From Dreadnought. To Tin Can.

Hokitika Guardian, 21 January 1922, Page 4

From Dreadnought. To Tin Can.

(By a Naval Correspondent). Converting Dreadnoughts into tin cans is modern equivalent of beating swords into ploughshares. For some time past this strange transmutation has been going on busily in Great Britain. It consists in breaking Up our unrequired warships and sending the “scrap” obtained from them into South Wales, where it is turhed into the “black plates,” from which, after they have been “tinned” cans of all kinds are made.

Shipbreaking, like shipbuilding, is a business of itself. Firms who engage in it .have to be specially equipped for the work if they intend to do it extensively, and they must “know their market.”

Before the war, when the Admiralty wished to dispose of a ship they used to nut it up to auction. Prices varied, but a vessel that cost nearly a million to build would probably be “knocked down” for about £20,000. At the present time the market for unwanted warships is overstocked, and as a cfonsequencie the Admiralty is selling them at “sacrifice prices.

The precise sums obtained are not divulged, but one firm of shipbreakers is understood to have bough! a job lot of about one hundred battleships and cruisers for something like five million pounds—a mere fraction of their original cost. As a business “deal” the dreadnought is less attractive to the ghipbreaker than was the old three-decker. Cop-

per bolts and sheathing from the latter always yielded a substantial profit, while her timbers, whether oak or teak, could be “made lip” into garden seats, and a variety of other things. One old three-decker ha s been known to realise quite a comfortable little fortune for the lucky speculator who bought her.

But the Dreadnought hides no unexpected mine of treasure for the shipbreaker in her weighty hull. He knows exactly what he will find there. Reducing a warship to “scrap” has to be done mainly by skilled labour By means of powerful acetylene burners the vessel is “sliced up” into squares measuring about five feet by two and a half feet—these being the right size for “feeding” into the blast furnaces in which the vessel is finally melted down. It is a wonderful sight to watch men “cutting up” an old battleship for the acetylene flame carves through her armour plating almost as easily as a hot knife goes through butter. After a ship has been reduced to fragments her remains are sorted over carefully, the more valuable metals being placed apart from the common steel “scrap.” The latter is mostly bought by the South Wales metal merchants at prices which are determined by current market quotations. “Scrap” of this kind has lately been sold for j £2 10s per ton. But in every warship there ig a certain amount of costly material which fetches big figures. For example cast steel is worth twice as much at? ordin-