Battleship Texas, Making Steam 

Thank you, that's a great compliment!

When was the last time you made steam shipmate?? I just retired and the only time I think I might have seen a steam ship was when we passed the Kittyhawk my 1st year in. I remember seeing her smoke way before we seen her.

Boiler Techs, we make the pointy end move through the water.

If your grandpa was around he'd be the first one to tell you Texas should just be kept a museum because any steam man would know her time is past and it would cost millions to put her in a condition to safely run her.

@@mikewalker4330 Your probably right from what I've seen. I would estimate the cost to around 200 million to get her steam plant running. Not to mention all the gears and sea chest that would need to be brought up to spec. One can always dream though.

That's how they did it in the plant I worked at unless they were lucky enough to have a cherry picker or a crane at their disposal.

@@mikewalker4330 no room for a cherry picker and no access for a crane some engineers are just plain stupid

Yes, but imagine one single wrong shot can put this at bottom of the see. Or canon from this one to some other.

@@dekipet The same thing can still happen today with a lucky shot. As a designer, all you can do is take every reasonable precaution you can against that sort of "golden BB" with as few compromises as possible, but at the end of the day everything's a compromise. You just have to hope you made the right compromises.

But why they used boilers instead of massive giant piston engines inside the ship???

@@Big1_ There were no internal combustion engines that big in the very early 1900s when Texas was built. Even by WWII when there were diesels large enough to move a large ship, they were used for cruising, not top speed. The Germans for example tended to use mixed powerplants with diesels for long-range low-speed cruising and steam engines for high-speed operation. By that time large diesels were more efficient but far less powerful. Take the Graf Spee, for example. It used 8 diesel engines instead of boilers and steam turbines. In comparison to cruisers from other nations, it was very slow (28.5 knots, compared to 33 knots for American cruisers, for example) but had very long range (16,000 miles to around 9,000 miles for American cruisers), which was fine for it's intended role, but meant it was hopelessly outsped by peer units. Even today, we're still using steam engines on large ships. A modern CVN still uses steam engines. The nuclear reactor is basically just a boiler, creating steam to drive a turbine to drive a screw.

@@wun1gee thank for the explanation, i apreciate it :)

It was even worse with the coal-fired boilers. My grandfather was a member of the black gang on a US Navy ship before World War I, and he told my father that you could only stoke for about 5 minutes, then an officer would order you to the end of the line of stokers to cool off a bit and then go back to work.

Thanks for the kind comments! Your horror would have been shared by engineering crew 100 years ago. The operating manuals of the time were very adamant about keeping cold boilers either filled completely with water for short periods or very dry and closed up.

@@tomscotttheolderone364 You are 100% right sir.

Ditto

They are a treasure of information and history

Lol all that training for nothing. I learned how to take X-rays on film, the year after I graduated we went to digital. Still glad I learned it as I am sure you are to. Steam is alot cleaner than nuclear also, no bone cancer from coal.

Use piston valves on the HP, cylinder oil, and flake graphite sparingly from what I can gather.

@@clivelee4279 All valves on this engine are piston valves. While something else may have been used as lubrication on later designs, this one only used water for lubrication.

Most locomotives, at least after 1900 had superheaters. Lubricating oil was forced into the cylinders with mechanical lubricators.

Thanks Bob!

I remember my dad taking me into the Texas engine room as a child in 1977. I was in total awe. Big mistake for him. I started taking everything apart just to see how it worked... Obsessed with anything mechanical.

Thank you, that is a very kind thing to say!

