Construction of reinforced concrete ships was not a great idea, reports d1softballnews.
Ships made of reinforced concrete
Not far from the coast of Powell River, a Canadian city overlooking the Malaspina Strait in the British Columbia region, ten large ships built in the 1920s and 1940s and later abandoned now form a crumbling breakwater barrier, to used for a long time to protect the port and a small storage basin for tree trunks used by a nearby paper mill, once one of the largest in the world.
The peculiarity of these huge aligned boats is the material they are made of: reinforced concrete.
For a certain period of time, at the end of the nineteenth century and more intensely during the World Wars, cement was a material used in shipyards in various countries of the world, including Italy, for the construction of large and small transport units. maritime. It was a choice mainly motivated by the temporary shortages of raw materials – wood but above all steel, mainly destined for the war industry – and presented a series of advantages.
The use of concrete, cheaper than steel and more easily available during the Wars, allowed to speed up the production times of naval units and, in some cases, to reduce overall costs, however, eliminating the need for paints and paints to be used as a coating to prevent corrosion of the metal.
This construction technique generally involved the use of overlapping steel mesh frames, welded and then incorporated into the concrete to create the walls and hulls of ships.
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Source: d1softballnews
