Battleship New Jersey BB62 #3 Engine Room Start-to-Finish Build

For all of those followers that had the patience to spend almost a year each for the two models that I created for the Battleship New Jersey Museum & Memorial (16" and 5" gun systems), my next (and final) major project for the ship has now begun. Here’s Ryan Syzmanski talking about those models.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjFvq6CmYRg&t=21s

I noted in my last posts on the 5" project, that the engine room was on the docket, but it needed dimensioned engineering drawings to proceed. I spend several hours in the engine rooms taking lots of pictures, but without the dimensioned drawings, I would be shooting in the dark. Due to the complexity of the space, dead reckoning like I was able to pull off on the other two wouldn’t work on this one.

My search of the National Archives produced a very promising set of original drawings for all the New Jersey’s engineering, and I had even planned a trip to College Park, MD to view them. That was until I realized that I was looking at the drawing index of the Battleship New Jersey BB16, built in 1905, not BB62 built in 1943. Who knew there were two of them?

They did find microfiche drawings, but their computer system wasn’t working correctly and I couldn’t get details on what drawings were in the set. Then John Miano came through.

John wrote a terrifc photo study touring the Big J with terrific pictures of the engineering spaces.

“A Visual Tour of the Battleship USS New Jersey” Copyright 2021 John Miano, Collesseum Builders, Inc. ISBN 978-0-9099804-3-2

I wrote to him asking if he could assist in the project. Ryan Syzmanski, the Big J Museum curator introduced him to me. John did have some drawings that will work, but the were large files. I finally realized that my DropBox installation could be used to capture John’s files even if he didn’t have the app on his system.

The files arrived yesterday and this morning. They are terrific! I still need more specific drawings of critical machinery mainly the HP and LP turbines and the Main Reduction Gear, but their outlines plus pictures may be enough to do something. I also have specific details about every latdder and grate in the entire space, down to the specific bolting details of how they’re fastened to the structure.

I need more info on the structural girders, but I can probably ferret that out. I finally have imagery of the massive foundation steel that supports the equipment. You can’t see that on a visit unless you want to crawl around in the bilge and that ain’t gonna happen.

This project is more complex that the previous two… I know, I know, that’s hard to believe, but believe me. I’m planning on doing milld cutaways of main propulsion plants and the reduction gear. There are over a dozen different sized ladders that need to be produced. I’m planning on 3D printing the floor grating so theywill look pretty good, especially with lighting showing through it. I’m leaving off #2 deck above enabling viewers to see the main equipment floor without obstruction. The model won’t be overly large at 1:48, but it will be complex and interesting. It may also get an AV program to highlight aspects that won’t be evident once it’s all put together. This is the same approach taken with the 5". Ryan’s communication person is helping to produce that one for me to put up on the Internet.

Here’s a taste of one of the drawings. If you’ll notice there is a dimension given between the spacing of the three sea water evaporators at the drawings bottom. That’s all I need to perfectly scale the entire drawing. That’s the missing link in the other kinds of diagrams I found. All of the other drawings have dimensions as well. The scale they’re originally drawn in does not matter since I’m going to be working with them at full size 1:1 real world. I then scale to 1:48 (2.08%) in the slicer before printing any parts. SketchUp likes to work large. On some of the smaller details I may even enlarge them further.

S40-17 Upper Lev Plan.jpg

So… fasten your seatbelts. If this is anything like the previous two, there will plenty of successes, near misses and out-and-out castrophes to deal with. Only the strong of heart should proceed. I will start drawing as soon as I finish editing my book on 21st Century Model Making. Stay tuned to this space.

5 Likes

This saga is also found on the KitMaker Forum which uses the same web engine that is now on this new and improved Fine Scale Modelers Forum. Instead of duplicating all the previous notes, please jump over to that Forum now for an update to get you up to speed, and for all future reports, come back here. I will posting the same writeup on four forums simultaneously with each reaching a slightly different viewing audience.

Now for the latest news:
With the main condenser and low pressure turbine in pretty good order, I started working on the high pressure turbine and the small impulse turbine that drives the main condensate pump. John Miano got me good drawings of both, but there were stil many ambiguities that I couldn’t resolve. Those concerned with the pump engine weren’t show stoppers, but the questions surrounding the hp turbine were crucial. The most imoort of these was how the machine is supported. I couldn’t find the answer in the drawings. I had to visit the ship again.

