Download - Royal Australian Navy

50 NAVY ENGINEERING BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2003
ploy when we blew our third
consecutive fuse for an hour's
break on a hot summer's
afternoon.
Our other work practices were
spectacular as well.
In Blacksmithing, we found that if
you got your furnace going well
and you threw cans of oil into the
coke, you could effectively send
an awesome mushroom fire-ball
up the chimney and out into the
atmosphere.
Since Plumbing and
Blacksmithing were in the same
building and we didn't particularly
like the plumbing instructor, and
his office was on a mezzanine
floor in the rafters of the building,
we found that if we stoked up the
furnaces first thing to get them
going, used as little forced air as
possible, a fair amount of oil and
turn off the chimney flute, then
thick oily smoke would roll out
from under the chimney uptake
and float up to the building's roof
to be caught there. Some
mornings, we worked it quite well,
so well, in fact, you wouldn't even
see his office – although you
could hear him coughing – but
he’d never give you the
satisfaction of coming down out
of it.
Welding came in two forms – arc
welding and oxy-welding.
In arc welding, we'd slip into a
mate's welding bay and either
turn up or turn down his welding
amperage controller. This either
zapped his electrode on the job
in one big glob, or the electrode
would stick to the job and he
couldn't pull it off. Another silly
thing we did was yell for our
instructor and when he stuck his
head inside your welding cubicle,
you and two or three mates would
all strike an arc at once. Result
one blind as a bat and swearing
instructor groping around trying to
find one of us to kill slowly.
A particular favourite move was to
ask some poor junior termer
walking past to come and give
you a hand. (They'd never refuse
you - a senior termer). You'd tell
them to look away as they stood
on a big metal plate (to steady it
of course) so they wouldn't hurt
their eyes as you did your job. As
soon as they looked away, you'd
weld their steel toe caps and heel
caps of their boots to the metal
plate and then race off and leave
them there.
We found during our
Coppersmithing, that if we held
two oxyacetylene torches, burning
on full acetylene, into a I inch
water pipe securely clamped in a
vice to a heavy metal workbench,
and slowly increased the
oxygen into the flame, then by the
time you had the flame burning
half and half (equally oxygen and
acetylene), then the water pipe
acted like a jet engine and the
bench would try to take off. (This
was nothing to the take-off that
the plumbing instructor did when