Well……. we happened to be in Pearl working on a schedule for the destroyers called the pineapple fleet. Their patrol area was the middle Pacific up to Alaska. I really don’t know haw far south they went. My job was in the light machine shop running all the various machines as the work order required. Most of the work was routine stuff. Make new shafts, rework pipe flanges, machine the large bearings that the foundry had re poured, do engraving, and that sort of thing. One day a ship came in with a large flexible coupling that was giving them fits. This coupling was a two ring piece with one ring fitting inside the other. Each ring had a series of slots around it. The outside ring had the slots on the inside and the inside ring had the slots on the outside. The slots on both pieces lined up. These slots held a series of pieces of spring steel all the way around the coupling. Each slot held about 10 pieces of spring material. The problem was that the torque when the coupling was engaged was such that it was destroying the spring material like a large pair of scissors. Not as quickly as that but never the less it was a serious operational problem for the destroyer. When the coupling was brought to our shop we were told that the shipyard had refused the job because the changes were too extensive for them to handle. Now this destroyer was in a big fix. It was due to deploy to the north Pacific and they were not able to put to sea without their main shaft. WE WERE THE LAST HOPE!!!!! Well now, we were known as the “can do” ship and this very large coupling was NOT going to mar our reputation. We went to work around the clock. Setting this thing up required a lot innovation in set-up and custom tool grinding. There were about 5 or 6 of us that worked on this, but MY part was the most important (I’m not sure the other guys agree). After a number of loooooong days we took the coupling off of the machine and assembled it. Everything fit perfectly! It was delivered to the ship and installed by the machinist mates right under the wire, just in time for putting to sea as an integral part of our defense system in the north pacific.