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Posted by Marty on Friday, May 23, 2008 at 17:23:05 :
In Reply to: Yeah... posted by Clint Dixon on Friday, May 23, 2008 at 17:09:03 :
I gotta tell you a little story about steel....
All our steel here at the shipyard used to come from Portland. We put in a huge order for a hull we were building in the 80's & there wasn't enough plate in the US to fill the order so the only alternative was Japan.
The steel arrived & usually the first thing we do is mark the plates for square & trim 3 edges. If you ordered an 8'x32' plate, it would come an inch or so bigger in each direction & you'd never want to rely on them being square.
The Japanese plate arrived & the plates weren't .002" out of square. They were so perfect that we just butted them together & welded them with our big sub arc welder...no grinding even!
The quality control, or the equipment...whatever but that was the last US plate we ordered in quantity. It saved us thousands of hours.
We can make fun of their funny cars & maybe even those silly wood forks they use, but trust me...the Asian steel is miles ahead of us.
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