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

[Builder 2010]

Thanks guys! It's always a test. While sanding and filing the rotor and upper back part, I droppd them on the concrete shop floor. The housing got its nose knocked off, and the rotor lost the small diameter extenision. It's the reason I don't throw away bad parts. I was able to cut the nose off a junker and graft it to the new housing. The fix is undetectable.

This series shows the evolution of the blade design. To quote Tim Allen in Galaxy Quest, "Never give up, never surrender!" As an eternal optimist I always think there's an answer.

The oblique view shows how nice the big wheel is and that you can perceive blades on all the rest.

I wanted to reprint the now-broken pump-end cap, but inadvertently printed an older version of both ends. The other end actually came out better than the one I kept so I'm exchanging them. The other—the one I wanted—was the wrong version, so I re-set it up on the slicer and will print it later tonight. The improved lower housing is finishing up on the printer right now. That fixes the incorrect profiles I discussed yesterday.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Gnomey]

Great work so far!

 

[Builder 2010]

The new LP Turbine base was a big success! Therefore; I'm declaring this piece of apparatus done and ready for paint and assembly. Of course there's a lot more to do since none of the steam inlet piping or lubrication lines are there. And the main steam line needs to be done in unison with the HP Turbine. The blade design worked very well and from the two views you see just enough to be very convincing. Frankly, it's way more successful that I thought it would be when I dreamed it up.

The enlarged ribs holding up the faux blading is totally out of view further enhancing the effect.

We're heading out of town for a week, so don't look for anything new. I may or may not have the chance to visit the ship while back in Philly. I could use another visit to the engine room to clarify the foundation design for the HP Turbine. I'm getting pretty close to finalizing the design of the Main Condensate Pump Drive, and another visit for that is probably not necessary.

 

[Wurger]

 

[SaparotRob]

You certainly solved the turbine blades issue and you succeeded admirably.

 

[Vic Balshaw]

Well done.

 

[Gnomey]

Excellent work so far!

 

[Builder 2010]

My wife and I are visiting the ship on Thursday. I cajoled her into going with me for the first time. I convinced her to come based on the argument that she saw the bottom, wouldn't it be good to see the part where the people go? I'm going to attempt to get details on the HP turbine foundation and main steam piping runs.

 

[T Bolt]

WOW, Fantastic!!!

 

[Airframes]

Brilliant work !

 

[Builder 2010]

We're back. The ride to Philly was splendid with gorgeous weather both days. The ride home was the polar opposite with clouds, rain, sleet, snow and wind. All that was missing was hail. It took a bit longer, but the car ran perfectly and we arrived unscathed. My wife decided at the last minute that she was not so inteseted in visiting a battleship so I went alone.

With the main condenser and low pressure turbine in pretty good order, I started working on the high pressure turbine and the small impulse turbine that drives the main condensate pump. John Miano got me good drawings of both, but there were stil many ambiguities that I couldn't resolve. Those concerned with the pump engine weren't show stoppers, but the questions surrounding the hp turbine were crucial. The most imoort of these was how the machine is supported. I couldn't find the answer in the drawings. I had to visit the ship again.

Last week, Ryan Syzmanski and I spent and hour and half in the un-refurbished engine room #3 and I focused on three areas: HP details and foundation; Main steam piping runs; and the main condensate pump drive.

Boy! Am I glad I did this. I was completely wrong in my thinking and had two triangular brackets installed on the output end of the main condenser that are actually two of the four that support the startboard side of the main reduction gear, the apparatus that sits BEHIND the condenser in this view. There are also triangular brackets surrounding the MRG on the other three sides. I am assuming that even with the properller shaft's thrust bearing quite a ways astern from the engine rooms, there is still thrust that must be directed into the ship's structure to push the ship forward and these massive supports are part of that system.

The propeller shaft from the engine room forward of this one has a bearing that sits on top of the curved support that's welded to the triangular supports. Thse supports captivate the MRG and it ain't goi'n anywhere! Engine room #3 has shafts running through the lower level from engine rooms 1 & 2. Engine room #4 has three shafts spinning through it.

