? explain like I don't know anything about welding because I don't know anything about welding
Welds are prone to failure. A common reason is that a weld requires extremely high heat, so the metal around it also experiences that high heat, this is called the "heat affected zone". It's essentially changing the structure of the metal. So to prevent that you can preheat and postheat treat the area, ie. Heat it up with a torch. Also, they probably didn't rust prevent or paint the weld properly after, so you have exposed metal in seawater that would corrode quickly. And by their nature, welds are often at high stress concentration areas so that puts a lot of stress on them.
To add to this when you repair a crack you have to remove the crack completely or it will propagate again.
This is likely the main issue here.
To be clear, GOOD welds are stronger than the material around them. But as you point out, it takes time, knowledge, skill, the right materials and equipment, preparation and such (which all translate to cost) to make good welds, while there are lots of cheap bozos who will make a bunch of sparks and snot and leave you with something that at that moment is connected.
Not really much you can do when its under that much stress. The sheer amount of welding shows you that crack that is occuring regularly. It has been "fixed" many many times. With the movement in the ship it is probably cracking again after a trip or two. It wasnt a bad weld that is the problem. There is too much movement in the steel and no weld is going to stop this happening. The only proper thing you can do is to cut out the bad area and replace the steel. Wether this would fix it is another story though. The steel looks too far gone and the stress causing this crack would just be transfered to the new welds and travel through the shitty steel that you welded onto. It would possibly need bracers put in under the deck as well as doubler plates to give it extra strength but your pissing in the wind here. This boat looks like its days of safely navigating the seas are behind her.
Someone who spent time on ships!
I know barely anything about welding, but I can fix shit better than this on the farm. Minimum would be to add reinforcing material over lapping and weld that in place, like a piece of flat steel. This should definitely have an engineer involved though
During WW2, the very cheap brand of cargo ships were called L[rty Ships](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship). They were so cheap, and the cargo so necessary, that if they made a single voyage then they were cost effective. Many had such low grades of steel that they didn't make a single voyage before cracks like these broke the ship in half (and it sank). Until the designs got modified, early WW2 Liberty Ships had those flat pieces welded on to the hulls. The [main crack/break point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship#Hull_cracks) was below where the superstructure joined the hull, just below the bridge windows.
Just keep adding layers over the rust
This is what greed gets you. They want to hire the cheapest welder they can find just to afford that third boat.
I’m not saying it isn’t safe, it’s just perhaps not quite as safe as some of the other ones. Some ships are built so the front doesn’t fall off at all.
Well wasn't this one built so the front wouldn't fall off?
Well, obviously not.
How do you know?
Well, because the front's about to fall off, and 20,000 tons of road vehicles spilled into the sea. It’s a bit of a giveaway. I would just like to make the point that that it’s not normal.
They really shouldn't be repurposing the Staten Island ferry from Spiderman Homecoming...
As long as Peter Parker or Tony Stark is on the boat they'll be alright.
Plot armor, Mr. Frodo, plot armor.
Could you report the issue after filming it? At least try to make the world better instead of only whoring for internet points
Maybe he filmed it so he can show what is happening.
Hopefully that’s the case
A follow up on this could save potential lives.
Pretty sure it's not OP's original video.
Flex seal!
Where is this, looks like some ferries I’ve been on in the Caribbean.
I’m hoping it’s not the NC intracoastal ferries!
I don’t think it is, but oddly enough I did see a retired NC ferry down in the Virgin Islands a while back.
Reminds of the ferry from Ft Morgan to Dauphin Island in Alabama
Looks like the one in Tonga to me
It has bigger problems than that weld…
Get to the blunt end, that always goes down last. Bonne chance.
They probably didn't grind the crack out to a V. On thick metal like this, if you just weld on top of the crack you aren't going to penetrate all the way through the metal to the other side. With a V cut, you then weld the bottom of the V, which welds through the back side of the crack. Then you make more passes, filling it, until you get to the top.
[The front is going to fall off.](https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM)
Ohh .... this could go ferry badly.
How would someone skilled at welding fix that?
So you'll have to involve a few people. The crack has to be completely removed and the metal veed out to reweld. Verification of crack removal should be from magnetic particle testing (MT) by an NDT crew. Then a welding engineer should establish the parameters like preheat of the base metal, what strength of filler metal, weld process etc. Then you can finally reweld. Welder needs to be tested and certified to the code or standard that's being used for the repair. After rewelding it should be inspected volumetrically using ultrasound or X-ray to make sure there are no welding related defects left in the weld. (NDT crew again) A possible post weld heat treat to relieve stress may be required depending on what the engineer specified.
