360 Views of the Olympic class reciprocating room

[Stephen Carey]

I like the "Mast" colour - I think Cameron's were taken from the pumping house engines in UK, with liberties like the central steam valve that the Chief was swinging when the engines went - allegedly - astern. Typically, all the research went into the interiors of 1st Class of course, which everyone apart from a few like us are most interested in. I think most people don't even realise there's an engineroom down below in ships. I wrote the Titanic starting doc because a student in Glasgow asked me "How do you start the Titanic, is it with a big ignition key?"!
Good news is that your views in the original post are working on my mobile phone - great stuff. I have some constructive points for you regarding connections to pumps, and the guards round the crank pit area (similar to the vid I attached) but will dig out my 1927 Sothern's Marine Engineering book first and do some research. It shows you how to build a steam reciprocating engine from scratch so there should be some good stuff in there. It's a fabulous book, all the drawings are by hand and on tissue paper throughout. I have a vid of a modern motorship engineroom as well, which gives some pointers as to how machinery was and is fitted into enginerooms.
"Step by step" as they say here! Talking of which we are off to our farm up in the hills on Samal Island today to see what a cock the builders have made of our rest-house we're building there whilst we were away in Japan for a couple of weeks. Can't get the staff... I'm hoping for better work for Duterte's Capital Projects that are in the pipeline!

Stephen

 

[Rancor]

Regarding the winches, in my line of work we occasionally use chain motors to drag heavy items around horizontally or up ramps, etc. Could the winches have been used for something like that? Moving a spare propeller shaft or something?

Otherwise a line to an overhead rigging point would make sense, but looking at Stevefury's model there's a fair bit of stuff in the way.

 

[Stevefury]

I'm not sure how they usually would rig ropes/tackle etc in these spaces, but I've created a new 360 to explore the possibilities within the room. I've removed almost everything for clarity. As I understand it, they have several areas to create anchors/tie points: The i or h beams which protrude out of the crotch of each engine Y frame. The engines have been removed in the 360 but the beams can be seen floating in the air. The large I beams in the center of the room would be a good point, with clever rigging one might use the manual/electric winch above the cylinder heads. Maybe the pillars could be used to rig pulleys? just a guess.

The 360 link:
Empty RM

Attached is a render during the construction of my project which shows the inter-crotch and overhead beams.

 

[Stephen Carey]

Steve
What on earth is that "intercrotch" for? Looks like a dead ringer to whack yourself into during a blackout...
The parts of a steam reciprocating engine are not that heavy, and the cylinder covers and pistons would be removed out of the top via a chain block and rail. Not that these ships would have done that sort of thing at sea, it would have been left to a shore squad to do when the ship is in port. A bunch of riggers would make short work of whipping a piston out; I could do it meself... Pulled hundreds in my time, up to and including 1080mm bore. We had an electric overhead crane, which I would imagine the Olympic class also had per your description above. I doubt it happened with external combustion engines very often. Our steam pumps years ago just banged away by themselves, and we only took the apart for "something to do". Adjusting valve links was about it. However on diesel engines there is a proscribed running hours and calendar based maintenance routine.
On one Cunard passenger ship fitted with medium speed engines (one of the earlier ones, Cunard Ambassador I think), the engine tops were so close to the deckhead that there were deck plates you lifted up in order to haul pistons and cylinder heads out into the working alleyway that ran above the engine room on both sides. I notice in the model that the cylinder tops were close to the deckhead in places - I need to look again to see if I can spot the lifting gear.

Stephen

 

[Rancor]

Stevefury,

Another question for you!

Noticed these pipes connecting to the LP exhausts of the main engines at the forward end. I understand one (port side?) is the 'silent blow off valve'. Wondering if you know what the starboard connection is for?

Thanks.

 

[Stevefury]

Hi Rancor.
The starboard side is the silent blow-off valve. There are two connections on the port side facing forward. One is the relief and the other is the turbine start.
Many of these connections were speculative as we (I) don't have these parts of the piping details for this area of the room. I had followed the suggestions closely as possible which were made by more experienced folks than myself and this is how I have them arranged.
Starboard blow-off:

Port side relief (Large upper valve) to a main exhaust return and the turbine start connected to a regulated steam supply:

Here is a photo of the area on Britannic:

 

[Stevefury]

Hi Stephen.
I didn't mean to get vulgar or graphic with the beam descriptions.
The beams measure about 9'6" high off of the floor plates. Pretty high for a head banger.