Just imagine, for a moment, the noise in these spaces when the ship was crusing at flank speed. I counted six steam turbines of various sizes all running. And that's not including the pumps and sub-systems that were run by electric motors. Steam turbines ARE NOT quiet! And propeller shafts spinning 18' props at 220 rpm aren't quiet either. I've read that the MRG makes all kinds of noises too, even when in perfect running order.

I also found that the foundation holding up the massive HP Turbine is a rectagular heavy I-Beamed weldment that is supported on end by additional triangular braces on the forward end of the main reduction gear, and has its other end simply resting on a shelf-like bracket on the boiler-engineer room bulkhead. There are no separate foundation legs or supports holding up the hp turbine. Ryan was surprised to see this since he didn't think the bulkhead thickness had the helf to support a 30,000 pound, vibrating machine.

I took 80 pictures and one 3D scan of the curved inlet end of one of the two auxiliary steam turbine electric generators. I also just discovered that my Scaniverse APP on my iPhone 12 Pro is much more versatile that I knew and that I using the wrong file type to import the processed images into SketchUp.

I have to decipher the images I took. Many are like the analogy of the blind men trying to describe an elephant when each is touching a different part. For example: the main steam pipe runs out of the boiler room bulkhead and the follows a ridiculously long path before reaching the HP turbine. At one point it makes a 180º turn back on itself. We assumed this is all to manage expanision issues since the steam in that pipe is over 800ºF.

I was in areas that most people will never go. Access around the HP turbine, in general, is very tight and visitors would not be allowed there, if (and it's a big if) this room was to be re-conditioned and opened to the public. Making matters worse was most was completely unlit and I had a 1,000 lumen flashlight that I used for most of the images.

Here's a confusing taste of what I saw:

Astern Steam Lines: These lines snake back and forth providing 800# steam to the two astern turbines on each end of the low pressure turbine spool.

The air ejector unit is a rather small and ridiculously complicated maze of piping and valves. It's purpose is to remove entrained oxygen from the feedwater condensate coming out of the condenser before sending it to the boiler room. While I think I can model and print it, I'm not sure why.

There are seven of these cam operated, spring-loaded throttle valves perched on a manifold atop the HP turbine. They are manually operated in sequence by a large hand wheel on the main control board. as the wheel is turned, the cam is moved via a gear box which opens each valve in order to increase or decrease steam inlet. I will be modeling these!

These are water collection points under the HP turbine. Just how much of this I can/will model is anyone's guess at this time. You won't see much of it. I don't yet know where this water ends up. It's hot, as noted by the insulation wrapping, and it's basically distillate and is relatively pure with probably traces of the lubricant and it wouldn't be wasted. I will find out.

Looking up under the HP turbine you can see part of the weldment that holds it up. The large flange on the right side is on of the center joints of the main condenser. The HP turbine nestles up against it.

The other end of the frame rests on this support welded to the boiler room bulkhead. This is a two-image composite.

As you can discern, it's not overly complicated. it will require that some portion of that bulkhead to be included the model. The other suggestion that my older grandson made was to detail the far wall to show the ship's framing and the armor plate installation. Ryan thought that would be a good idea. These is actually very little equipment of interest on the port side of the engine room with the upper deck having electrical switchgear cabinetry and the lower deck being completely bare.

This is the kind of stuff that makes this model both enjoyable and a bit scary. Working with no net!

 

[Vic Balshaw]

Interesting trip weather wise and some good info pics.

 

[Gnomey]

Great stuff!

 

[T Bolt]

Wow, a lot of work ahead of you

 

[Builder 2010]

Thanks guys! Yup! A ton of work, but it's good work! Starting designing the HP Turbine in earnest and concurrently, its foundation. Speaking of foundations, I got another 9 drawings from John Miano including details of the bracing system around the Main Reduction Gear and Auxiliary Turbo-generators, and the lube piping for the latter. Here's a couple of WIP shots.

For those technically interested: the HP turbine has 7, cam-operated throttle valves that come on squentially as the forward throttle wheel is turned. But they don't all enter the turbine at the same place. The first few feed into the 2-wheel impulse turbine at the start of the spool, with the remainder feeding into wheels further along the spool. This enables 600 pound steam to be evenly applied through more of the machine. I will be detailing some of this mechanism. It will be small, but it will be there. There's still more work to do on this drawing.

