1:48 Engine Room #3 Battleship USS New Jersey for Permanent Display on Board. (2 Viewers)

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Took a couple of shots with a ruler to send to my old friend, Bryant, who builds my wood bases. I wanted to give him a head's up about sizing. It's not the final value, but it's close.

It's going to be about 1 foot deep.



And about 21"wide (by about 1 foot high). The prop shafts and the bulkhead stiffener in the fire room made the width extend past the drawing's edges.



Today was one of the first where progress was in retrograde. I had a printing anomaly of the MRG… there was a significant growth of resin on one interior wall. I didn't discard this, but went back and reset it in the slicer with more supports in that area and printed it again. While it was printing I took the Dremel Flexi-shaft and a carbide router and sugically removed all of it. You can't see this when the gears are installed, but the lump would impact their installation.

Here's the malformation from two directions. I had already started attacking it in the damage when I took the image.





After cleaning it all out with the router, then sanding drum and finally a diamond coated burr, it's functional… Functional, not pretty.



Much to my dismay, the reprinted part actually came out worse. With the delamination I suspected there might be some resin on the vat film. I emptied the vat, made a mess when my silicone funnel with its filter tipped off the resin bottle and made a royal mess. There was no resin stuck to the film. I refilled the vat and started printing again. The growth looks exactly the same as the previous one and my corrections did nothing. I have no idea what about the design is causing the excess resin. But this one also has delamination on top and that would be visible, rendering this print scrap.



Ths delamination...



I tried the gear sets in the repaired part and they fit without interference, so the correction worked.



I correct output shaft just came off the printer with the second upper frame print and is in the post-cure chamber, explaining the water pipe used to support the bull gear.



Lastly, I had another shock. I made beautiful prints of the two cutaway gear box covers. I mean they were perfect! Except they weren't. For some reason, the designer had the reduction gear bores way undersized. I don't know what he was thinking, and I'll have to have words with him.



I left the shop and went back to SketchUp to fix this. It took hours! I've said this many, many times. It's often more difficult to repair an SU drawing than to do it in the first place. The fixed covers are now in the printer. I've officially named it THE MACHINE!.

I also noticed that my innerds desgn of the gear case doesn't have an inboard bearing cap for the bull gear shaft. There's a bearing on the lower half, but nothing on the upper. I drew up a bearing cap and will print it separately. Clearly I missed something when looking at the framing diagrams.



I also found out why the LP/Condenser height was off by 3/16". Look at this image of the equipment below the drawing sheet.



It will be easier to shim up the condenser foundation than to trim the HP foundation. The printer doesn't lie. If I drew it wrong, it will print wrong. Hopefully, tomorrow will be in a more positive directly.
 

Dude, that's amazing work.
FWIW I'm old, so weird growths don't impress me anymore.
 
Yes… I'm going to be 80 in July and weird growths are definitely the rule of the day. Your skin has lost its collegan, but doesn't seem to have trouble growing all sorts of new stuff all over the place. It's all G_d's weird sense of humor.

I had forgotten to design and print the turning gear that resides on the the gear box cover's starboard aft corner. Large rotating equipment needs to be turned to keep from warpng of the main shafts due to their weight and to bring things around into view for inspection purposes. I came up with a not-so-smart idea to design the machinery on the cutaway piece. The cutaway piece would be exactly the same shape as the opening. Problem is that o.d.s are printed slightly oversize, and i.d.s slightly undersized so the resulting parts don't fit together as seen here.



I attempted to decrease the outisde profile of the insert, but it was getting weird and not going as I would have liked. The solution was to redraw the gear cover with the turning gear on top and eliminate the cutaway for that quadrant. Here's the part on the slicer as it will print. Printing will take place on Monday.


It's often better to redsign it correctly than to keep messing with it.

The fully-detailed condensate pump is done. I printed it with a 1/8" hole in the conical joint to the outlet pipe. The print was a beauty!



Even without glue, the pin holds them together nicely and I took these two images looking from both ways. Pardon the pixelation. I enlarged these a bit too much.



I have the Main Reduction Gear foundation parts to print and all the main propulsion equipment is done. I now will start designing a pile of auxiliaries. The weather may permit me to do some primer painting of the completed work.
 
Thanks! I found out that if you start a post, but then don't finish it in a timely manner, it disappears. That's what happened to last night's post, so I'll redo it now.

First off, I finally replaced my chair… It was my dad's desk chairand was at least 60 years old, possibly older. I bought a very inexpensive chair from Amazon that cost less that $90USD an no shipping (Prime members). My son had admonished me to get a new chair. I sent him a picture and asked if it would make my modeling better. He responded, "How can you do better than perfect?" He's a nice boy (well actually he just turned 50 and is a terrific eye surgeon). Whether or not it improves my modeling, it's certainly more comfortable..




