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

Great work so far!

It took an army of people to do that, and all with slide rules and drawing boards. There were literally hundreds of engineers and draftsman creating the drawing needed to build a ship. Futhermore, there were specialists at the companies making the subsystems like turbines, reduction gears, condensers, switchgear, etc., etc.

I got all of today's punchlist items completed and even some more. The new prints were successful, the parts were cleaned, post-cured and painted ready for assembly tomorrow. I used the vinyl cutter to cut more striping for the output prop shaft from this engine room and applied the vinyl to the part. I added the double-sided, foam, servo-tape to the bottom of all the "concrete" support block, and cut and installed with epoxy the conduit tubes that now continue down all the way to the bottom of the mounting blocks. I printed out and coated the pipe identifying decals and will apply those over the next few days.

You only see a little bit of the output prop shaft from the gear box, but it's there and I had to add it.



Here's what you see on the ship. There is a sheild around the prop shaft-bulkhead seal that obscures part of the striping. I'm not including the shield.



I didn't like the open bottom of the lube oil settling tank, so I closed it up with styrene and then painted it today.



Here's the new work platform that will be glued directly to the evaporator platform, and the little legs tie to part of the main gear box.



And here's another batch of floor grates. The doubling of the outside perimeter wall worked in preventing any damage during support removal.



Tomorrow should be another productive day.

The new floor add-on connecting the evaporator deck to the main gear box is grated and ready for installation. It's a shame that I finally figured out how to print perfect grates at the last one I need to do… Oh well. If some other Iowa battleship wants an engine room, I have it figured out.



I trimmed the key list graphics and glued them back to back using the 3M Transfer Tape. I will use the same method to glue it the rear inside face of Plexiglass after the case is built. That way, the kay will be visible from both sides.



And here's the new work platform on the lower level. I'll paint it tomorrow.



Tomorrow's another day...

Excellent work so far!

Not much to show today, but I did get stuff done. Painted the new work platforms, repainted the low and high pressure turbine cases, painted the new piping and glued the main air ejector to its angle bracket that will hold it to the bulkhead.

And I have a picture of the completed base from my friend Bryant, and, as usual, it's a piece of furniture. All the finishes and sanding are done, but it has to cure for a week before he can ship it. It's coming at the perfect time since I'm almost done messing with all the subassemblies and am ready to start putting together an ENGINE ROOM.

All of the punchlist items up to getting the base from Bryant are done. That means I have a week where nothing's going to happen on the engine room. Today I did all the decaling and touchup painting. I made the hookups for the power supply and the power switch and tested it with the main steam line which has 3 LEDs on its bottom. There's nothing left to do until I actually start tying down all the assemblies to the base and that doesn't happen until the model is secured to the base.



Decals designate the output RPMs of the main propulsion system.



I was unhappy with how the decal looks on the main reduction gear, but don't know what to do about it. I used flat paint on the gear box and didn't want to gloss coat it before applying the decal. That was probably a mistake.

I applied decals to the pass-thru prop shafts from ERs 1 & 2.



Again the flat paint was a problem. I applied some Testor's Dullcoat to them to help blend them in, but it's still not my best work.

The cross-over pipe is identified with its steam flow pressure and direction.



And all the main pipes to and from the auxiliaries are identified the same way. The piping on the 1:1 ship is also identified similarly, so I'm following the prototype.



And I got the power supply and switch all tied into the power distribution board, so they're ready for install as soon as the baseboard arrives.



So… work is paused for about a week. I will clean up the shop a bit, and then have some more mundane home maintenance projects. There's some water areas that are in need of some caulking...

I got a commission 3D printing job which got me back into the shop. I'm still working on some nagging punchlist items. One of these was the mismatch in levels between the two turbines and its effect on the crossover pipe. I also didn't like the very small surface area I had to glue said pipe in place. To remedy that I made round spacers and fill pieces for the two junctions.

This one is for the LP turbine...



And a broader one for the HP turbibe outlet.