It appears their function was to be an anchor point for lifting. To hang a block & tackle etc. They have what seems to be a loop/hook mounted on rollers situated within the beam to allow the loop/hook to roll from port to starboard as required.

They appear on a couple detail drawings such as below:

Some of those same i-beams in my model have another I-beam on-top one another. The double I-beam is purely a speculation of mine as it is a convenient mounting point for the catwalk frames overhead.

I put a couple identical beams/rollers in the little area up on boat deck level underneath the ventilation/light windows, inside the air/light uptake. They can be seen in the walk-through animation. I have little reference to what may - or what may not have actually been in that uptake space on boat deck. I thought some beams with the same rolling anchor points would be appropriate.

As a note, the room's big structural i-beams which run in-between the engine cylinders just above the engine frames measure about 20'6" off the floor plates.

 

[Rancor]

Hi Rancor.
The starboard side is the silent blow-off valve. There are two connections on the port side facing forward. One is the relief and the other is the turbine start.
Many of these connections were speculative as we (I) don't have these parts of the piping details for this area of the room. I had followed the suggestions closely as possible which were made by more experienced folks than myself and this is how I have them arranged.
Starboard blow-off:
View attachment 39289

Port side relief (Large upper valve) to a main exhaust return and the turbine start connected to a regulated steam supply:
View attachment 39290

Here is a photo of the area on Britannic:
View attachment 39292

Thanks Stevefury, I think I understand now. The relief line looks like a way to send the auxiliary returns directly to the main condensers instead of the direct contact heater?

And the turbine start allows the turbine to be turned over without the main engines running? Introducing high pressure steam directly into the exhausts of the main engines?

Thanks!

 

[Sec']

Wow SteveFury, that's an incredible piece of work. Really get a feel for it
Just started looking into Titanic and found a couple of photos, admittedly Hnr.433, of the recip ER in construction, and the control stand from the test bed.
Yours seems to match spot on

 

[Sec']

 

[Sec']

 

[A. Gabriel]

All -
I received a pdf on Britannic today which has a drawing of a main engine showing the reversing gear (clip attached). There are steam valves shown for the IP and LP cylinder starting positions mentioned by Steve in one of his posts above, which I must mention in my "starting doc". I've included a clip but cannot post the whole document as it's too large, but I can email it as required. There are some interesting parts to it such as the "three bridge telegraphs..." - see clip from the pdf, and a lot on the intricate lifeboat arrangements. There are hints to describe various safety measures in the light of "recent accidents", but the Titanic is expressly not referred to, though Olympic gets a mention here and there.

View attachment 39248

Lord knows just how much I would love to get a hold of those plans for Britannic's engines. I desire them immensely — the only other available plans for them are the ones sourced from a French publication and are therefore in metric, introducing unacceptable rounding errors in the dimensions undoubtedly originally crafted in inches and feet. When it comes to accuracy for a Belfast-built ship, it's British units only!

As it appears @codad1946 and @Stevefury have not been sighted for months, has anybody else on this thread the pdf of the plans, that I may request them as well?

 

[Steven Christian]

I had missed this thread before. Excellent work and some really good info. Thanks. Very interesting.

 

[A. Gabriel]

The question now becomes, is there anybody else who has taken such a detailed attempt at modeling the reciprocating engine room, or even the turbine room? To my knowledge both spaces are so poorly detailed in the photographic record that one has to make much conjecture in modeling these spaces.

 

[Stevefury]

Hello, sorry I haven't visited more often.
To answer some questions, almost all of the drawings I used for reference are either available on the web or from my main source of a pair of books "Titanic the ship Magnificent".
I used volume 1 a lot as it covers old practices of ship construction used on the Olympic class ships, machinery etc. Web sources like the Britanica and other reasonably reliable places. I also relied on the advice and suggestions from historians, sailors who worked on and engineered the older but more modern steam powered ships.

I was given a few proprietary images which covered plumbing and ventilation plans from the 1930 Olympic refit but all others were found in the public domain.

Some aspects of the images I made are definitely Titanic specific but most are a mixture of all 3 Olympic class ships. A few things (but not many) are educated guesses like the appearance and placement of the main steam board.

It took about a year for me to do the reciprocating engine room and boiler room #1.

I have 3 old computers still rendering 24hrs a day making a HD walkthrough tour of the room on all levels. They've been rendering (more or less) for about a year and about 3/4 done.
I also plan to walk through BR1 from Scotland Road afterwards.

Hoping to have this project rendered and wrapped up mid 2019.

Thanks for the kind words!