@@tomscotttheolderone364 There are basically two broad types of desuperheater: Indirect contact type - The medium used to cool the superheated steam does not come into direct contact with it. A cooler liquid or gas may be employed as the cooling medium, for example, the surrounding air. Examples of this type of desuperheater are shell and tube heat exchangers. Here the superheated steam is supplied to one side of the heat exchanger and a cooler medium is supplied to the other side. As the superheated steam passes through the heat exchanger, heat is lost from the steam, and gained by the cooling medium. The temperature of the desuperheated steam could be controlled by either the inlet superheated steam pressure or the flowrate of the cooling water. Control of the superheated steam flow for this purpose is not normally practical and most systems adjust the flow of the cooling medium. Direct contact type - The medium used to cool the superheated steam comes into direct contact with it. In most cases, the cooling medium is the same fluid as the vapour to be desuperheated, but in the liquid state. For example, in the case of steam desuperheaters, water is used. A typical direct contact desuperheating station is shown in Figure 15.1.3. When the desuperheater is operational, a measured amount of water is added to the superheated steam via a mixing arrangement within the desuperheater. As it enters the desuperheater, the cooling water evaporates by absorbing heat from the superheated steam. Consequently, the temperature of the steam is reduced. Control of the amount of water to be added is usually achieved by measuring the temperature of the steam downstream of the desuperheater. From Spirex site

@@otisarmyalso I am still curious about what happens to the heat taken from the steam. Is it simply lost?

Thank you for the very kind compliments! I am not a BT or engineer. Tom Gillette, who I acknowledged at the beginning of the video, gave me a good introduction to them and pointed me in the right direction. From there, I read Navy manuals and Naval Academy textbooks of the era enough to have a basic understanding of their design and operation. It also helps to have the real thing in front of me that I can get up close and personal with!

Well you were a good student because you know details about running a steam plant. Texas is lucky to have guys like you and Travis on the staff.

Yes, thank you for your correction. This was a misunderstanding on my part from a verbal description I was given a few years ago. I found original drawings of the Cuyama tip plate after I shot the video that clearly shows the tangential grooves and the a small chamber formed by a shallow depression in the front of the plate where the oil came together and spun. I also recall a veteran saying that they had some asbestos gloves they used to work with the hot components.

He helped lay Torpedo traps in the the Gulf of Finland near St. Petersburg around 1915 ? Where they got caught, Swam ashore and stayed behind enemy lines for two years. Learned to speak Russian, and Later was assigned to a crew that attempted to save the czarist family 1918. Was a real life oo7 Swashbuckler his entire life. My Dad had his dispatches so we knew his history. Late in his life, my Mom wrote down his stories. The Navy was his entire existence for more than 30 years. Met the Queen When she visited. Was highly respected in my home town, also a lot to live up to. Brutal man. Not a real family man kind of guy But he was my Granpa

Glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks. The drums were pressure tested to about 400psi. While I don't know this as a fact, my bet is there weren't too many initial leaks simply because these guys were highly skilled. Even if there were bad rivets, most could be found before pressure testing. Properly trained and experienced workers would come back after everything was cooled and test rivets by tapping each one with a hammer. They could usually tell by the sound if a rivet was good or not. By the way, this method of caulking was used throughout the ship during construction and there were teams that did nothing but that. All hull shell plating was caulked that way, as well as water and fuel tanks. While that was the primary technique, they also coated overlapping water and fuel tank plate joints with a sealing material; frequently a lead compound.

They'd probably start to explain to you how wonderfully simple it was until your head exploded. I look at all that piping and ducting and I'm just like "Yeah it's no wonder the navy forbid them from ever using the steam systems.."

@@wun1gee The system I get. I wouldn't want to work complex systems in a 100+ degree environment that was that cramped.

Thanks for the compliment. No hint is needed, the irreplaceable value of verbal histories is well understood. There are only a small handful of Texas veterans still alive and they are either too far away or not in a position to converse. However, they used to have reunions almost every year through the 1990's and early 2000's on board the ship, and the museum staff and volunteers managed to get 100's of hours of interviews with them. We also took them to their duty stations and berthing spaces if they were physically able to make the climbs. The effect of them standing at their station 60 years later frequently fired up detailed memories. My favorite experience was during a reunion in 2004, I took a veteran around to 3 or 4 locations where he had been stationed. What was odd was that he didn't seem to know much and didn't seem to be assigned to one duty very long. He did make a pretty big deal of showing me a ventilation trunk where he said he would occasionally sneak to take a nap. After we shook hands and parted ways, a couple of veterans came up to me and one said, "We always hated him, he was the laziest s.o.b. on the whole ship!"