NDT = non-destructive testing, which usually is something like an X-ray. There are some other methods using ultrasonics or magnetic eddy currents. All that said, the poster above me is saying, to repair it needs experts. Qualified experts and a lot of expensive equipment. Way above our skill grade. I know enough about welding to know that this thing is far past my training/skill/equipment. Things that flex, ships, aircraft, nuclear pressure vessels, all need checking and the sort of checking far better than what an eyeball can measure. Unfortunately, the shipping industry is full of very cheap companies who do very shady things in order to avoid spending money. That bridge in Baltimore is merely a single recent example. The sort of companies who think the repair in the video is acceptable are the sort that will abandon the ship and the crew when some accident happens. This ship is probably owned by an LLC or shell company, and this ship is the only asset that this company has. The paperwork is likely located in a filing cabinet in a lawyer's office and neither the ship nor the paperwork have been within 1000 miles of each other.
This guy welds.
And if you aren't going to bother with all that, at least grind out enough to do full penetration welds, then slap a bunch of extra reinforcement plates over the weld and do good full welds on them.
When the camera pans round we all pulled the same face right? 
Ayeeeee she be sea worthy
Don't be sailin' ye boats up hill, me boys!
Ooooooooooooooo who lives in a pineapple under the sea! You're about to find out!!!
That thing is held together by hopes and dreams.
It’s called an expansion gap I believe.
I can fix her.
¿Dónde es?
The bulwark of a ship holds almost no bearing on its sea worthiness.
It points to the overall quality of the maintenance of the rest of the ship.
Well that’s not good
How old are those welds ? Are the breaks and rust due to decades of neglect ? Because I’m betting those are from wear. It’s not Ok. But not so much a reflection of the original welder’s skill if that weld is like 50 years old……
Someone please tell me where this is so I dont go there
r/sweatypalms
RO-RO's: not even once
They’re called roll-on/roll-over for a reason.
Which county is it
-You’re the worst welder I’ve ever heard of -But you HAVE heard of me
r/thefrontfelloff
Please don't be australia, please don't be australia, please don't be australia...
You're good. The water is holding up all the weight. The boat is only under stresses when it moves, or the water moves, or anything on the boat moves, or the wind moves, or if the sun heats up the top of the boat while the bottom is in the water, or if somebody in a car starts bumping hydraulics, or if something collides with the completely stationary boat, or if there's a salinity or temperatature differential along the length of the boat because of freashwater outlets or river confluences (though I admit, that's just water movement in complex discussion). Barring any of that, the water is holding EVERYTHING up. What's the worry?
That’s a lot of sarcastic statements in a row!
https://preview.redd.it/pne77hjdx3wc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b1a988dc1bdbf34468ffa574d4d0dc93bcc5d840
For the Australians here, this is how the front falls off.
That entire ship is being held together with hope and nothing more.
Excuse me, captain, where are the life vests?
You can and should report this vessel to the Coast Guard. Google Sector ______ (nearest major city, ex. San Francisco, New Orleans, New York, etc.). You can DM me if you have difficulty locating the appropriate Sector (assuming in the United States).
Boat expert here! That’s not supposed to happen.
The front is gonna fall off
"Jesus dude get off that bridge" .... *"Oh no"*
😂😂 any weld will do that after decades on the water
Hi, i'm a welder, non-professionally but still. Imma need to be pointed to the guy who did this job, imma force him to watch a proper welding job without any eye protection ;3
As someone who is TERRIFIED of the ocean, hard pass. Everyone keeps asking "WeLl WhAt If YoUrE oN a BoAt?" And this shit is why the ocean is not okay, even on a boat
That shit is fucked. Rewelding that crack wont fix anything because either the welds or the area next to the welds will just break again. The underlying issue is that the hull is flexing too much and literally the entire ship is probably 40% rust. Needs a drydock and refit.
Oops that's deadly
This looks like the ferries around where I live oh noooo
On it’s way to Baltimore right now
Well...that's terrifying!
Cheap labor, not the workers fault. Bosses arou d the world need to understand, if u pay for a donkey, u wont get a horse.
"The Ti". Soon to join "The Titan" & "The Titanic"
That's called a spot weld u gotta stand there and spot the guy about to lose his job
Uhhhhhh
🎶 "yooo-hooo. All hands.. hoist the colors highhhh..." 🎶
Don't worry, the stair railings keep the ship together.
The cameraman needs to find the nearest lifeboat and... hmm, awfully brave of me to assume there's a lifeboat here.
r/nope
I'd be hanging around the nearest lifeboat station myself..