1:48 Engine Room #3 Battleship USS New Jersey for Permanent Display on Board.

[Builder 2010]

I spent much of my build time creating a set of numbers on stalks that are going to call out the various components folks are viewing. It will tie into the key that will be attached to the inside of the rear acrylic case. They are not large and will be unobtrusive. This little drawing job should not have taken as long as it did. SketchUp kept crashing when doing the Move/Copy function to rotate and copy each number to the other 3 faces of the cubes. It seemed to have crasked on every other cube. Some crashes were the "Beach Ball of Death", something that happens on Apple computers when the program is hanging. Other times, SketchUp just shut down. Each time, I had to reload, catch the backupped file and get back to work. Wasted time!

I then got back downstains and worked on the other bulkhead. After epoxying the stiffeners in place and cured… hard!, I noticed a error I made. On the fore bulkhead I correctly had the stiffeners on the small chunk of the #2 fire room's hold floor. But on the aft bulkhead, I made a mistake way back in the initial design stage of the flooring system. I incorrectly used the tabs from the cross-lap joints. These are not the floor height, but represent the 2nd skin height. I had mounted that small strip thinking that was the floor level.

If the epoxy wasn't so darn efficient I could have removed the now-secure stiffeners and revised the flooring system, but alas, the epoxy worked way too well and cured way too quickly.

I'm going to add the hold floor strip and added verticals in preparation for this. It will be different than the other bulkhead and it will be interesting to find out how many viewers notice the diffence. It will appear that the stiffeners penetrate the hold floor to the 2nd skin. For all I know, this may be just how they're tied into the ship's structure. Tomorrow I will add the floor strip on top of the new parts simulating the hold floor. The clue that I made a mistake was the stiffeners not going up to the top of the bulkhead cutaway wall.

I'm also going to glue in the propeller shaft seals into the bulkheads since they're going to need epoxy as well and it's much better to do it before painting. Other stuff also connects to these walls, but I'm not ready to add them. These parts include all three of the air ejectors and the high pressure turbine's mounting bracket. If I have to, I'll remove paint in these areas or mask them for better epoxy adhesion.

For some reason, I was considering the aft bulkhead as something different than the forward one, whereas they should have been treated alike. They both should have had full height extensions to support the little bit of fire room hold floors that would have supported the stiffeners. By just having the cross-lap extensions on the aft, threw me a curve that didn't cross the plate until too late.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Gnomey]

Excellent work so far!

 

[Builder 2010]

Friday's work consisted of finding that the prop shaft coming from the main reduction gear was also misaligned with the hole in the rear bulkhead and required the same surgical procedure that I used for the through prop shaft #1. Again, I doubled its thickness to provide a gluing lip for strength. Even though the cut was a bit irregular, I traced it on the new piecce so there's not too much filling to be done.

After clamping and gluing, I smeared some Tamiya Fine Filler on and will sand this joint and the other one tomorrow.

I printed the callout numbers 1,5X larger than my first attempt and these should do nicely. I've kept the smaller ones as they may prove handy for smaller equipement or hard to reach places. I've identified 26 pieces of interest in the model.

I finished designing the lube oil purifier. It's a centrifuge that spins out any particulates that are entrained in the oil. I only had one, not-so-hot photo on which to base the model. On the main drawings I was able to pick out the overall footprint and height so I know it's not grotesquely out of proportion. It sits under the evaporators and will be hard to pick out therefore, I will be counting on the lighting installed to give it some life. I have absolutely no idea where those pipes actually go.

The last thing I did today was add some leveling shims on the lattice frame and then measure, cut and fit the 0.030" syrene sheet flooring. There are two halves since they both slope towards the outside from the ship's center line so wall will run off to the bilge scuppers at the extreme corners. This isn't glued it and won't be until the painting of the of the lattice is completed.

Weather might be okay a couple of days this week to do this painting outdoors. Two more parts to finalize and draw and we're onto paint and assembly. I'm at the stage where the assembly order becomes critical. I already saw how difficult it can be when attempting to get the main gear box and its prop shaft through the bearing. I may have to glue the bearing in AFTER the gear box is installed. Lots of work still to do. I'm now a the point where I will actually be building a model.

 

[Vic Balshaw]

Looking good.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Builder 2010]

Got two things accomplished today: painted the red primer on the underfloor and printed the Lube Oil Purifier.

I masked the parts that were to remain white. I didn't want to have to paint white over red primer. I then took it outside, donned my vapor mask and safety googles and started spraying from the can, Rust-oleum red primer and got half way through. The nozzle clogged up. Can was half full. I called the ACE hardware nearby and asked if they sold Rust-oluem spray and they did. I drove over there in rush hour traffic and they didn't have the color. But the salesperson asked if I had any other cans of paint and if so, use a nozzle from one of those. I got home, got another nozzle, and it worked fine. I finished the job.

It's amazing how much sloppy workmanship that paint covers...

I also glued the support legs into the two deck frames with thick CA and then had to level the Main Air Ejector's frame with the TGs frame to which it's attached. I glued the shims on with CA. There may need to be more shims to make those upper surfaces level while sitting on the sloping hold deck halves.