here here - i'm always adding somewhere how important these videos are as a document not just of the machine, in this case the battleship Texas but to the people who understand the workings behind them - once these folk have passed, these objects will become very cold and folk will not be able to understand them, apart from the odd book here and there, but the stories from those who actually used them, the anecdotes are always very special and give a whole new depth to the operations going on behind the scenes

can't wait for part 2 lol

That's correct about the compressor room. The only remnants are the charging compressors that were repurposed for supplying compress air to other needs on the ship. Two more compressors were added to the room. The original compressed air bottles, called accumulators, are still in the spaces that were the original compressor rooms. Other than that, all signs of being torpedo rooms have been completely eliminated.

The original coal fired boilers on Texas included oil burners, but for a somewhat opposite reason. If they needed a a firing rate greater than what could be achieved with only coal, they could increase it with oil. As part of the precommission ship's builder's trials, they added the oil burners to fully coal fired boilers to further increase heat. The fireboxes got so hot, they warped the coal grate bars. They had to pull the fires one boiler at a time, then pull each grate bar and beat it out straight. For that reason, I would be surprised if they did it more than when absolutely necessary.

It does seem weird, most locomotives, at least after 1900 used superheated steam with forced cylinder lubrication.

Thank you for the valuable comments. Nothing replaces direct experience operating this kind of equipment. I will review some of my conclusions. I am sure that you are right on much of it. There are some detailed drawings of Dyson boiler components that I will go back and review in detail for boiler feed. My bet is you will be right. As far as sight glass position, it is what it is. I have a Navy manual describing operation, including tending water. One thing was that keeping water level at midpoint was very important. Large changes in demand, such as big changes in engine throttle, or sudden changes in burners could cause big jumps in water level one way or the other. Most interesting was a warning that you couldn't tell if the drum was full of water or empty if water level was so high that it filled the entire sight glass, so a tender may panic and blast even more water into an already overfilled steam drum.

@@tomscotttheolderone364 How would you verify completely full or completely empty sight glass?

@@stevensheldon9271 This design typically had three valves called try cocks located at different levels on the steam drum. You would very quickly know that the water level in the steam drum was too high if you opened the top one and got water instead of steam.

There may be some old boiler men that see this who could answer your questions far better than me. I can tell you a couple of things. They used fresh water condensed from seawater in a closed loop system. Salt was a very big concern and they constantly checked salinity that could occur primarily due to condenser leaks. They also kept the water at a very high ph level. The goal was to force calcium and other impurities out of solution so that it would settle in the water drums where it could be blown out. Otherwise, it would form deposits on the boiler tubes, reducing efficiency and lead to hot spots that could cause tube failures.

@@tomscotttheolderone364 Wonderful... I just had another thought, that blows my mind... these battle ships were built with a slide rule.. LOL.. and are some of the most advanced article of of the industry, and in my opinion, even by today's standards of war ships. I almost do not think today's men could build such a machine like these, from scratch, with out having nothing to ref from. Just truly amazing what these men made happen at an amazing time frame.. Thank you.

Good question that I don’t have a good answer for. My best guess is that they would lightly oil them if the ship was going to be out of service for an extended period. Otherwise, they could use the jacking gear to slowly turn the engines periodically.

It's amazing that they could get by with just water for lubrication. I guess the long (relative to its diameter) pistons and low rpms helped but still.

It sounds and feels like a rocket engine blasting off when a large PSV lifts. I was on the ground floor, inside a building when a main steam safety 100ft above and 50+ feet horizontally away lifted. The walls were shaking so bad I thought something had blown up and I was about to be blown away by shrapnel. This was a 2100lb safety relieving a 10-20kkph at a land based power plant. Those are lower pressure but there is no where to get away. I imagine it was several times scarier in the hull of a ship!