This is the beginning of the HP Turbine foundation. I hope John can get me some more drawings about this assembly, otherwise, I'm going to be taking some "modeler's license". The non-detailed square log on the right is the wall bracket that I will be detailing further. I bought the large format styrene sheeting for the base decking and bulkheads. The bulkheads will not be full since it will block to many sight lines. Instead, I'll just show bits that are critical to show things like where steam enters the room and the bearings for the prop shafts that pass through the space.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Gnomey]

Great work so far!

 

[Builder 2010]

I hope all of you have had a happy and healthy Christmas (Hanukkah) holiday, and hope for an equally happy and healthy New Year.

Besides spending Christmas night (First night of Hanukkah) with our daughter and family, I did a lot of design work over the last week. I am declaring the HP Turbine Designed and ready for printing. I now have the actual engineering drawing of the welded foundation that supports this vital piece of propulsion and feel confident that at least the main propulsion portion of the project will be as accurate as I can make it. Even with hundreds of pictures and lots of actual drawings, there are still unknowns that i have to guesstimate.

The drawing of the frame on my last post was from my imagination and I will now draw it exactly as it was originally designed.

Meanwhile, the HP Turbine rotor, with my previous experience with the LP Turbine, was pretty straight forward. i can't say the same for the complete throttle valve structure. This bit took days to get into an acceptable form… and I don't know if it's printable in this form. It depends on where the supports are going to fall. The HP throttle consists seven similar mechanisms. I drew them the same even though there may be some variatons between them, but no one will know. They're very hard to visualize in their 1:1 form due to the forrest of piping and insulation that surrounds them.

Let's get started looking at a nice finished rendering of the completed unit. Like the HP, it will be printed in multiple parts. I would like to print the throttle body integral with the upper housing if I can. But I could print it separately.

This drawing project, although it may not appear as such, was one of most challenging I ever drew and forced me to get better using a plug-in call "Curviloft". I keep forgetting I have this app because I don't have many times I need it, but when I need it, I REALLY NEED IT. I permits SketchUp to create organic, compound curved shapes. There were two instances where I needed this on the HP Turbine. The first was the funnel-shaped discharge outlet that conveyed 46psi steam to the LP Turbine. I first made it a regular cone, but it looked terrible. I used the Curviloft function where you draw a series of contoured frames and the app skins it over like building an RC airplane out of balsa old-school.

The next opportunity presented itself in properly shaping the 600 psi steam inlets on either side of the throttlle housing. There are no square edges on most of this equipment since they all massive casting and they are usually associated with lots of filets. In this case the shape had to curve in one plane and then in two when it had a full-surround filet where it joined the main body. Again, I tried to do it with simole SU shaping, but woke up thinking about how to form the frames and use Curviloft.

This shows the early attempt with its square entry.

Here was the shaped object drawn off the main housing.

And lastly, after attaching and forming the rest of the area around the protrusion. It took a lot of work removing the old shapes and preparing the area for the new work. This is often a problem with what I'm doing. I first draw the parts as best I can directly from the drawings. Then I start heavy editing and modifications based on pictures and then, worst of all, getting it all in a position to be printable. My drawing time would be hours shorter if i didn't have to be concerned with solids, reversed faces and thickness to make things printable.

The last utterly enigmatic design work was coming up with something resembling the 7-valve cluster that makes the ship go slow or fast. I have another plug-in that quciky lets you draw springs (or any kind of spiral/helix) which I put to good use creating the valve springs. I was going to do a cutaway of part of the valve body, but the innerds are not right and making them so is more time than I want to spend. Furthermore, the details would be so small in 1:48 as to be meaningless. As it is, some of the details may be too small to render successfully… think about those turbine blades in scale thickness. I am not duplicating the cam mechanism that controls the sequential valve opening. I don't have any accurated information about it and it's buried amid the valves so it can't be seen.

Like this….

At each point in the drawing process I would export the parts as an STL file and load it into my ChiTuBox printer slicer to see if it is a full solid object and printable. I don't spend time adding supports, but it's a good way to catch anything missing.

This is a complicated part as it is, so including the valves on top might be overkill for the printer. My other choice is to print the entire valve body separately and attach later. With the HP unit designed I can turn my attention to building its foundation based on the scale drawings I now possess. Stay tuned!

 

[Vic Balshaw]

Way over my head.