The welder then cranked up the heat on his or her machine a bit, and 'burned it all in', hoping to puddle the whole mess together with the arc as well as tying it into the base metal. Pieces of welding rod with the flux beat off of them, bolts, scraps of steel the burners had trimmed off other plating, baling wire, nails, or anything else handy would be thrown into the 'valley' formed by the bevelled edges of the plates. This practice consisted of finding any handy pieces of steel to throw into the bevelled vee of a weld seam that was too wide for the root pass. When the gap was just too wide for a root pass, some shipyard workers would 'slug the weld'. Heating, beating, and jacking were commonplace to get the edges of the plates to line up for a welded seam. All sorts of boilermaker's tricks using 'steamboat' ratchets (screwed binder) and lugs welded on either side of the joints were used. When the plates were fitted up for a welded seam, particularly where welded modules of hull sections were brought together on the buildin g ways, there was often an excessive gap across the area of the welded seam. Still another factor was the practice known as 'slugging a weld'. Another factor blamed was the quality of steel, it being an open hearth steel and possibly prone to brittle failures, particularly in very cold waters.

The fix was to 'break the weld seams' with a rivetted splice running perpendicular to the seams. Some welded ship hulls did sustain major cracking right in the yards where they were built, and some had it happen at sea.

One was the fact that the long welded seams in the ships' hulls produced a lot of post weld stresses. The matter of Liberty ship hulls, as well as the T-2 tankers (also a WWII ship) breaking in two was a well known thing. Blodgett had quite a distinguished career in the welding industry, and he developed a lot of the weld procedures and practices that were used in the construction of the Liberty ships and subsequent welded ships. Welding of ship's hulls was a relatively new practice, and there was an amazing man named Omar Blodgett who was quite an authority on welding engineers. The Liberty Ships were one of the first examples of mass-produced welded ship construction.

Liberty ship construction welding