I largely agree, except for one thing. Assuming that the volume of a pressure vessel remains the same, steam pressure only increases when more steam is created from water. Adding energy to steam will only increase its temperature, not pressure. That’s the beauty of superheat. It raises steam temp and energy while maintaining the same pressure. That additional energy is 100% useful. Unfortunately, turbines love it, but not the reciprocating engines on Texas. They required the condensation from saturated steam to lubricate the cylinder walls. Dry, superheated steam would result in seizing and cylinder scoring.

@@tomscotttheolderone364 Thanks for the reply! I may have misunderstood your point, but I believe that pressure and temperature both increase with rising temperature in a fix volume. Dry steam continues to increase in pressure unless it is converted into flow. For example, a pressure cooker is a fix volume of water that converts liquid to dry steam. The pressure inside slowly increases along with the temperature and if there isn't an outlet it would explode due to over pressurizing the vessel beyond the materials strength. As an aside, I found your point about recip steam engines requiring saturated steam very interesting. On another channel, (@Drachinifel's video titled "Navel Engines - Rotate that shaft") he said the opposite. Liquid is generally bad in a recip engine because it is incompressible and hence if you hit it at the bottom of the stroke it can cause the piston to not turn and break the engine. However, what you're saying makes more sense because steam engines, unlike gasoline engines, do not have a compression stroke. Compression takes place external to the engine.

@@tomscotttheolderone364 Thanks for the reply! I may have misunderstood your point, but I believe that pressure and temperature both increase with rising temperature in a fix volume. Dry steam continues to increase in pressure unless it is converted into flow. For example, a pressure cooker is a fix volume of water that converts liquid to dry steam. The pressure inside slowly increases along with the temperature and if there isn't an outlet it would explode due to over pressurizing the vessel beyond the materials strength. As an aside, I found your point about recip steam engines requiring saturated steam very interesting. On another channel, (@Drachinifel's video titled "Navel Engines - Rotate that shaft") he said the opposite. Liquid is generally bad in a recip engine because it is incompressible and hence if you hit it at the bottom of the stroke it can cause the piston to not turn and break the engine. However, what you're saying makes more sense because steam engines, unlike gasoline engines, do not have a compression stroke. Compression takes place external to the engine.

​@@Jason-Spice Your analogy is not correct. As long as there is liquid water in a pressure cooker, it will continue to produce more steam, raising both pressure and temperature until one of two things happen. Either the relief valve opens, or you run out of water. If you put just a few ounces of water in a cooker and attach a pressure gauge and thermometer, you would see pressure and temperature increase until you run out of water. At that point, expansion stops. Temperature will continue to increase, but not pressure. The temperature above saturation is pure, recoverable energy that makes steam dry, or super heated. That extra is highly valued because 100% of the extra put in can be recovered as work in an engine designed for it. The ones on Texas were not. I am not in disagreement with Drachinifel because I didn't say that an appreciable amount was allowed to gather in the cylinders. All I said was that condensate was needed to lubricate cylinder walls. The crew watched pressure and temperature in each cylinder. If properly balanced, just enough water would condense on cylinder walls to do the job. It is likely that they allowed more than was needed since too little could result in cylinder wall scoring. If they had too much, they could hear it make a crackling noise as it tried to evaporate and condense with the pressure changes caused by piston movement. When that happened, they would open a cylinder drain to get rid of it. However, that was usually only needed during startup since that is when most condensation occurs. During normal operation, they regularly open the drains for a few seconds on each cylinder to keep water from accumulating.

Watch "a look around Boiler Room 3." Oil is pumped to the burners with the service pumps. Pressure varies, but is generally around 200 psi. Yes, boiler output is controlled by the number of burners being fired and also fuel oil pressure.

My reading of steam manuals from the 1920's leads me to believe that it was manually controlled by the water tender using the two sight glasses on the front of the drum. It is very likely that the movement of the ship didn't affect the glass levels too much when you consider the geometry of the relationship of the water in the drum to the level created in the tubes that are only fed through small openings at their tops and bottoms. While it seems that automation would be easy, a book of procedures and cautions that I found suggested that it was anything but simple. For instance, if they suddenly opened up more burners to create steam, the level in the drum would suddenly drop a lot. The immediate reaction would be to open up the makeup water valve to bring the level up and not expose boiler tubes. However, the key was to wait and watch it drop, because the level will surge back up. If they had responded by adding makeup water, then the drum would be too full and water would be picked up in the steam in an action called priming. That is very damaging to pipes, valves and equipment on the steam line. So, it required a lot of knowledge and a cool head to maintain exactly the right amount of water.

