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| Thread ID: 76369 | 2007-01-30 05:53:00 | Diesel Engines | Bob_Bond (10568) | PC World Chat |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 520614 | 2007-01-31 11:11:00 | Cheers Surfer Joe, since BobBond raised it with me, I've been wondering too... not it's back to me asking all the random questions... [sigh] :D | Sick Puppy (6959) | ||
| 520615 | 2007-01-31 17:28:00 | I find that hard to believe!,what kind of car was that? It wasn't a vehicle as such . . . it was a stationary crane on an OGB that the Navy owned during WW-II . The flywheel was over 30 feet in diameter and had a jacking motor that kept it slowly moving all the time even when it wasn't running . The purpose of turning it slowly? . . . to keep it from distorting if it stood still . OGB = ocean going barge . I also got to work on Herman The German . . one of the (at that time) largest floating cranes from the spoils of war after the Germans gave up in WW-II . It was stationed in Long Beach, CA, and was the twin to the one that the English lost when they were transporting theirs across the English Channel . The US Navy had to bring the one they got across the Atlantic, around the cape and up the Pacific Coast past South America to Long Beach . It arrived without a scratch . It wouldn't fit thru the Panama Canal . . too large . All the placards and instruction tags were in German . It was a beautiful work of art with herring bone gears and sintered bronze bearings all over the place . It had over 400 ton lifting capacity, and I got to help placing Howard Hughe's "Spruce Goose" into it's hanger on the mole in Long Beach with it, next to the Queen Mary . Anyway (I digressed again, didn't I?), the very large piston that I spoke of had to be re-ringed . . . . a process of allowing the connecting rod to go off-centric and pop the piston above the deck of the cylinder to access the ring land in the piston . The ring was really a metalized wire and flaxen rope type material that was wound into the land and allowed to exceed the diameter of the piston by 1/4 inch to allow for tension when the "ring" was back into the bore . The jacking motor was used to pull the piston back into the cylinder as we packed the material into the bore with wide chisel-type punches, and then worked the piston up and down for 200 cycles and then re-jacked the piston out of the bore to be re-packed a second time . The second packing was lubricated with beeswax and placed into the land and this time allowed to exceed to bore by only 1/32 inch . This was the final fitting before the head was replaced and the "one-lunger" was restarted . We had to preheat the water jacket with shore side steam for two days before we started it first on natural gas, and then switched to distal oil . . . not unlike diesel in power and heat capacity . It was a four-cycle and I can still hear it running in my mind . Whoosh - thump - whoosh - whoosh . Very slow . . . a very deliberate 22 rpm . It used poppet-type valves for the intakes and desmodromic valves for the exhaust . Fuel was injected by a cam-operated plunger system that sprayed fuel across the head of the notched piston into a pre-combustion area in the opposite side of the cylinder wall to eliminate knocking and harsh explosions . Cooling of the engine was via a sea locker heat exchange unit that use ocean water to cool the water in the engine . . that way no salt water entered the cooling jackets of the engine . I imagine it is scrapped and destroyed now . There was a lot of bronze and stainless steel in it . . . . the piston was composite of aluminum, cast iron and babbitt . The actual engine stood over two stories tall and took up most of the barge that wasn't crane and cable spools . The operator's cabin rode halfway up the boom so he could see what he was doing . The biggest part was the flywheel . Reduction gears and the transmission were all exposed for oiling and they rode in center less roller bearings and bronze types with rawhide dust shields . Locomotion of the barge was a pair of Detroit 6-71's in vee-drives and twin screws, twin rudders . |
SurferJoe46 (51) | ||
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