Maintaining Your Battleship Gun Turrets: It's Electric! 

I know same here hopefully one day I get to go just to meet him

What I took away from this video is, if you want to diagnose a electrical problem on a battleship, you better have Libby, and her keen eye, along to help.

It's such a strange thing isn't it? Even though it sounds like such a mundane subject it still keeps up engaged. It makes me want to fly out from Australia just to see the ship and every 2 seconds stopping and saying "I know what that does".

Same 😂

Absolutely agree @HuskyKMA and like wise doubt I'll ever set foot on the new jersey living over the pond, maybe one day. But loving the channel watched virtually from the start keep up the great work Ryan and all 👍

Shaft earthing! Didn't know it created arcs from the prop - I bet that was pretty cool.

Thank You for Your Service.

The USS South Dakota had that happen. A pretty interesting read if you check it out

Imagine fixing ANYTHING on a ship this size. Or even trying to isolate the problem in the first place

@@harryballsagna4549 can you send me a link or a title?

Imagine being an electrician on a nuclear Aircraft Carrier, were if both reactors Scram, you only have the Diesels to maintain power to primary coolant pumps and get at least one reactor back up. Dead in the water drills were kinda fun once you understood the SOP.

Wan an aviation electrician's mate for 5 years. Try watching your platform take off and getting back to the playstation. FUN!!!

Retired ET, yep. No fun. Hands in a cable run? Check. 25 years of nasty? Check. Fishhooks on armored cables? Check. Random garbage? Check. Cable tags? Whats that? Random dead ended live cable? Oh ####!

...and therein lies the problem with restoring an old ship. I'm just as comfortable measuring bias voltage on a vacuum tube as I am a transistor. Younger guys, not so much.

I second this motion 🙂👍

YES!!

Now the yard hands would probably be confused when they opened the cover and didn't find a replaceable circuit board populated with chips. Years ago I re-wired a car after an electrical fire. Ever pop the hood on a Ford and see a neatly LACED wiring harness? :)

Man, I'm sure it would be great to have an as-built for the electrical system, but that would eat up a huge number of hours that could probably be better spent doing more critical preservation work.

Yeah, that definitely sounded like one of the hot leads was flakey.

@@BlackEpyon I had a lot of big branches that I had to saw into five foot long lengths so that the monthly branch pick up people would grind them up.

@@billkallas1762 I have to admit, as a landscaper, relying on others to carry away tree branches isn't something I'm used to :P

Of course they didn't charge you for it. Everything on the supply side of the meter is their responsibility. Having you actually lose power due to an untrimmed tree probably resulted in a few meetings at the Power Company, as they should have been trimmed BEFORE they caused an outage or presented a hazard. FWIW, around here the saw crew in the chipper truck would have been right behind the repair crew and the branches would have been disappearing about as quickly as they hit the ground.

Interesting! I was a computer repairman in the Air Force decades ago. Rarely would a fuse blow. For some as the system was over 10 years old then, that might have been the cause if we replaced the fuse and everything worked.

electric cars have the same issue on the main battery, ive heard of fuses blowing just because you did one too many high-torque slams on the pedal but the newer tesla cars are using a pyro and an e-fuse, an MCU monitors the current flowing, and decides if it should blow the explosive fuse or not that lets you define allowed current patterns, and change the fuse rating based on if your starting or running normally and it wont have any thermal aging

I used to work on 30 year old radios in the Air Force. I didn't know why they failed, I just knew that some of the fuses or circuit breakers would go bad because they were old. We learned to check across the fuse or circuit breaker if you hald low voltage, but power still passed through.

Same thing happened to the XBOX 360s at launch.

Wouldn't the constant vibration tend to 'age' the thin metal elements of the fuses as well ?

I'm sure there's a thousand different gearboxes with oil in them with various change intervals and procedures.

i second the oil change part, i believe they've already shown the refrigerators/kitchens and provision areas

I can tell you on smaller ships (last one I was on was 378' long), the oil was sampled and sent to a lab. The engines didn't get an oil change as long as the oil was doing its job. We did have an Lube Oil Purifier (LOP) that was rotated out through the two Main Diesel Engines (MDE's) and Ship Service Diesel Generators (SSDG). Between the purifier, and the amount of oil that was burned and leaked, the oil was VERY VERY rarely changed.

I have been curious about the chilled water coolers for the magazines and how they worked.

Depends on the amount of oil in equipment. A ship's gearbox uses lots of oil; it has to be cooled and filtered before use in gearbox and returns to the main sump (takes the heat out of the gearbox)and the cycle repeats itself. There is a limit of about 10%, of adding new oil over a certain time frame (due to chemicals in lube oil, to keep them in the lube oil). A ships gearbox can contain hundreds to thousands of gallons of oil. So a complete oil change is very expensive, time consuming; its alot easier to just keep the sump filled to a certain level and take oil samples. If adding oil to equipment, there must be an record kept of oil being added (to determine if something is wrong/leaks somewhere). Oil samples tell if you are getting water into the lube oil system, or if there is certain wear and tear on moving parts due to particles suspended in the oil. A purifier/coalescer can also be used, by taking oil at the bottom of the sump (where water will collect) processing the oil (removing water- usually only a very small amount) and returning the oil to the sump. Not sure how the gearboxes on the battleship are preserved or if they have to run the lube oil system weekly. The main gear box should be vented. Not sure what a battle ship does for that (into space or vented up the smokestack (safer)). On the battleship is the steam turbine bearings part of the gearbox lube oil system?

