DOCKING THE OLYMPIC.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 5 November 1924, Page 7

DOCKING THE OLYMPIC.

GREATEST WEIGHT-LIFTING FEAT. The greatest weight-lifting feat in the world has been accomplished at Southampton when the Olympic was docked in July last. An inert mass wcighting'46,ooo tons has been lifted forty feet into the air iii three hours forty-five minutes. lb is still poised there, and will remain poised for a week while ant-like figures of men, eight or nine hundred of them, scurry round it with hammers, paint brushes, pneumatic drills, and all the impedimenta of shipyard work. The greatest British-built ship in the world, the White Star liner Olympic, has been lifted by the greatest floating dock in the world, which is also British designed and buiLt: Nothing like this has been seen in our waters in all the years of our sea history. Floating docks have lifted big ships before, but nothing on this scale has been attempted. There were nervous moments during the docking, for man was juggling with immense weights wholly beyond his control if anything went, wrong—and the only guarantee of success lay in an obtruse series of calculations pigeon-holed in some engineer’s office in Newcastle. The multiplication table and Mr Algreba between them lifted the Olympic. It was a case of equation, natation and levitation. . First the floating dock was submerged until there were 34 feet of water over the keel blocks and the cradle on which the Olympic was to rest. Then four tugs pulled the liner round from her berth and edged her in between the two walls of the lock. Three feet of water remained between her keel and the blocks when she came to rest, and with great care the dock was lifted under her. Inches at a time it rose, while men with a variety of gadgets watched and gauged and tested to make sure that the centre of the cradle' was under the centre of the ship. They touched. Red and green lamp? flashed the message from thirty feet below water; The red predominated, SO’ the Olympic was a fraction too much to port. Great beams of steel running through the walls of the lock (one of them had been chosen as a nesting place by two astonished pigeons) pressed against the sides of the ship‘and edged her a decimal point to starboard. At last the red and green lamps in the signal box turned level. She was trulv centred. More pumps silently started work. There was an uncanny silence throughout- the whole of .the uncanny business. -The feat was carried through without a creak or a groan. Only when some oncoming workmen dumoed a heavy pulley block on the steel platform of the dock was the silence broken..

Those on the dock had no sensation of movement. Yet they and the dock and the Olympic climbed ten feet upwards in the first hour. The underwater hull of the liner came more and more in view, and a.s it did so men in rough punts alongside scrubbed away the green growth of six months’ seafaring.