Then a massive problem arrived. The LP turbine was sitting low and needed shimming so it matched the elevation of the main gear box LP inpu shaft. I made the spacer out of laminated styrene (as I used on the LP pipe spacer) and after glue set, shaped the edges so they looked decent. I also needed to further flatten the LP's bottom surface. This when the trouble hit. Unbeknownst to me, I had voids in the part that contained un-cured resin. I was aware about voids being potential trouble, but when I designed this part early in the project, I inadvertently created some. The wasn't an issue until I put the turbine on the belt sander an opened up the voids spilling raw resin all over the bottom and up the sides.



I had to remove it using 99% Isopropyl alcohol and it started to eat into the nice repaint job I did last week and made a complete mess of this finished part. I put the part into the post-cure chamber to harder any liquid resin still remaining. The side with the "10s" on it (denoting the location of the astern turbines) and decided to remove the vinyl letters so i could sand down the damage and repaint without worrying about them. I set up the vinyl cutter and just cut some more. Like 3D printing, having the vinyl cutter means I can fix screwups without to much hassle. I then remasked and airbrushed white to restore the turbine. Alls well that ends well and it looks okay. If worse came to worse, I could have reprinted the entire turbine, but wasn't looking forward to that.

Here's the spacer...



And the refurbished turbine. I had to remove the LP RPM decal and have extras of that also, and will replace all graphics elements tomorrow.



I also printed a copyright plate to be attached directly on the model, not on the name plate. I did them in differnt colors. Any favorites. You can't see it, but that's two different shades of gold.



The wooden base is shipped and I'll recieve it on Monday. Then the real fun begins. I am still anxious about locating all the mounting pins on all the various legs and columns to permanently mount all this stuff.

Middle one.

Great work so far!

Middle one? I chose the top one and applied it today using the 3M transfer tape.



Working on the last punchlist items… I knew that the fit between the turbines and the gear box needed some work and now was the time to do it. One problem was the LP shaft in the gear box was not long enough to reach the turbine, especially now that the turbine is actually almost a half inch more forward that I thought. I had printed a new torque tube to accomodate this, but the shaft needed lengthening. It wouldn't have mattered, but the tube is cut away so intrepid viewers can see the shafting inside. Instead of fussing trying to add length to the 3D printed pinion shaft, I found a piece of brass tubing that just slipped over. Problem solved. All I had to do was make it look like steel. I used Bare Metal Foil to give it a silver coating. I could have painted it, but this way was cleeaner and faster.



With the shaft now the correct length I was able to finish painting the torque tubes with the red cutaway edges and then epoxy them to the gear box end covers. I'm not going to worry about gluing it to the turbines. The glue surface there is rather skimpy.



With everything just fitted up for measurement purposes, here's how the torque tubes look when sitting properly.



I tried the cross-room bridge to see how it aligned and it laid in very nicely. Remember, all of this stuff gets fastened AFTER the bare model is attached to the base.



I also removed the bad decal from the top of the MRG, repainted and applied new numbers and decal. This time, I faced it in the same reading direction as the graphics on the turbines. I had it reversed before and it bugged me. Another thing that's really bugging me is that the Mission Models Dark Ghost Gray doesn't match the previous bottle that I used for a lot of the apparatus. It's leaning towards purple. I can't seem to match the color gray that I used many months ago. It's so different that I'm thinking about repainting the rest of the gear box to match. I'm trying these paints, but am not happy. If you don't add the polymer additive, the paint is very fragile, all pigment and little binder. I'm using Pledge with Future as the acrylic binder. They sell their own additive, but you can get a lot of Future for the same price. I used GlossCoat before applying the decal and then Dullcoat after the decal set and it's a much better looking job than before.



We went out to dinner tonight and while driving the car I realized that I didn't add any information about the horsepower output from the turbines. I'm going to add that. Also, according to UPS, the wooden base arrives on Monday. Next week is going to be interesting...

Excellent work so far!

Limited time today, but milestone anyway. First up, I repainted the entire gear box. I will reapply the numbers and decals next session. The paint now meets my expectations.



And the milestone is the base arrived perfectly.



I plopped the model on it just to make sure that all my measurements were correct. Thankfully, everything works!





Tomorrow it the Jewish New Year so I won't be in the shop, but I will on Wednesday. I will be taking the base to General Rubber and Plastics to have them measure for the plexiglass. When the order is made, I will start the process of making the base and the model ready to be joined. After joining, I will be mounting everything that will make it an engine room. Stay tuned. We are rounding the final turn.

Great work so far!