@@tomscotttheolderone364 Thanks Tom, with all the work I've done on boilers, I'm familiar with the complexity of the measurement and control problems. But I never had to consider the possible influence of the boiler itself moving around. I did serve on a destroyer in the Navy - no doubt battleships are a little more stable. Maybe a LOT more, actually. But still any motion just makes a tough task even harder. I'm thinking I might not have enjoyed standing watches as a water tender :) Hats off to the guys that had to handle a tough job. Thank you

Yes, there was an airlock with two doors. I will be posting a new video in the future that shows one.

@@tomscotttheolderone364 thanks!! Loving your videos.

I'd love to use a tripod, but it's not possible when climbing onto catwalks and shooting while moving around. Many times, I am also holding the camera with one hand and holding onto a rail for support with the other. Imagine what it would be like if I turned the image stabilizer off.

I suspect there may be a little difference in type of fuel used.

They simply plugged the top and bottom openings of a tube and didn't replace it. I do not know this for a fact, but I have been told that they would accept at least 10% plugged tubes before replacing them. That makes sense because replacing tubes is a major job that requires the services of a shipyard.

The good news is that the rooms were so well protected, that the ship would probably be lost by the time they flooded. I think the bigger fear would be a major steam leak. It would be pretty difficult to survive if one of the 14" steam mains carrying 290 psi, 420 deg. steam failed.

Absolutely! I will be putting up a video in the not too distant future that uses the ship's engineering casualty manual from World War II to show how any combination of boilers could be tied in or isolated to run either or both engines. In fact, because of the reciprocating engines, there was a way you could run the engines at reduced power, even if you completely lost the 300 lb. steam mains. There were 150 psi auxiliary steam lines that allowed steam to be tapped off of the engines to run auxiliaries. You could close the main throttle valves to isolate them and the high pressure cylinders, then back feed the intermediate and low pressure cylinders with 150 psi steam from the auxiliary lines fed through reduction valves from the boilers. The high pressure cylinders were lost and the engines would be unbalanced, but they could still make way at a reduced speed. While I cannot think of any way they could lose the main steam lines, the point was the system was exceptionally flexible and redundant. As long as one boiler was capable of making steam, they could run at least one engine and hopefully the auxiliaries needed to keep it and the boiler going.

@@tomscotttheolderone364 Better than us! If we lost the main we're dead in the water and on emergency diesel power. We would steam quite a bit on 1 boiler (out of 4), cross connected to save fuel, as I said. If they dropped the load we were bobbing around until one of the boiler rooms got lit off again....

The rooms were well ventilated since they were pressurized. I understand that they could get as hot as 110 deg. F. with boilers at full steaming rate.

@@tomscotttheolderone364 So a normal day in Houston.

There are 1924-25 proposal drawings for both turbine and turbo-electric retrofits. The reciprocating engines were kept largely for cost reasons. They were very reliable and were still able to provide needed levels of performance, even though they suffered from significant vibrations at certain speeds. Also keep in mind that by the 1925 upgrade, Texas was obsolete as a first line battleship and nothing could be done to improve that. However, she still had significant value, but just not enough to sink that kind of money into. The boilers were an entirely different matter. Coal was on its way out as a power source and as I showed in my video, there were a number of problems using it. The fact that the oil fired boilers were sitting in warehouses and were readily available made that upgrade an easy decision.

The hole is oval, so an oval gasketed cover can be slipped inside and set in place so that it seats against the inner edge of the hole. A couple of bolted brackets hold it in place when the boiler is not under pressure. Otherwise, boiler pressure holds it in place. Click on the following link to go to an old boiler manual and go to page 25 to see it. The book was for coal fired boilers like what Texas started with, but the covers are exactly the same as what is on the oil fired boilers now on the ship. www.google.com/books/edition/Forged_Steel_Water_tube_Marine_Boilers/fhaDAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=marine+and+naval+boilers&printsec=frontcover

Спасибо!

