One of the Surprises When Drydocking the Battleship

[Music] hi I'm Ryan samanski curator for Battleship New Jersey museum and Memorial and today we've got a video about one of the three great mysteries of dry docking the battleships that we found so far that mystery is these bolted on access plates on the inboard side of the twin docking Kels there's one on each side and uh I feel like those plates wouldn't be so much of a mystery if there weren't then also an interior access plate and all of these other bolt holes so we had to do some searching to find out some of the shipyard guys thought that these might be evidence of Keel coolers which we'd never heard of before in reference to a battleship so we had no idea what that uh might be entailing and uh we asked some Navy folks who worked on Steam ships like this when they said that uh steam ships have Keel coolers that's not likely what the uh what those are so continuing to look it seems like that is where you access the coupling where the tail shaft meets up with the last segment of line shaft so if you need to unbolt the tail shaft to pull it out of the ship when you're removing the propeller and other things like that you can remove this access panel go in there and that's where the FL is on the coupling that you can unbolt you can see one of these couplings on the outboard shafts it's completely exposed and it's more or less in the same place as this is in service those would have a uh fairing built around them for the outboard shafts at least to keep them a little bit more hydrodynamically efficient seems like those were removed while the ship was in moth balls all right so the plates are an access plate but what's the rest of this setup well my friend aard kler from marad gave me the idea he worked on Wisconsin in 1989 when she was in dry do number four uh next to us over here and uh he he had done some work in this part of the ship and he said that he had found blueprint evidence that New Jersey had gotten some modifications that the other Iowa hadn't so all of the American fast battleships suffer from vibration issues at high speeds wellknown fact for whatever reason with the Iowa class it's the inboard shafts that have the worst vibration issues I would have thought it would be the longer outboard shafts but it's the shorter inboard shafts and maybe that's because they go through the fewest number of bearings so the solution the Navy seems to have come up with sometime in the early 50s maybe maybe 1952 after her first Korean War deployment the solution was well add an extra bearing the bearings for the battleship use lignum VY as the material that's in contact with the shaft as a tropical hardwood it's naturally oily so it's pretty self-lubricating and it is what would wear away as opposed to the steel propeller shaft so uh they install this bearing and that bearing does need a little bit of seawater lubrication a little bit of seawat for cooling for the friction so they decided to turn this part of the ship that was normally watertight into a free flood area so they drilled something like a hundred holes in the ship to do that well it didn't solve the vibration issues but it did cause a water intrusion issue so they only did that to New Jersey they didn't go back and do it to any of the other ships and you can see the bolts that they put in these holes it seems like U that was an attempt to then plug those holes maybe those holes were left open throughout the ship's entire career and they were just bolted closed in moth balls whatever the case over the last 30 years it has failed and water was able ble to intrude into that space again now fortunately it was contained within that space and it didn't intrude anywhere else on the ship so we didn't know it was an issue until we got the ship up on the blocks and water continued to leak out of there after the rest of the ship was dry and you can notice that we've painted on both sides of it but we have not painted that area because you've still got water streaking down and you might be able to tell from the streaks that it's not just water there's also an oil another residue there as well when the ship was mothballed the Navy used a preservative oil probably cosmoline or something very similar to cover some of the unpainted surfaces in there such as where the bearing is wearing on the paint that that sort of stuff however because of the water intrusion problem caused by the holes that were drilled there and because the ship has been in the water longer than was Ed water got in there mixed with the cosmoline so now the water that is leaking out is oily water which required us to contain it here you can see that we're containing the oily water that's being drained out of the other side Preparatory to painting that you can see that uh in addition to the screws before we blasted the paint off there's also a uh like rubberized caulk type material that's covering that as well so while we were initially confused and a little bit scared about what we were finding in there it has not turned into that big of an issue we're able to mitigate any sort of environmental impact it might have uh and so it's going to be real simple to drain those seal them up clean uh pressure wash the residual off of there repaint it and it should be sealed again until we're in dry do next so what do you think is this a feature you're going to add to your model of New Jersey let us know in the comments section down below or since you can't really see between the twin docking Keels are just going to leave it all Battleship New Jersey receives operating support from the New Jersey Department of State also from a number of other businesses and private individuals like yourselves we really appreciate your support there's Link in the description below for ways you can donate to support the museum you can also support us by liking sharing and subscribing so more people find about the museum and our Channel thanks for watching

Channel: Battleship New Jersey

Views: 735,782

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Id: 2HiewiOw-OM

Length: 6min 57sec (417 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2024