One was to lower the drydock and move the barge over, and the other was to lower a couple of blocks at a time. Lowering the blocks is done by two men manually twisting the jack screws, which can take a couple hours to lower just one. There had to be a better way. When they put their heads together, Jimmy Dodds suggested putting the steel on the bottom of the hull in one big sheet, according to Jim Curry, metalworker welder. The team of Curry, Terry Phifer, Curtis Pigram, Winford Henson, Dwight Alston, and Marc West took that idea and ran with it.
Necessity is the mother of invention, they say.
The solution was to build a frame to hold the steel sheets, flood the drydock, float the barge in, drain the drydock to settle the barge onto the sheets, then weld everything together. First the Ensley crew built the frame to keep the steel sheets from sagging once they were laid on the blocks that hold up the barge. This essentially connected all the steel into one big sheet. Welders work on the forward rake of the barge. Then once the barge sat on the steel sheets, the welders could weld around the plug holes to attach the steel sheets to the old bottom.