The building of ships, engines, locomotives, machine tools and large machines for a great diversity of purposes necessitates bringing together the products of several different shops. While each of these shops considered alone is virtually a place for the re-manufacture of metals along its own particular lines, the assembled products of the several shops present such a diversity of construction and each machine or structure so built has so distinctive an identity of its own, that an establishment made up of an assemblage of such shops is regarded as beyond the limitations of a re-manufacturing plant.

For example, a ship or a locomotive is a much more distinctive product than the plates, castings, bolts, rivets, pipes, etc., which compose it, and the assemblage in one establishment of the different metal-working shops required to build either embodies the capacity for turning out, quite as readily, machines or structures of many other kinds.

Assemblages of shops capable of uniting such a diversity of rolling mill and re-manufactured products into highly complex constructions are also most advantageously fitted as general repair shops, and particularly, because of its accessibility, is a shipbuilding plant also an extensive ship-repairing plant.