What it takes to float their boats

The museum's well-designed exhibits and hands-on activities bring to life a mariner's hard existence in days of yore, right down to scary dental tools for yanking out teeth, a last-resort pain remedy far from shore. But the museum doesn't just dwell in the past.

"One of our goals," said Amy Lent, executive director, "is to connect people with contemporary maritime industries through workshops and exhibits."

This summer's exhibit, "Net Worth," opening May 2, will examine the rise and fall of Maine's fin fisheries, and follow the social, political, and environmental impact on everything from working waterfronts to real estate.

"Shipbuilding is absolutely the number one influence on the economy and character of Maine in history and today," said Lent. It also creates some of the museum's most engaging activities. Part of the property is the Percy & Small Shipyard where four-, five-, and six-masted wooden schooners were built from 1896 to 1920. In five of the original buildings, the process is reconstructed from lofting to launching. Two vessels are especially popular with children: a hands-on tugboat and an authentically rigged 50-foot pirate ship.

A trolley tour of General Dynamics' Bath Iron Works is not to be missed. The one-hour guided tour begins at the museum, which this year increased the schedule to five times per week. Last year most tours sold out.

Minus cameras, cellphones, large purses, and backpacks - forbidden for national security reasons - we entered the south gate of the Iron Works on an old-fashioned green trolley that looked ridiculous beside mammoth assembly buildings and towering cranes. Before the 2001 terrorist attacks, it was relatively easy to get behind the scenes if you knew a shipyard worker, but now precautions are strict. The names and citizenship of all 20 tourists were required for a list the museum submitted before we were allowed in.

"After 9/11 we stopped all visits other than those directly related to our business with the US Navy, even veterans groups," Jim DeMartini, the communications manager, said later. "But it didn't feel good. A lot of us are Navy veterans and reservists and we're all proud of what we do. When the museum came to us about reinstating the tours, we agreed. . . . It gives us the opportunity to show the public what we do and how proud we are of the tremendous skill it takes to build a Navy warship."

Unless you have lived aboard a ship, you do not understand the complexity of what goes into it, said DeMartini. Even what is visible from the trolley boggles the mind. We rolled slowly past assembly buildings, each 110 feet wide, 236 feet deep, and 72 feet high. We got pretty close to the action, though not indoors and never off our seats.

The Bath Iron Works builds destroyers in modules called Mega Units. Each module, one-third of a ship, weighs 100 tons and looks sliced as if cut top to bottom, giving us cutaway views. Soon, construction will switch to Ultra Hull units up to 176 feet in length and 50 feet high. We waved at welders, pipe assemblers, and electricians. The color of their hardhats - white, purple, green, brown, yellow, gray - identified their trade.

Bath Iron Works built its first Navy ship, the gunboat USS Machias, in 1893 and its first commercial ship a year later. Its 425 shipbuilding contracts have included 245 military ships and more than 160 private yachts and commercial vessels, including the yacht Ranger, winner of the America's Cup in 1937. During World War II, crews worked around the clock building 82 destroyers for the Navy. At the peak, they delivered one ship every 17 days. The Bath Iron Works is completing its contract for AEGIS guided missile destroyers, underway since 1985, and this year begins building the Navy's newest model, a Zumwalt class destroyer; orders for future contracts are uncertain.

Ray Ingraham, a tour guide and retired destroyer engineering manager, described the fabrication process, the old launching ways, and the current Land Level Transfer Facility that enables workers to complete 85 percent of construction on dry land and move the nearly complete ship to dry dock for launching in the Kennebec River.

From the time the steel arrives by rail, it takes 42 months to build a guided missile destroyer. An AEGIS class ship requires 48 miles of piping, 254 miles of electrical cable, 6,500 light fixtures, and 6,200 tons of steel.

We were surprised to learn that the 750-foot-long dry dock was built in China and, with three giant cranes lashed inside, traveled by ocean on a six-month journey, through two typhoons and a storm in the Gulf of Maine.

Janet Mendelsohn can be reached at janet@janetmendelsohn.com.