The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

be described in an early issue. Very rapid loading of flour and other bagged cargo, also bales of wool, has been made possible at low cost by the use of the screw type conveyor, the usefulness of which has been greatly extended by the provision of sections with slip sleeve permitting running the conveyor around sharp turns. The flexibility of the conveyor is also in- creased by putting casters on the power head, and the conveyor sup- ports. Conveyors for Handling Sugar The screw type conveyor has also been. used successfully at a San Fran- cisco dock for handling raw sugar from shipside to the refinery. The conveyor is mounted on a scale so that the sugar may be weighed as it moves from alongside the ship. This opera- tion will also be described in a forth coming issue. The use of skids and lift trucks for handling freight on San Francisco bay and river barge lines is quite gen- eral. The Bay Cities Transportation Co. and the Fay Transportation Co. were described in previous issues of the MARINE REvirw. These two com- panies handle 95 per cent of their freight on skids. This includes less than carload cargo of almost every de- scription. The Pioneer line, Berkeley Transpor- tation Co., Petaluma & Santa Rosa Railroad Barge line, all use skids on the dock and for carrying cargo on the barges, finding that the skids cut cargo handling. costs, reduce claims and ex- pedite the dispatch of the barges. It will be recalled that the Fay Trans- portation Co. when hand trucks were used, discharged around 13,000 cases of canned goods from the barges in approximately three days. By operat- ing with skids and lift trucks, 11,000 cases are discharged in a total of about three hours. There would seem to be an oppor- tunity to cut costs and expedite barges and other craft in New York and other Atlantic coast harbors by adopting the skid and lift truck method which has proved so success- ful on the West coast in handling everything from pig lead to baby carriages. A recent development on the Pa- cific coast of great interest, is the Kane hatch cover, developed by Cap- tain Kane of the American Hawaiian organization at San Francisco. It is a wooden hatch cover designed to reduce handling, reduce accidents and reduce repair and replacement costs." The covers are made up in sections of two spruce planks ten feet long, riveted together. The weather deck covers are five inches thick, the other covers, 4 inches thick. The end of each cover is protected by a three- inch 22 gage steel band that goes around the entire end. See accom- Panying illustration. This reduces repair and replacement costs because Stacking Bags of Sugar on Conveyor for Removal From Shipside at Crockett, Calif. it is on the ends that breakage usu- ally occurs. The long length de- creases handling costs and keeps longshoremen from using hatches covers for dunnage, levers, etc. The handles, or grips, are off center so that a longshoreman cannot get his hands caught. Lack of this feature has caused accidents. In: one case brought to my attention, a man was pulled into the hold when a hatch cover fell because his fingers caught in the handlé ‘of the cover. Repairs and Renewals Cost Less Captain Kane states that these covers should last five to six years and that repairs and replacements should not exceed $50 a ship a year. The strongback arrangements on the older ships of the line have been changed by Captain Kane so that they conform to modern ideas by eliminating fore and aft strongbacks ‘and replacing with the usual modern type of strongback. On one ship this change has made it possible to clear the hatch in four hoists as com- pared with 19 hoists formerly. I also talked with Captain Kane relative to the cargo light developed by him and described in the June is- sue. The Kane cargo light gives bet- ter results than four ordinary cargo lights. The secret in obtaining the best results is in the proper placing ‘of the brackets. The lack of a standardized nomen- clature for cargo handling gear causes a lot of lost motion when one ~ is traveling. Platform slings par- ticularly are called by many names, plasterboards, nail boards, airplane slings, dishes—these are only a few. Industrial practice has shown that determining on the best name for a given article is well worth the effort. To work out a standard nomencla- ture, some central agency is needed. An organization of stevedores and others interested in cargo handling should be formed for the interchange of information and creation of stand- ard names and practices. Significant developments are tak- ing place on the Pacific coast in re- spect to developments of standard practices that may lead to great economies and improvement in safe- ty of personnel. Package of Lumber Held Together by MARINE REview—August, 1931 Steel Strapping for Convenience in Shipping 67