mid - 1970's? - The welding bay at the Penarth Dock Engineering Company Limited. The component being welded in the oven is a stub drive-shaft from a Steel Company of Wales cold rolling mill. The journals at each end were subject to extreme forces in service and experienced heavy wear. The area was prepared and then re-welded using stelite rods, a hard facing alloy of cobalt. The entire shaft was then heated to normalise the stresses induced by the welding process and then placed on a horizontal borer to rough cut using tungsten carbide tipped tools. Once machined to within a few thousanths of an inch it was then cylindrically ground whilst still mounted upon the horizontal borer to the specified diameter and within tolerance. An extremly time consuming and specialist process.

The original photograph is held at the archive of the National Museum of Wales and forms part of a series of 31 photos of engineering workshops at Penarth and Barry Docks. [Museum item number : 87.202I/23] [629] [20180328]