The rough forging of a shell body, rolled and pressed to suitable dimensions from a steel billet, is an uncouth-looking object, resembling as much as anything one of those upright earthenware umbrella-stands to be found in any cheap furnishing store; and with a view to licking it into shape, to turning it as quickly as possible into the smoothly finished article it was destined to become, Mr. Cooke's representative, on his return from Woolwich, having, as a preliminary, set in motion the machinery necessary for a supply of gauges, forthwith proceeded to improvise a further series of machines and tools, calculating the nature and number required for a given output of shells per month, and mapping out a plan whereby the various operations should follow one another from start to finish in correct and regular sequence. How important is the strict adherence to a regular sequence of operations is borne out by the fact that a shell might easily be ruined in the event of any operation being performed out of its turn. A convenient and suitable _locale_ in which to lay out this shell-manufacturing plant was found available in a previously unoccupied extension of the new fitting shop; and as in the case of fuse manufacture at the old works fitting shop, so in the present instance, members of the fair sex were destined to figure prominently--a little band of neatly attired novices, some 150 strong, speedily responding to the call, and ranging themselves under the immediate supervision of a suitable quorum of expert mechanics of the sterner sex. [Illustration: 6-INCH SHELL MANUFACTURE IN THE NEW FITTING SHOP, CREWE WORKS. [_To face p. 112._] A multiple cutter-milling machine, formerly habituated to the peace-time art of facing locomotive cylinders, suddenly found itself saddled with a row of a dozen shell forgings, the open ends of which it faced to a correct distance from the inside of the base. Thenceforward, engine and turret-lathes deftly manipulated by our little friends of the fair element bore the onus of the succeeding operations. Ordinary engine lathes were eminently suitable for operations such as centring, rough and finished turning, grooving and external blending and turning copper bands. Then, thanks to the facility with which the various tools can be swung round in the lathe-turret and brought to bear on the work, turret-lathes were employed on operations such as rough and finished boring, internal blending, recessing and facing. Rough turning on a fluted mandrel, rough and finished boring, and internal blending, in a concentric chuck secured to the face-plate of the lathe, are operations quickly disposed of. "Blending," needless to say, produces in the mind an impression of smoothness and of harmony: smoothness unscored, that is, of the walls and base; harmony complete between the two, and indispensable.