Lastly, here's one of the two Lube Purifiers that I printed (always print more) and this one was perfect. The other had a small pipe that failed to print well.

Till tomorrow...

 

[Wurger]

 

[syscom3]

The voids in the lower floor, is that where the bunker oil is stored?

 

[Gnomey]

Great work so far!

 

[Builder 2010]

Some places are filled with fuel, others with water. Not every void is filled and the volume is balanced like they do in an aircraft to trim the ship.

Ryan sent me a load of pictures yesterday including the main gauge board. He also sent images of the ambiguous electrical cabinet that I needed to finalize the upper mezzanine and images of cabinets on the lower mezzanine. The latter are very hard for me to interpret since it doesn't show the entire array or how the images realted to one another. Lastly, he sent pics of the lube oil storage tank and the strainer that sits below it. Again, the strainer pipiing is covered with insulation and is difficult to understand. He missed the lube oil settling tank of which he wasn't too familiar. It's on the same level as the main gauge board and sits against the side wall. I'm not sure about including either tank. The storage tank can be supported by the aft bulkhead, but may block views. Since I'm not including any side walls, the settling tank will have nothing to support it. It would also block the view of the gauge board which is much more important.

The three pics of the gauge board were shot standing facing the middle and then simply turning to face right and left for the other views. This created a very distorted series that needed to be edited before I could use it as a drawing guide. I downloaded the three images into Corel PhotoPaint and redid the perspective on all of them so they could be merged into a single, reasonably-sized image. Then I was able to draw the panel.

The raw images:

My edited composite:

A rendering of the final drawing:

And the panel set up on the slicer for printing. It's being printed as I write this. The main gauge board has the RPM prop shaft counters for the other three engine rooms so the chief engineer can keep an eye on them. There are also other gauges and controls that are not present on the other three panels.

I would love to have decals for the gauge faces, but can produce them in my shop. Inkjet decals, when they are very small, tend to have the ink run even when they are properly overcoated with sealent. Inkjet ink is water soluble. Professional decals are either silk screened or printed on other machines that can print white. I'm sure it I wanted to pay for them, I could get them custom made, but this model gets donated and I manage my costs closely.

I still have to finalize the Lube Oil Tank situation, the electrical cabinetry, and the piping configuration to the large lube oil cooler. The cooler resides on the hold floor below the line of the lower diamond plate personnel flooring, so it's piping is mostly concealed. It needs coolant inlet and outlet, and lube inlet and outlet, but there's two more outlets unaccounted for. It may be that each pump has piping to the cooler, but I don't know. I haven't found any information about this. Lastly, I have to created the telephone booth that sits beside the main board. With that done, all printing will be finished.

I fitted the floors and then applied the equipment again to test fits. First the lattice painted. Stil have to mask it and paint the white styrene gloss white.

Becasue you can look through all the holes is why I had to paint the whole deal.

The floor fitting.

Notice those angles of all the drive lines. The props are not square to the ship's centerline. Probably helps pushing the ship in a straight line like alignment settings on a car's front end do.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Vic Balshaw]

That last pic, lots of pieces and you don't have a step by step pic to follow. Scary!

 

[Builder 2010]

The main gauge board printed… sort of. I had made the classic Drawing for 3D Printing error. I had parts that weren't actually contacting the surface on which they should have been. I wrote about this error in my book "21st Century Modeling…" so I should have known better. All the other details printed perfectly, but the part is scrap. I corrected the drawing and will reprint on Monday.

Notice that all the small gauges are either missing or deformed.

The reason: Almost all the small gauges were sitting proud of the surface by a very small amount only seen when you orbit and look directly at it from the side and zoom in.

It didn't take long to correct the drawing and re-slice it. When designing for printing (like anything else) the details will kill you. It's very hard sometimes to see if surfaces are truly in contact. That said, the details that did print are impressive.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Builder 2010]

Before printing the new gauge board I had to empty all the resin and remove the little gauge circles that were not attached to the panel. When the printer attempts to print an unsupported aspect, it will start to form on the teflon vat bottom film and then at the next cycle, when the machine attempts to separate the forming part from the film, it leaves the unsupported blob on the film. It will continue to acrete more resin since the LCD is still exposing that spot. This will continue until the blob is thick enough block the UV light and it just sits there. If it gets very high, it can apply significant pressure on the LCD screne when the lead screw is bringing the build plate down to print position, and possibly crack the screen. Never, ever start a new print after a failure without first emptying the vat, inspecting for anythign stuck to the film and removing it.

When I re-ran the corrected-drawing version of the main gauge panel, I was greeted with a perfectly beautifully printed object. The little bumps you see on some of the gauge edges are very tiny supports that the slicer automatically placed there to catch a face that would start printing before the panel behind it. If unsupported, there would be risk that the gauge face would not form properly.

