Portside Aft Steering Gear Compartment on the Battleship Iowa

Some of the tour today covered things I'd already seen and wrote about, like the Barbershop, Brig, and Laundry areas, so I won't go over them again.

We started in the Crew's Mess, as the passageway we would take was off the Museum Store.

While the steering gear compartment is armored, it's outside of the "Armored Citadel", which runs from just forward of the #1 turret, to just aft of the #3 turret.

The blue painted area shown below is the top of the aft end of the armor.

As you can see, it's really thick:

After we went down one deck, below this first armored deck, we passed by a hatch leading down to the 4th deck. The stainless steel door to the right leads in to one of the "reefer" areas where refrigerated foods were stored. If you look carefuly at the ladder going down, you'll see some "flaps" mounted on the sides of it. When these were moved to cover the steps, it made them into a ramp so boxes could be easily slid up and down the ladder.

Pretty clever:

Here's another ladder going down to the refer area, and still another hatch under that, with grating on the bottom:

Now, the good stuff!

Getting closer:

One more armored hatch to go through, and we're there:

This is the control panel for running all the pumps and servos, and a place-of-last-resort to steer the ship from.

 Notice the two bronze mounts in the picture. There are where the handwheels were located to manually (with hydraulic assist, of course) steer the ship.

The closer of the two got cut off in the picture, but in the one further away, at the bottom of the bronze mount, you can see a stub shaft with a white tag hanging on it. These were the stubs the wheels attached to.

The wheels were removed for some reason, and are "MIA" for the time being:

How do you know you're on the Port side? Well, besides the yellow painted designator with the frame number, there's a red stripe painted on the wall, red just like the Port navigation lights on the ship.

And notice the rows of rivets overhead. This was the top of the localized armored box the steering gear is in:

Rudder position indicator:

Aft end of the hydraulic rams that move the rudder. The large round plate in the left foreground is the top post of the actual rudder, and the "dogbones" on either side connect to the rams:

Close up of the brass tag on the dogbone:

Another view looking forward:

The hydraulic diagram of the system. Sorry for the flash hot-spot:

And a drawing listing all the lube points, and what type of grease/lube to use:

So, that was today's behind-the-scenes tour. While we were sitting in the barbershop, the question of "Turret Tours" was brought up. Turret #2, where the accident occurred, is absolutely OFF LIMITS, as it's a memorial to those who died in it. Current plans are being discussed for turret #3, and include putting in a plexiglas "bubble", where people could at least climb partly in to the turret, and look around, and a Virtual Tour" of the turret, being put together by one of our volunteers who's extremely good at taking panoramic photos, and stitching them together, giving views similar to what The Smithsonian does for some of it's aircraft interiors.

I've seen his panoramas of the radio room, and some of the superstructure areas, and their amazing.

Actual tours of the turret, and it's inclusion on the tour route, will require getting all the HAZMAT items out of the turret, and cleaning it up and painting the inside.

Hang on, it's on the "TODO" list for this year!

Engineering Spaces Tour on the Battleship Iowa on Sunday

For the crew only, and I'm taking my camera!

Some of it I've seen before, but we're going to see the steerage area where the rudders are controlled, and some other things on the 3rd deck.

 Pix to come Sunday evening......

And then on the 27th, I'll be taking a crew only tour of the superstructure.

Pictures will, of course, be posted following that tour......

How's About a Little ZZ?

One of my favorites.

Those Who Cannot Remember The Past.......

Got this from a friend's email.

I think it says it all.....

"Unbroken" - A Movie of Courage and Valor

We went to see "Unbroken" tonight, and I recommend it to all.

It's the story of Louis "Louie" Zamperini from Torrance, CA, and is based on the book "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption" by Laura Hillenbrand.

My wife bought the book several months ago, and was waiting for the film to come out.

I haven't read the book yet, but I'll get started on it in the next few days.

It's a stirring movie, and doesn't pull any punches concerning the treatment of Allied POW's in Japan.

Highly recommended, and take a box of Kleenex with you.

Loud Music, A Laser Light Show, and Fireworks Going Off

At 2245 local time, that's the extent of New Year's Eve madness in La-La Land.