My reprints of the gear sets came out beautifully, but there was still a fit problem. I made them as separate gears and when attempting to assemble… couldn't. My spacing was not equal. Didn't matter when they were attached to each other, but separate they wouldn't fit. To get them to fit I removed stock in the journals to position the port side gear further outboard and the pinion more to the center.



Fit was not okay and good enough to assemble the gear covers to the main body.





The print for the other cover with the intergral turning gear failed. I reinforced the supports and will print again. Right now I'm printing some of the MRG's foundation parts. That comprises four separate print activities.

Along with the gear cover I printed the rear bull gear bearing cap and they were successful. took a little sanding and shimming to get it to fit right. The reason for the fitting was the misalignment of the main bearing bracket. I didn't realize that the drawing had moved when I chose to print it integral with the housing. All will be unseen in the finished model.

So here's what's been printed so far. The pile grows bigger.




I'm drawing the complex turbogenerators now. Luckily I have lots of pictures and foundation drawings that will help.
 
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Forgot to display the image with the bearing cap, so here it is….



I hadn't reprinted the gear cover yet and decided to give it a try to fit the separate turning gear into the opening. With a bit of sanding with a Dremel drum sander, I removed stock from the plug, used thin CA to hold it in place and then copius amounts of Bondic UV cure substance. I sanded the joint and am reasonably happy with the results. There's a slight ridge and I will do some more sanding to even remove that.




I got the aft MRG frame printed and it came out well. The MRG sitting on a block of wood is a tad high. The frame sits directly under the flange. There are three more printings that will make up the entire MRG Foundation.



I also printed the prop shaft junction pieces and the bulkhead Watertight seals that go on the prop shafts as they pass through from one compartment to another.



With the success of the turning gear fix, I don't have to waste time and resin to make another one. Notice that gap when the gear case covers are in place. That's due to not changing the geometry of the MRG base journals to make the mods made on the gear case. I will corect that going forward.

I love this hobby/avocation. Every day in the shop produces something that never existed before. It's why, for me, in retirement, creating and building is so much more satisfying than playing cards or games on my iPhone.

The main steam pipe is on the printer right now. In not too long a time, all of the main propulsion system will be created. I have to decide to build the base framing and start mounting some stuff or doing all the 3D and then start assembly. Depends on my interest level. Some of the smaller things take as much time or longer to design and the big stuff.
 
Thanks Vic and Wurger! Yes! It has sentimental value and now it's just parked at another spot in the basement. Always good to have another chair to sit on when we have tornado warnings.

The last bits of the main reduction gear foundation is draining in the printer now. All the rest is done, cleaned and trimmed. I got the MRG to sit still on top for this image. Not the scale guy. This piece of equipment is massive. It's the size of a small house. You're looking at the output side which is smack dab against ER 3's aft bulkhead. You can see much peering into that space.



This is what I'm talking about. Most visitors will not seem much of this end of the MRG. Look at the thickness of the bracing.


I was pleased to see that the HP turbine's output shaft while sitting on its foundation aligns perfectly with the input pinion shaft in the MRG. That doesn't happen often with me.



Work continues on designing the complicated by small turbogenerator set. The nice thing is when I design one, I get two of them since they're identical. The hard part is understanding what's under all that heavy insulation. I'm building the model sans insulation so folks can actually see what's inside. I didn't realize that the donut-shaped part at the outboard end is the exhaust steam collector. It took two tries to get Curviloft to get a close approximation. It's still not perfect, but it's going to be very small and it will be effective. The large pipe dropping down is the waste steam line going directly into the TG condenser that lies directly below on the lower level.



To illustrate this challenge, here's the side view of the actual turbine. The isulation and piping completely hides the turbines actual geometry.

 
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I'd like to fasten the MRG halves together with screws and not glue. I've kept some of the rejects and used it as a test article to see if the screws would work. They do! I also used them to hold the gun house shield onto the body in the 5" project and used a different screw to hold the same on the 16" project. It's just so much cleaner. I just used four at the corners. More could work also. Don't be too quick to throw away rejects. They can come in handy for a lot of reasons.



I actually assembled something. The cross-beams finished nicely and I glued together the MRG's foundation. I made a template of the base so I could be sure that what I was gluing together was going to correctly hold the MRG. To glue the HP frame on the fore end I packed out the I-Beam shape with stock equalling 0.050" so the angle frames would have a broad gluing surface instead of just the edges of the flange. I checked and double-checked to make sure that I was gluing it in the right place.



And here it is with the MRG sitting in its place.



I also did the relief grinding in the MRG frame so the gear covers would fit flush. I have to reprint the HP rotor and print a coupld of open angle frames. There are spaces for two more of these on the fore end of the MRG foundation. With those parts, main propulsion is done for a while. As I get further down the road, I'll need to print some more plumbing like the 600# steam lines to the astern turbine inlets and figure out what to do about all the condensate drains that seem to be all over the place. When I finish designing all the secondary equipment there will be more piping decisions to be made.
 
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