BLOG 8 - "Marine Musings 3" - PROLOGUE AND WORKSHOP ACTIVITIES

When I joined DMET in 1966, due to subsidies from the Government of India, our fee structure was an affordable Rupees 350 to 400 per month, inclusive of food, accommodation, tuition, transportation etc. The accommodation was modest, the food simple and palatable and the teaching just fell short of brilliant.

Today, in comparison, the fee structure is around Rupees 20,000 a month, which works out to Rupees 240,000 per annum.

I don't think I would have joined this institution today, as I would not have been able to afford it.

Besides, I have not been able to find any evidence of any Marine Workshop training being given to today's cadets.. I may be wrong - I will check and post my findings later, in another blog.

I was bemused by the following site that lists the daily routines of today's cadets.

http://www.merical.ac.in/Routine-IMU-KC.pdf

BLOG 8

Chapter 2

I was assigned to Calcutta Port Commissioners Workshop, now known as Kolkata Port Trust.

Since the majority of the first three years was as an apprentice in CPC workshop – 4 days of the week – I will first write about the workshop training, to be followed by hostel life and academics in College.

WORKSHOP:

Every morning, after breakfast, we boarded the college bus – on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays – to be ferried on a 45 minute ride to the workshop.

During the ride, we passed through Hyde Road every day, filled with industries that had monopolised their various fields. Examples Jessops, Braithwaite, Metal Box etc. Practically all the companies on that road had their foundations in pre-independence days, some over a 100 years old, and having a monopoly of the market that they catered to, providing jobs to tens of thousands of skilled and unskilled workers. In actual fact, they produced / assembled items where the raw material had been taken to England at very cheap rates and returned to India as near finished products at very high prices. There were many such British industries all over India that exploited the rich hinterland of India.

Highly unionised, these companies fell prey to strikes and lockouts. During the morning and evening rides through that road for three years, I saw an increasing number of red flags, strikes, sit-ins, dharnas and lockouts. An industrial hub of India teetered and collapsed. Communism had, by then, scythed its way through Calcutta. Net result was tens of thousands were thrown out on to the streets, jobless.

Mind you, this was at a time when refugees from Bangladesh – then known as East Pakistan – were flooding West Bengal by the millions. Calcutta bore the brunt of it and the economy sagged. To this day – more than fifty years later – I am amazed and humbled by the generosity and fortitude with which the people of Calcutta withstood this human tide and gave them shelter to the extent they could. I still shudder when I remember seeing thousand of refugees clustered on the railway platform at Sealdah station, leaving only a small path for the travellers, with thousands more under every inch of the platform, beside the tracks, curtains of gunny bags separating each family, each space being about 2 mtrs x 1 mtr.

Back to workshop. We had to ‘punch in’ by 0800H and be at our workplace by 0820H, which meant going to our change room, changing into white boiler suits and reporting to the foreman / supervisor of the particular shop.

Fitting Shop: Our first section was the fitting shop, where we used tools such as a 4lb hammer, chisels, different types of files, tri-squares, drills, calipers, verniers and the like. Hands were blistered and thumbs were bloodied in the quest of making square / rectangle / triangle male and female pieces fit perfectly into each other, from 1 to 2 inches thick steel plates and steel rods to match. We spent three months in that section, at the end of which I could swing a 3 pound hammer – a full blooded swing – from behind my shoulder and hit a chisel held in my left hand and peel away a layer of steel like it was cheese, from a 6” long steel rod of 4 to 6” diameter. Palms were calloused, forearms, wrists and shoulders built muscle. The skills learned here came in handy in the final year only to a small extent, when we had to manufacture something from scratch for our projects. Apart from that, these physical skills were useless during my sea career. Yes, I learnt to use Vernier callipers, micrometers (screw gauges), different files (there are, literally, hundreds of different files), heating different types of steel to different temperatures in a furnace and using steam or pneumatically operated heavy duty hammers to shape the heated piece (so along the way you learnt a bit of metallurgy) and then tempering it to give it the required hardness. Yes, understanding metals (theory and practical) made a lot of difference in the senior stages of my sea career.

The Foundry shop thrust me into a world of primitive practises – today, in hindsight, it looks primitive – with patterns, moulds and casting of dies. We had to chisel away the slag, so that the unfinished product can be sent for machining, on the way to its becoming a finished machinery part. I learnt a little about melting different metals to different temperatures and pouring it into the mould. I should have learnt more about the design part and making the necessary drawings, but we were sent onwards to our next shop.

