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. Since the bottom of the hull was very dented, the plug wells had to line up with the stiffeners inside the barge. Each stiffener is a half-inch angle iron that runs the length of the hull, and they are spaced 24 inches apart. West made a grid so that the plug wells would match the stiffeners. Then came the hard part.