THE RESTORATION
Pagamenos and Rybka plot out replacement of the curved outer plating under the stern.
tury-old sailing ship in a harbor full of motorships that could be repaired cheaper, it was also assumed that we were idiots. While a good case could be made for the latter assumption, the former was definitely not true. We hired a local contractor, Nikos Pagomenos, who had worked with Throckmorton, to be our front man and do all the shouting and arm-waving essential to negotiations. Eventually, we hammered out a contract for steel repairs with the yard of G. Koroneos in Perama. Elissa Is Hauled Out Elissa was launched in OL:tober of 1877. One hundred years later on October 6, 1977, she was hauled out to begin the process of h;eping her alive for the next hundred years. Marine railways are rare in Greece; small freighters are hauled out on great wooden sleds pulled over hardwood logs . To overcome the tremendous friction , the ways are greased with boiling animal fat. The congealed fat eventually finds its way onto everthing in the yard . This system goes back to ancient times. Although today, wire rope tackles and electric winches have replaced ox teams, it takes nearly a full day to haul a ship out. Elissa had not been hauled for more than two years. After rough scraping, it took another three weeks with pneumatic chippers to clean and scale her bottom. To update earlier surveys thousands of ultrasonic readings were taken of the hull plating. When the full extent of the needed' renewal was known, some difficult decisions had to be faced. One alternative was to perform only those repairs that would get her to hold together long enough to reach Galveston and then take it from there. This was a rejected on the grounds that the ship's present deplorable condition was the result of many years of such thinking. And the ship was expected to float over seven thousand miles of ocean whose tranquility could not be guaranteed . Tailoring the job to the cash 18
in hand seemed a good way to lose her. We decided that we were there to make good the strength of the ship, to get a sound bottom now and not later. The scarey part was the spectre of running out of funds with the ship still missing enough of itself to float, and then watching her go for scrap because we set our sights too high . We were breaking new ground in that this was the first time (to our knowledge) that such extensive rebuilding had been done on a rivetted iron ship of this size. The one case I know of where an old iron vessel was made fit to sail again is the much smaller schooner Pioneer, which I had sailed for South Street Seaport Museum . In her case, Russell Grinnell, the restorer, got around the difficulty of joining welded steel to rivetted iron by replacing all of the iron shell, retaining only the vessel's frames. In our initial planning, based on bad surveys that confused identifiable remains with sound structure, we thought the ship needed little enough renewal that we could afford to rivet. We had spent many months reading old treatises on iron shipbuilding, watching plates being riveted in the bilge strake of an old tanker and acquiring the proper tools and seven tons of rivets. When we got to Greece and discovered the full extent of the job, it became immediately obvious that if this ship was going to stay alive, she would have to become a welded steel one, fast.
" ... the Greek workers perceived that Elissa was a very special lady and took great pride in doing their best on this particular job." Before we could proceed on this.modified course, we had to wade through a lot of mythology concerning wrought iron. On the one side were the enthusiasts who proclaimed its durability to be just short that of gold; on the other, dour old shipfitters who had unsuccessfully attempted welded repair of iron hulls and warned of the welds cracking. As is usually the case, both parties had some truth on their side. Wrought iron is a more durable material than mild steel. It is softer and more malleable due to its much lower carbon content and for this reason, its rate of oxidation is slower. Wrought iron also has many slag inclusions that run in striations, like the grain in wood. This is a result of the smelting process in which the bloom never became truly molten as is necessary in steelmaking. Rather a puddled mass was "wrought" into the
desired shape forcing slag layers inward instead of floating to the top to be skimmed off. These striations retard corrosion in that once a layer of ferrous material has oxidized away, the glasslike slag inclusion must be mechanically abraded before oxidation can take place. But this lack of homogeineity costs strength . Furthermore, for survey purposes, the insulative effect of this kind of inclusion renders ultrasonic caliper readings unreliable. The signal will travel through ferrous material until hitting a slag inclusion and then bounce back, so you may get many frightfully thin readings in a sound plate. What this means is you can count only on drillings, slow hard work to bore. Then all of those holes must be tapped for threaded plugs. if you are to keep the plates. Blob welding is not a recommended method for sealing them because you may induce concentrated shrinkage stress and get a hairline crack next to the hole. Further problems abound. The insulating effect of the striations can hinder penetration, except in a full-penetration edge-to-edge weld . For Elissa's rebuilding, feasibility was determined by having several sample welds of iron to steel tested to destruction in a laboratory in the presence of Lloyd's surveyor John Currie. In the case of the butt (edge-to-edge) weld the iron pulled like taffy and finally broke several inches from the weld. Thus we knew shell (hull plating) connections would work . Most of Elissa's plates are of an excellent grade of iron or the job would have been impossible. But in two places a individual plate had corroded to a far greater degree than adjoining plates. The plate had to be cut out even though it was of acceptable thickness in order to reach material that was good enough to weld to . We also found problems in the repair of local damages with small inserts. In Lloyd's rules for steel ships there are minimum sizes of plate permitted to avoid problems with too many welds close together-which can crack the plate through the stress of shrinkage. Our inLloyd's Surveyor Brian Pearson consults with Creamer and Rybka in Elissa' s hold.
SEA HISTORY, FALL 1979