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Comment by pfdietz | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the case a British destroyer from WW1.

This ship started as two Tribal class destroyers, HMS Nubian and HMS Zulu. In 1916, the first lost its bow to a torpedo (and then running aground); the second lost its stern to a mine. The admiralty decided to salvage the remains by joining them together into a new ship, dubbed HMS Zubian.

https://www.twz.com/royal-navy-once-created-a-franken-ship-f...

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In 2020 France did the same with an attack submarine. The Perle had a major fire in its forward half, ruining it. The Saphir was a submarine of the same class being about to be decommissioned. They cut both in half then fitted the forward from Saphir onto Perle, which ended up being way cheaper than rebuilding a new half.

(they're from an older class that is not being built anymore, but the Perle should remain in service a few more years until enough of the new class units are delivered)

https://www.naval-group.com/fr/naval-group-livre-le-sous-mar...

https://archives.defense.gouv.fr/content/download/611644/102...

The US did the same for the San Francisco when she struck a seamount.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_San_Francisco_(SSN-711)

>In June 2006, it was announced that San Francisco's bow section would be replaced at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard with the bow of USS Honolulu, which was soon to be retired. San Francisco is four years older than Honolulu, but she had been refueled and upgraded in 2000–2002. The cost of her bow replacement has been estimated at $79 million, as compared with the estimated $170 million to refuel and overhaul the nuclear reactor of Honolulu.[11]

Another example is the USS Wisconsin, an Iowa-class fast battleship. Its bow was damaged in a collision and replaced with the bow of the never-completed USS Kentucky, which was to have been the last ship in the class.

This is mentioned in the TWZ article.

I used to have a car like that - relative in car business specialized in buying late model cars that had one end (front or back) in good shape, and other end wrecked, and would use the two good halves to make a new car. He used a jig to get the alignment precise, and claimed it was as good as factory. The car seemed fine - there was no way to tell.

Sounds like a salvage title to me

A 'cut and shut'?

Where do you live for that to be legal?

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=cut+and+shut

Most limousines are made like that. The practice is fine in theory but I guess the business is too shady for the vehicles to be fine in practice.

There's a whole Well There's Your Problem (an engineering disasters podcast) about exactly that. I think the conclusion is that it isn't fine in theory or practice...

https://youtu.be/K5sQJB6Jvkw?si=hq8yGx2i9FQy-wAB

Well, this was a while back (90's perhaps) and he was building these in upstate NY. I've no idea if it was legal the time - I was driving plenty of cheap crap cars back then (Ford Pinto, Ford Ltd II ex. cop car with single digit mpg, '78 TransAm), and relative to those this was pretty nice!

This is called a 'cut-and-shut' and is considered to be extremely dangerous. There's no way you'd get insurance for one if you disclosed its origins, which he probably wasn't when he was selling them on.

In the UK at least, passing one of these off as a standard repair is illegal (it's a 'radically altered vehicle' and would need to be registered as such with a special licence plate).

Funny thing is that one can do it properly and it even will be as good as from the factory. For that one must peel off whole car’s body sheet wise and weld/glue the not damaged sheets again. Also add anti corrosive paint in between. However this is not the cheap way. A business doing this will not survive. It just takes too long. So it would be healthy to assume, that such repairs are rolling coffins at the end.

And you’re right - to identify coffin car a mobile x-ray device is needed. Edit: and yes, I was driving a car that wasn’t well repaired and absolutely safe for 5 years.

In Cuba I had a hairy drive from Havana to Vinales driven by the owner’s 12 year old son in a stretch Lada - ⅔ of one and ⅔ of the other

A WW2 Btitish ship, the HMS Porcupine, got hit by a submarine and ultimately was split in two halves, promptly nicknamed HMS Pork and HMS Pine.

> HMS Zubian.

I prefer Nuzu.

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