FLIVVER SHIPS ON ATLANTIC

Southland Times, Issue 24596, 19 November 1941, Page 4

FLIVVER SHIPS ON ATLANTIC

Remarkable Vessels Built In U.S.A.

Recent cable messages have mentioned the flivver ships which will shortly begin to carry cargo from the United States to Great Britain. Built cheaply and quickly, these vessels will represent one of the greatest mass production efforts ever undertaken in the United States. Of unconventional design, the ships will be powered by motor-cat-engines and could be discarded or dismantled after their first voyage across the Atlantic, but according to the news magazine Time, the British Government proposes to keep the first 750 sent over as trawlers. Time states that the first of the flivver ships nearing completion in a shipyard at Orange, Texas, looked crazy. It had a high-flanged bow, a low stern, one turret-like house amidships and five low hatches on her flush 270-feet deck, and it broke most of the accepted rules of ship construction. She has no keel, continues Time. She has no ordinary propeller shaft. She has no costly marine engines. Fore and aft she is just a hollow shell for holding cargo. Her power plant consists of 16 110 horsepower Chrysler petrol engines geared in teams of four to four shafts that run straight through her bottom to four six-feet propellers. She is a flivver of a ship to be turned out en masse to win the Battle of the Atlantic. This is the Sea Otter, built in a little over a month by the United States Navy and now awaiting her sea trials.

SMALL CREW Her qualities are extraordinary. She displaces 2240 tons and has a cargo capacity of 1600 tons. But she draws only 11 feet when fully loaded—which means that others like her may be built far from the sea. Instead of a crew of 25 to 30 men usually needed to run a ship of her size, she requires only eight to 12. All hands live in the cylindrical turret amidships. With a freeboard when loaded of only nine feet, her decks will be awash in all but the calmest weather. Carrying 37,000 gallons of petrol, she has a cruising range of better than 7000 miles, enough to take her to England and back without refuelling. A fouled propeller’ can be drawn up through a well in her bottom to be repaired and a burnt-out engine can be quickly replaced by one of four spares carried. The idea of the Sea Otter originated with Commander Hamilton V. Bryan, of the United States Navy, retired, and a motor engineer, Warren Noble. They decided that because automobile production was soon to be cut, the ship would utilize motor instead of marine engines and the J- to 3-8-inch steel normally used by the motor industry. A New York lawyer, Roland Livingston Redmund, paid the cost for an 80-feet model to be built which did remarkably well in its trials. The first full-size flivver ship cost about £50,000 and under mass production it is expected that their cost will be about £30,000. Ordinary small cargo ships would cost about £200,000.