Volume Ten - Pre-Victorian to the present day - even more aspects - The Patent for the Penarth Slipway - 1881 . . .

Mr. R. H. Tweddell, cont'd :

He saw no objection to any profits thus made being placed to the credit of the slipway as an undertaking, or to a graving-dock either. He thought the use of an accumulator was almost essential, not only on account of the safety and speed thus obtained, but also because it could then be made available for working hydraulic machine-tools, for punching, riveting, &c. One of his own machines was being thus worked at a slipway fitted up by the Authors of the Paper.

The fact of having an accumulator would also allow of the working of hydraulic capstans or large sheers on adjacent wharfs, and would enable the engines to be taken out or put into the vessel before or after going on to the slipway. The Authors improvements for avoiding “ fleeting " were very effective and neat, but their cost would, he should think, be greater than Sir W. Armstrong’s system of using a chain dropping into a pit.

In reference to Messrs. Day and Summers’s system, would not the objections raised by the Authors be met by the use of three or four separate hauling-drums?

Mr. T. B. Lightfoot.

Mr. T. B. Lightfoot, in reply to the correspondence, observed, in reference to the suggestion that the foundations adopted in a slipway recently constructed by Earle’s Shipbuilding and Engineering Company, Limited, would be less costly in maintenance than if constructed by the method mentioned in the Paper, that no doubt in some instances this might be so; but at Penarth the expenditure on the ways had been so trifling since operations had been commenced in 1879, that whatever might have been the case at Messrs. Earle’s, it was evident the foundations at Penarth had given most ample support.

Mere surface-dressing and filling had not been recommended in the Paper in every case, but it had been distinctly stated that piling was sometimes required ; and probably at Messrs. Earle’s the Authors would have pursued the same course as Mr. Godfrey.