The only depth charges on the ship were used exclusively by the spotter aircraft stationed on board. There was no ability to launch or drop them off the ship. Steam was not directly used for any of the power systems you mentioned. Electricity was primarily generated with steam driven turbines. Power for the weapons systems was all electric. Shell and powder hoists were directly driven by electric motors. All of the smaller weapons were manually trained and elevated by hand cranks, except for the 40mm anti-aircraft gun mounts that were electrically driven. The big 14" guns used electric constant speed motors to drive variable speed hydraulic pumps that turned the gears that rotated the turrets or elevate guns.

It would certainly cost hundreds of millions of dollars and the replacement of so much equipment and plating that its historic fabric would pretty much be destroyed. While I agree with your sentiment, the monetary and historic costs would be too great.

I am not sure what what is meant by "combat speed", but I assume it is the ability to produce full power on the engines. This is a fairly complicated subject that doesn't have a single or simple answer. I will limit myself to Texas since there can be quite a bit of variation depending upon boiler design and engine type. The most likely scenario is Texas would already have one hot boiler and be ready to make 10-12 knots, with limited auxiliaries running, in 1.5 to 2 hours. That is what it took to bring the engines to operating temperature. It would take another 6 hours to produce full power and speed due to the time it takes to heat the cold boilers if they began firing them at the same time they started warming the engines. So, total time to reach full power is about 8 hours if everything goes well. It could take up to 10 hours if the steam system and engines are completely cold. Without support from shore power, the extra time is due to having to begin firing boilers using diesel fuel pumped by hand until enough steam can be generated to bring at least one fuel oil feed pump and set of heaters on line. The biggest limiting factor to all of this is warming up cold boilers. The refractory brick that lines their fireboxes and protects the boiler casing from damage will begin spalling and will crumble if heated too quickly. If the damage is minimal to moderate, the boiler can still be run, but at a reduced rate. If damage is serious, the boiler must be taken off line and cooled down to prevent burning through the casing.

@@tomscotttheolderone364 I was thinking of a Pearl Harbor type situation, combat power is being able to move the ship (during its prime in WW-2 full crew and supplies) from a dead ported stop to being able to answer bells. I'm not a Naval expert, from what I read about the Battleship at Pearl from a cold start to moving would take 24 hours. Any Idea when the Texas last moved under her own power ?. Thanks for the timely response.

Yes, not just boiler water, but all fresh water on the ship was distilled since it was created from sea water using the ship's distillation system called the evaporators.

Setting her in concrete like Mikasa would certainly destroy her, especially considering that they also filled Mikasa's lower decks with cement to ballast her. The reason for the concrete wasn't for preservation, but to make certain the ship was totally disabled. Otherwise, the Japanese would have been forced to scrap or sink the ship in order to meet the terms of the Washington Naval Arms Treaty of 1922. At the very least, doing it to Texas would destroy hundreds of historic artifacts located deep her that can't be removed. Once in concrete, abrasion between it and the hull created by temperature changes would quickly destroy protective coatings and trapped moisture would then do its work to eat away hull plating and then hull structure. If kept in water, the ship can be periodically removed and every square inch of her accessed for repairs and restoration. Keeping her out of water is a non-starter. There were plans to accomplish that put together about 15 years ago. Unfortunately, it was far too costly. Keeping her in water provides the best overall means of supporting the hull and structure. The key to a very long life is to periodically dry dock her to service her hull and protective coatings. What is interesting is that the hull corrosion that they are currently repairing in dry dock occurred from the inside out as a result of interior water created by hull leaks. Most of the protective coatings that were applied in 1990 during her last dry dock session were still there and working. For those reasons, a combination of re-plating problem areas, full welding of the riveted plating and modern coatings should control further degradation as long as she maintains a 15-20 year dry dock cycle.