The Electrical shop was more productive. I learnt a lot, without realising that I had done so. Rewinding of burnt out AC and DC motors, different gauges of wires, how much of wire is required for a motor to reach its specifications, torque, current, voltage, flux – all became intimate words. Use of different motor bearings led me into a whole new world. My elder brother’s Theraja (Book on fundamentals of Electricity) almost became a bible, as I learnt the theory and the practical part of Electricity. It also became one of my favourite subjects. What I learnt in those two months stood me in good stead in dealing with heavy duty motors, finding causes of burn outs, breakdowns etc later in my sea career.

Arc and gas welding shop – for 2 months – introduced me to different welding rods, welding techniques, different types of welds, brazing etc. I never realised that the basic safety aspects were learnt during this period from the welders. I became reasonably good at them and I had occasion to further my expertise in this at sea. After a decade at sea – and having established myself as an ‘expert’ welder, I was forced to give it up as it started affecting my eyesight. 1982 was the last time.

Machine shop was a revelation. It was a world that I never knew existed. So many different types of lathes for hundreds of functions. So I learnt to centre regular shaped and irregular shaped parts and machine them to required dimensions. I made nuts and bolts by the hundreds. I learnt about threads, drills, lathe tools. I machined propeller shafts to perfection, after they had been spray welded at worn out sections. Drilling machines, planing machines, honing machines, turret lathes, capstan lathes, heavy duty lathes etc were all worked on, one by one. Those were the days when all work was done manually – no lasers, no computers. Enjoyable period.

All professional jobs that were done by me were done either when assisting the qualified worker or under his scrutiny and tutelage. I would not have learnt as much as I did in the workshop, had it not been for the fact that I had learnt quite a bit of Bengali, which aided in having a good rapport with the machinist, electrician, welder etc. Knowing Bengali made a difference.

Diesel Shop: The last shop (of the first two years) was the Diesel shop, where small engines were brought for overhaul. We should have been allowed more months in this shop, as the work there was practically the foundation of what we would do on board, at sea. I learnt what I could, in the short span of time.

The third year workshop was dedicated to on board work, as apprentices. Depending on how many were required for each vessel, we would be divided and assigned a vessel.

Calcutta Port Commissioners – now known as Kolkata Port Trust – have a large number of vessels to render various services to the ships that call Calcutta ports, like tug boats, pilot boats etc. They also have a large fleet of dredgers for dredging operations in the port and in the Hooghly river itself, in order to prevent grounding of ships.

During the third year, we were mostly assigned to different types of dredgers – suction dredgers, jet dredgers, grab dredgers etc. Churni and Subarna Rekha were some of them. Our work was mainly restricted to the engine room. Starting from overhauling valves on pipelines, renewing corroded sections of pipelines, we progressed to overhauling different types of pumps, compressors, overhauling triple expansion steam engines (now practically obsolete), cleaning scotch and water tube boilers, condensers, coolers etc. Sometimes we did jobs without knowing why, but the osmosis of memory retention stood me in good stead later at sea. So, I finished my third year.

By today’s (2022) standards, the methodology of how we did our work or saw what was being done, was very primitive. For example, to open the propeller nut in dry dock, two gigantic workers would swing massive hammers and hit a massive spanner again and again and again for most of a day to open the nut. Today, using hydraulic tools, the shipyard is considered inefficient if it takes more than an hour. The same was the case with Main Engine cylinder head nuts. The tools we used were outdated, even though more modern, time saving tools were available in foreign markets - electric, hydraulic, pneumatic .

Lunch Break in workshop was when we opened our lunch packets, given to us at 0700 hrs in the morning, prepared much earlier and was eaten at 1230 hrs. The contents were ten slices of bread where the college waiter had waved the knife which had an invisible layer of butter, 4 of the slices having an invisible coating of jam, with some boiled potatoes to make it a gourmet lunch. After a hard, perspiring morning session of work, we would be famished and this waiter packed lunch would be devoured. But it was insufficient to appease our hunger. It would be followed by a few 'matkas' of tea and 'samosas' from small vendors just outside the gates f the workshop.

After a few months of having this nearly dry bread for lunch, I came across a wayside stall, about 200 metres from the workshop main gate making 'dosas', 'vadas' and the like that was the staple 'tiffin' of the south. The shopkeeper also spoke Tamil. I started going out for this lunch practically every day. In a few weeks, arrangements were made where a 'thambi' (younger brother in Tamil) would come to our lunch room and supply us with 'dosas', 'vadas' and hot coffee. We would give away our lunch packets to the urchins outside the workshop.

Today, we mostly shun such wayside stalls.

===== Continued in Blog 9 =====