SREF Project-Dan

For my SREF project, some of my peers and I visited the Noordelijk Scheepvaartmuseum, a museum about naval history in the Netherlands. One site that was particularly interesting to me was one of the forges used by naval field smiths. The forge here contains several tools used to manufacture the steel in ships. Two forges are pictured here with the one on the left being from the 19th century and the one on the right from the 20th century. The 19th century forge uses a leather foot driven bellow while the 20th century design uses a manually operated blade. In the construction of the ships, field smiths were mainly used to heat the rivets before the steel plates of the ship’s hull were riveted. Blades were first crafted with heavy hand hammers, but were eventually replaced with pneumatic riveters.