special care is necessary to ensure the inserted section is sufficiently strongly built in; particularly if it has to bear the burden of the engines as it did in the Prince Consort class. Exceptionally stout timbering was therefore used for the purpose in those ships; even with that their central structure sometimes exhibit signs of stress giving rise to trouble in a minor degree." "Although the added central section had a full bilge throughout, their floors rose in the old fashion forward and aft, because their underwater lines had taken shape before conversion was ordered and could not be altered without an almost entire rebuilding of the ship. This reduced the carrying capacity of the hull compared with that of a full bodied vessel such as the Bellerophon; but retained a good model for easy movement and contributed to their excellent steering qualities alike under steam and sail." The bows of the Bulwark class were of the normal knee-shape for wooden warships. When they were converted to ironclads, the Prince Consorts and the Royal Oak were completed with stems approaching the upright above water, and this style, which was so much decried at first, had by the late-1860s won aesthetic approval. "The bow has been modified in order to dispense with overhanging weight, to increase its fitness to cleave and surmount waves, and to adapt it for ramming purposes." Though they did not have underwater rams. "The stern has been modified in order to give protection to the rudder-head, to deflect raking shot, and to render it more fit to receive easily the blows of following waves."" "Aft the overhang of the counter was narrowed to an oval termination foreshadowing what became the normal battleship type of stern thirty years later, except that the counter was above water instead of below. As these were the first vessels with that novel design of stern they were often called 'double-enders' until the design became so common as to suggest no peculiarity." "The upper parts of the wooden rudder... showed above water, and the rudder was of the old narrow unbalanced type with a bronze neck socket to receive an iron double-tillered norman head." As wooden-hulled ships the Prince Consorts and the Royal Oak lacked the double bottom and water-tight bulkheads given to iron-hulled vessels. However, at the time people did not consider these things necessary for wooden ships, whose sides and bottoms