I have a good related story for this:
My grandfather was an engineer and a welder during WWII. He first worked at the Bremerton shipyards near Seattle. He was offered a job to work at the Hanford Site in eastern Washington.
His job there? His group welded together the outer shell/casing of the Fat Man bombs. The designs and plans and original ideas came from Los Alamos, but the actual steel shell of the things were built in Hanford.
THAT is a fabulous story FRiend, and I’m not trying to play “can you top this”, but my Uncle Tommy was also a welder in the Kaiser shipyards out in California during the war, and as the story goes (handed down of course), one day they put out a call for welders to work on a classified project, paid triple wages in cash, had to pass an FBI background investigation.
My Uncle Tommy passed the background check, said they put him and a bunch of welders on a bus with blacked out windows, drove what seemed like forever, and dumped them all in the middle of an arid prairie like area, with tents to live in, steel girders, and blueprints to build a radio tower in the middle of nowhere.
They built the tower, got paid, sworn to secrecy and shipped back to California.
It was sometime in 1946 (?) that my Uncle was looking at a Life Magazine and yelled to my Aunt “they blew up my damn tower, the sons o’ bitches!” and that was when he learned that he had helped assist in the construction of the tower used for the Trinity test in July 1945.
His was only a peripheral role, but YOUR Grandfather?
Holy smokes, he helped build history, and I tip my hat to him, and to you.
Here in a little info with some dates that might put your grandfather in context.
http://www.atomicarchive.com/History/mp/p4s23.shtml