I suppose things night get a little more nuts, but I'm going to bed.

Hope you all had a safe and sane New Year's Eve, and wishing you all the best for 2015!

Wonderful "Christmas Present" for Us Radio Guys on the Iowa

God bless the guys at PCS Associates!

During the process of troubleshooting the URR-74(v)2 receivers in the radio room, we've been terribly hampered by a lack of usable documentation.

The WJ 8718 receiver is very close to the URR-74, and we were able to find manuals for that receiver, BUT all the freely downloadable manuals were poor copies made into pdf's.

The worst part was that the schematics were copied with the copier magnification improperly set, resulting in a 1"~2" "gap" in the schematic between the two pages it was spread over!

You couldn't get them to overlap so you could tape them together and get a complete schematic, and in some cases it was cut so badly that complete components and/or circuit blocks were missing.

This makes it rather difficult to follow signals on the schematic, as you're never really sure where they're going between the two pages.

I finally found a place that still supports the Watkins Johnson receivers we have aboard the Iowa, and sent an email asking how much it would cost us to BUY a real, correct copy, stating that we weren't looking for a freebie, and would gladly PAY to get the manuals.

Well, this morning I received an email from a very nice gentleman containing the details of the ftp account he set up for me so I could download the manuals they have available!

I grabbed the manuals, and have been looking at them part of the day.

They manuals are crystal clear, and all the schematics are complete, and not butchered up.

I notified our Grey Radio Gang, and we're going to be working up a nice, official "Certificate of Appreciation" for this gentleman and his company.

Merry Christmas, and God Bless Us, Every One!

Hope you all have a very Merry Christmas!

And here's one of my favorite stories from years ago.

"The Star" by Arthur C. Clarke


Forgot to add that we had a Christmas card signing project aboard the Battleship Iowa this year.

We signed and delivered 3051 personalized cards to our troops serving overseas.

"Old School" RTTY Equipment on the Battleship Iowa

Sorry I didn't take more pix of the gear, but I snapped these few after I finished photographing the six HF antennas on the ship.

I took the pix of the antennas so I could document them by their nameplates, and we could compare the what and where of them to the scanty drawings we have.

ANYWHOO....this is a representative of one of the four or five AN/UGC-48A machines abord the Iowa.

This particular one is working perfectly, and has an almost full roll of paper in it.

I am NOT an expert on these by any means, so I can't tell you much about it. In one of my older posts about the equipment in the Comm Center I have a ton of pictures of the RTTY gear, the printers and reperferators, and the CRT-based Data Terminals, which I found out the other day are in working condition. We're trying to find some of the magnetic tape cartridges for them, and supposedly there is a box or two of them stored somewhere on the ship, but this equipment is not on my "TO-DO" list, as I'm more concerned with getting our last non-functioning Watkins-Jenkins AN/URR-74(V)2 receiver working, and learning to replace the chain drives in the 1051 receivers, and the ART-23 exciters.

Nameplate:

Top covers opened:

Close-up of Print Head:

Paper Tape Mechanism:

2nd Tape Mechanism:

2nd Tape Mechanism:

It's definitely neat stuff, but not really in my "knowledge base"!

A Day at the Workbench

Spent the day catching up on some stuff.

*Cleaned my Kimber 1911

*Cleaned my wife's TRR-8 revolver

And started building the little "Digital Modes Sound Card Interface" for the Kenwood TS-940 we use on the Iowa for CW. The guy who donated it used to be a RTTY operator "Back In The Day", and was blown away when I told him you no longer need a "HAL Interface"
 

and a lumbering Model 19 Teletype machine to operate Radio Teletype ("RTTY") any longer.

These days, a PC is used to generate and decode audio frequencies corresponding to "Mark" and "Space", and the audio signals are sent to/received from the audio circuits of the radio.

The "nice" thing about doing it this way is that you're no longer limited by the hardware you have to just RTTY. You can also transmit and receive Slow Scan TV, PSK-31, WEFAX, and many other "Digital Modes" on the ham bands.

After I finish and test the little interface, I'll post a few pictures of it.

Earthrise 45 Years Later

I still remember watching this live.