Heavy metal: Life at the world's largest shipyard | Hacker News Reader

Heavy metal: Life at the world's largest shipyard

bbc.com

67 pointswj8 comments

The first order Hyundai shipyard received was built WHILE the dry dock was being built AROUND the ship.

The second (?) ship Hyundai built failed buyer's inspection (or was it the buyer just backing out) and Hyundai couldn’t find a buyer.

So the founder of Hyundai simply started a shipping company with that one unsold ship.

Woah, that's a pretty cool story. Anywhere where I can read more?

I can't recall where I read the stories I mentioned earlier but you can find more stories in some books like this

On Amazon - Made in Korea: Chung Ju Yung and the Rise of Hyundai

Another legend about Chung Ju Yung. While he was out supervising construction of first highway ever (connecting Seoul to Busan) of Korea, he was so busy that he didn't take off his socks for a week at a time. I guess he went about his work until the moment he dropped off to sleep, for days. He was practically a soldier on the front line.

But to know how Hyundai Shipyard and other Korean industries rose, you have to know about this man, army-general/coup-leader/president/dictator, Park Chung Hee. You can read about him. - The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South Korea

His daughter is currently the president of S Korea.

Anybody who even has a passing interest in the explosive growth of the Korean economy might enjoy reading Michael Seth's "A History of Korea: From Antiquity to the Present" [1] The beginning is a little chaotic, but the 20th century on parts are really well researched, condensed and fascinating to read.

A lot of this article rings familiar. I have a relative on my wife's side that works for the second largest shipbuilder in the world, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering (DSME). He went to the top university in Korea for some kind of relevant engineering degree and Daewoo covered his tuition. In exchange he promised to work for them wherever they put him and for about 5 years he ended up at the DSME shipyards in Okpo-dong, Geoje-do [2], just down the road from the Samsung Shipyard and not too terribly far from the shipyard in this story. The sites are so large they dwarf the nearby towns and are clearly visible on Google Maps without even turning on the Satellite view [3]

He had never been to Geoje-do, and he figured, being so far down south, it might have nice beaches or coastal areas like the next largest island (and only a few hours by ferry) Jeju-do -- also known as Korea's "Hawaii". What he found was rugged, rocky beaches and rough local fishermen. Either pushing their craft out to dangerous seas, or blowing off steam in the local bars.

Working as a member of the DSME engineering team, he at least got to work in a modern office building, the company put him up in decent, if spare, housing and he got a discount on a commuter car from sister division/company Daewoo Autos. The nearby towns had pretty good food and the scenery, though rugged was gobsmacking beautiful if you knew where to go.

He snuck me in on a tour of the facility. It has the kind of incomparable size a mountain does suddenly rising out of a flat plain. It looks big, but then you never seem to ever get near it and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and more massive until your eyes start to resolve tiny people working around the site, too small to see before. I forget the number of ships they put out a year, something on the order of 60 or 70. Or all sizes and configurations: supertankers, cargo vessels, LPG transport, submarines on order. The waters around the island are full of massive ships out on proving runs. [4]

He hated it down there, it was a dull rural life and he was trying to raise a family. In the last couple years of his indenture, he spent time studying to become a patent attorney and wanted to leave DSME, but the company finally relented and brought him back to Seoul to work a more normal life with better pay and seniority. He's now a senior engineer, working on better ways to build ships that keep the world running.

1 - http://www.amazon.com/History-Korea-From-Antiquity-Present/d...

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okpo-dong

3 - https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ulsan,+South+Korea/@34.894...

4 - https://gcaptain.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/DSME.jpg

The descriptions of the place are quite awe-inspiring, but it seems like the photos don't do it justice. Where are the photos of "giant cranes (aptly called Goliaths) dominating the skyline"?

It's a strange thing, with the scales (I presume) are involved (here as well). I worked a bit with refurbishing "small" oil-rigs, now used mostly for search drilling. They "only" stand about 70m above sea level when elevated for refurbishing.

But even these "small" rigs (typically built in the 70s, with a goal of lasting 5-10 years) -- are so huge -- that most people that worked on them had no issues with vertigo/fear of heights. When you stand on top, looking down, all the sizes are so big, that your brain doesn't see a 70m drop down to the ocean as all that far, because the support towers are so huge, that you just cannot fathom their size. Sometimes you can look down, and make out the ant-like forms of people working -- but even then, the brain just can't process the dimensions.

I think I have some illustrative photos on a drive somewhere, but apparently not on hand.

One of the few photography projects I'm aware of that comes close to both capturing the size, and displaying the size, is the series by Edward Burtynsky that I became aware of through the film "Manufactured Landscapes" - scenes like:

http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/site_contents/Photographs/Min...

The magnitude quite literally boggles the mind - the size is just super human. And that usually transfers quite poorly to film.

I was expecting this to talk about heavy metals[1] (which are (sometimes?) used in paints applied to ships), but it is using this title just to refer to the heavy industry. (Link bait?)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_metal_(chemical_element)

I wouldn't say link bait. It was just a different use of the music pun. "Worlds Largest" would most likely mean heavy ships and lots of metal, not necessarily having to do with environmental concerns.

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