I would also like to know this. Also very curious how they did it in older ships with hydraulic or steam-driven rotation systems.

Yes there is telemetry between all the guns and every fire control unit and even all the control switching stations that give control to combat engagement or the gunners in the turrets. I read an article in Wiki about it but they never showed the encoders, just the copper wire switching, so parts may still be restricted, maybe Ryan can show us the encoders.

Not to mention that you don't want multiple large electrical loads all drawing starting current at the same time...

@@seafodder6129Yea, the SSTG's start making funny sounds and the ET's start whining about replacing parts!!

I was an IC3 (SW) onboard the USS Peterson DD969 and the Carter Hall LSD50. U r correct. On the Carter Hall, we had a main bus transfer malfunction and explode since it didn't shut fast enough due to the amount of voltage. These ABTs all doing the same thing at the same time through out the ship is fascinating to me. I also had to go check Load centers and main switchboards for my equipment to function on emergency power since there usually wasn't anything automatic. ABTs are primarily used for vital equipment like steering, chilled water, and fire main.

You get a phase failure relay and that energizes whichever circuit is live, very common in fireman's lifts/elevators. Also any critical system such as hospitals and water pumping systems. You should see the 11,000v ones I have to deal with.

@@robertgarrett5009 I always used a fluke 87 digital meter. I didn't ever touch an 11k volt circuit. I did the maintenance/ calibration of the TLI analog gauges, the dc central alarms for intrusion, flooding, fire, and ventilation alarms. The preventative maintenance of all the synchro amplifiers for the heading, speed, and wind bird indicators. Also took care of the 2jv speaker amplifiers and speakers. Also did tons of sound powered phone repairs. Aside from the monitoring of the Wsn 5 gyros. Occasionally the 1mc, general, chemical, collision alarms and associated speakers.

Judging by the quantity of stuff inside I'm wondering if it's a smidge cleverer and similar to modern ones. A modern decent automatic transfer switch will only flick over when the emergency supply is stable giving the genset a little to stabilise and then when mains power comes back on it stays on the genset for a programmable time (ours are set to 5min) because it's not unexpected for it to be on/off a few times before staying on.

I was surprised to learn that the 16 inch guns could be percussion fired with a sledge hammer. Also the ship could be steered using block and tackle pulleys and many sailors pulling the ropes

@@carsonbrown7603 He covered this already.

@@carsonbrown7603 I don't think he means from its condition as a museum ship. I think he meant active service but everything shut down at the pier. Either way, both topics have been covered to some extent.

@T.J. Kong It's a matter of hours, not days. I never actually timed it, but taking a steam plant from cold iron to ready to answer bells by the book (EOSS) shouldn't take more than 6-8 hours at most. In an emergency, the book goes in the bilges and a competent engineering crew can get up and running in 1 to 1.5 hours. 'Course that will entail putting a lot of thermal stresses on the plant itself because you're not waiting around for things to heat up evenly, but if the need is sufficient (like someone's shooting at you) then that's a problem for another day...

I know it was covered somewhere in one of these videos about how they could use the emergency generators to power the pumps to light off the plant to eventually build steam, assuming you are lighting off dead cold. But normally they would have a steam shoretie.

@@seafodder6129 better hope you don't need to shoot back. On an older ship, you are looking at 8-12 hours for a usable signal from the gyrocompass, and closer to 24 for something accurate. Sucks when you need those heading/pitch/roll inputs to stabilize your weapons platforms. We tried to give ourselves 36 hours before scheduled departure. That gave you time to restart the gyros once or twice after losing a vacuum tube or 2 during startup.

Fuses protect the wiring, not the fixtures.

Things do vary, so we recommend going to our website, battleshipnewjersey.org to plan your visit. But generally, we're open year round.

Andrew, read my story I posted an hour after you about what happened to me at Griffiss AFB, NY.

@@klsc8510 would love to but sorting comments by time I don't see it, was it a reply to someone else?

@@andrewfidel2220 It is a short distance below yours. The comment was like yours. The best is to start the video again. Scroll down to find yours. Keep going a bit and you will find mine. Where is a search box when you need it!!!!

I think you're correct but we did have problems at times. South Dakota got beat up pretty bad by Kirishima due to loss of electrical power. Luckily USS Washington annihilated Kirishima before she could finish the job.

@@Lucas12v You were correct about South Dakota's electrical difficulties during the Second Naval battle of Guadalcanal , however they were in large part caused by an electrical engineer who tied down a main circuit breaker thereby putting the system into series which resulted in the system failing at a critical juncture of the battle. Thank goodness for Washington !