While this print was running I started working more intensely on fitting the big equipement. The weather wasn't conducive to painting the floor panels, and I'm glad I didn't since I had to cut the opening for the main condensers big piping. The was a classic trial and error afair and took most of the afternoon. It was made more difficult because the parts were not fastened together and it resembled herding cats. I finally resorted to taping it together. Because the intake and discharge coolant pipes exit on opposing angles. I had to keep enlarging and changing the opennings' size and contours to get it to work.

In addition to the holes in the floors I also had to open up the lattice below to accept the piping. After chopping and hacking as shown in the picture, I ended up cutting out that wall entirely. i did the same thing to accept the intake for the steam condensate pump.

In my drawing I noticed that the condenser was sitting about 1/8" too low causing the low pressure turbine's output shaft to misalign with the main reduction gear LP input shaft. I knew I had to shim it up and did that today so the piping would be sitting at the correct height. I also am thinking about tapering the ship to level the LP mount to account for the deck slope angle.

The extra large holes are just aching to have a trim plate to close them off. In the 1:1 ship there is an elaborate series of plates and seals that surround the condensate piping as it passes through the triple bottom. Afteral it has to be watertight. On the model you wouldn't see it, plus building it would be darn near impossible. I also started preparing the main reduction gear housing. There was an unseemly gap on the port starboard joint edge caused by a stuborn warp. In preparation I used some J-B Weld epoxy putting, put some Pess-n-Seal on the flat side and put the putting in a string on the film. I clamped the upper, warped half in place in a wood workers vice and squeezed out the excess until it was fully sealed. I'll finish sand it tomorrow and drill the holes for the small screws that I'm using to hold it together. I don't want to glue the beast since I want to be able to assemble it on the model and screws are the correct choice.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Gnomey]

Excellent work so far!

 

[Builder 2010]

When I said that the panel came out well, I was not kidding. Both copies are as good as I can expect. The printer still amazes me as to what it resolves and how stable those micro-details hold up. I hope my painting skills are up to the task.

I finally got around to doing my lighting test. I want to apply the copper foil for the surface mount LEDs directly on the UV resin with the assumption that since it does not melt—like sytrene does—so I should be able to solder directly on it. I wasn't going to try this on a good part. I tried it on a scrap main steam pipe. Here's the foil well adhered to the cured resin.

And then with an LED soldered to it. These LEDs are cool white which should replicate florescent lighting pretty well. Not only was the resin unaffected by the solder operation, the tape was actually stuck tighter after solding.

These LEDs were 200 for a little over $6.00 USD. That's about 3 cents/LED… almost free!

I also wanted to light the electrical panel just for fun. I made wire access available in the design. I thought I had tiny clear LEDs that were pre-wired, but could only find the colored ones, so I tried it with an incandescent grain-of-rice bulb… strictly old school. Took a bit of work to get the wiring fished to the bottom, but the experiment worked. The copper foil is serving as a light block since the resin is a bit translucent. I may use the foil block even on the real one before painting just to ensure that the light only goes where I want it to go. This is a junk part.

With the experimental success I got to work doing the actual lighting on the undersides of various frames that will have equipment lying below that I want seen. The first is the underside of the upper mezzanine to light the lower level electrical cabinets. These tiny LEDs have a polarity marking on their underside and a tiny green mark denoting the positive pole on the top. I mistook this mark as the negative pole at one point and kept fussing until I finally figured it out.

The first image is the circuit trail showing the 1mm gaps where the LEDs will go. I tin the gaps and the ends where the power leads will go.

I trimmed the foil so it just covers the beam, although this frame gets a solid "Linoleum" decking so seeing the underside will not be easily seen.

After putting the LEDs on I tested it. My 12 VDC source can only drive 3 LEDs in series. I could run many more in parallel, but the CL2N3 LED driver chips don't like parallel circuits. If I need more LEDs I wold have to run another series string driver by another CL2N3.

After the test, I put a tiny piece of Tamiya masking tape on each LED so I can paint the frame. When painted, the lighting circuit will be almost invisible.

Next up was the turbogenerators frame. This required only two lights to illuminate the underside. It was more difficult to run the foil and I broke off one of the support poles. No problem, it will be pinned and reglued tomorrow. Normally, when I make corners with the foll I do it like I learned to do it when putting foil on windows when i installed burglar alarms in the 1970s (moonlight job). But when I can't fold the foil and do the corner bend, you just lay the new foil over the old and apply some sollder just to make sure that there's a good circuit.

While this work was going on the printer was creating another masterpiece: the upper mezzanine electrical cabinetry. Armed with Ryan's latest images I was able to finish up the design. The printer reprocded every hand grab and toggle. It's draining on the machine and will be cleaned up and post-cured tomorrow.

The last thing on today's report was finalizing the screw system on the Main Reduction Gear housing. I am not gluing this assembly. The screws extend down below the lip. I will trim them off after final assembly—if I can do it without wrecking anything. I will try it first on the scrap housing.

I was hoping to paint the hold floor panels today, but the weather got bit wild with lightening at the time I wanted to do it. It was a busy and successful.

 

[Vic Balshaw]

Those panels.................................so good!