Last week, Ryan Syzmanski and I spent and hour and half in the un-refurbished engine room #3 and I focused on three areas: HP details and foundation; Main steam piping runs; and the main condensate pump drive.

Boy! Am I glad I did this. I was completely wrong in my thinking and had two triangular brackets installed on the output end of the main condenser that are actually two of the four that support the startboard side of the main reduction gear, the apparatus that sits BEHIND the condenser in this view. There are also triangular brackets surrounding the MRG on the other three sides. I am assuming that even with the properller shaft’s thrust bearing quite a ways astern from the engine rooms, there is still thrust that must be directed into the ship’s structure to push the ship forward and these massive supports are part of that system.


The propeller shaft from the engine room forward of this one has a bearing that sits on top of the curved support that’s welded to the triangular supports. Thse supports captivate the MRG and it ain’t goi’n anywhere! Engine room #3 has shafts running through the lower level from engine rooms 1 & 2. Engine room #4 has three shafts spinning through it.

Just imagine, for a moment, the noise in these spaces when the ship was crusing at flank speed. I counted six steam turbines of various sizes all running. And that’s not including the pumps and sub-systems that were run by electric motors. Steam turbines ARE NOT quiet! And propeller shafts spinning 18’ props at 220 rpm aren’t quiet either. I’ve read that the MRG makes all kinds of noises too, even when in perfect running order.

I also found that the foundation holding up the massive HP Turbine is a rectagular heavy I-Beamed weldment that is supported on end by additional triangular braces on the forward end of the main reduction gear, and has its other end simply resting on a shelf-like bracket on the boiler-engineer room bulkhead. There are no separate foundation legs or supports holding up the hp turbine. Ryan was surprised to see this since he didn’t think the bulkhead thickness had the helf to support a 30,000 pound, vibrating machine.

I took 80 pictures and one 3D scan of the curved inlet end of one of the two auxiliary steam turbine electric generators. I also just discovered that my Scaniverse APP on my iPhone 12 Pro is much more versatile that I knew and that I using the wrong file type to import the processed images into SketchUp.

I have to decipher the images I took. Many are like the analogy of the blind men trying to describe an elephant when each is touching a different part. For example: the main steam pipe runs out of the boiler room bulkhead and the follows a ridiculously long path before reaching the HP turbine. At one point it makes a 180º turn back on itself. We assumed this is all to manage expanision issues since the steam in that pipe is over 800ºF.

I was in areas that most people will never go. Access around the HP turbine, in general, is very tight and visitors would not be allowed there, if (and it’s a big if) this room was to be re-conditioned and opened to the public. Making matters worse was most was completely unlit and I had a 1,000 lumen flashlight that I used for most of the images.

Here’s a confusing taste of what I saw:

Astern Steam Lines: These lines snake back and forth providing 800# steam to the two astern turbines on each end of the low pressure turbine spool.


The air ejector unit is a rather small and ridiculously complicated maze of piping and valves. It’s purpose is to remove entrained oxygen from the feedwater condensate coming out of the condenser before sending it to the boiler room. While I think I can model and print it, I’m not sure why.

There are seven of these cam operated, spring-loaded throttle valves perched on a manifold atop the HP turbine. They are manually operated in sequence by a large hand wheel on the main control board. as the wheel is turned, the cam is moved via a gear box which opens each valve in order to increase or decrease steam inlet. I will be modeling these!

These are water collection points under the HP turbine. Just how much of this I can/will model is anyone’s guess at this time. You won’t see much of it. I don’t yet know where this water ends up. It’s hot, as noted by the insulation wrapping, and it’s basically distillate and is relatively pure with probably traces of the lubricant and it wouldn’t be wasted. I will find out.

Looking up under the HP turbine you can see part of the weldment that holds it up. The large flange on the right side is on of the center joints of the main condenser. The HP turbine nestles up against it.

The other end of the frame rests on this support welded to the boiler room bulkhead. This is a two-image composite.

As you can discern, it’s not overly complicated. it will require that some portion of that bulkhead to be included the model. The other suggestion that my older grandson made was to detail the far wall to show the ship’s framing and the armor plate installation. Ryan thought that would be a good idea. These is actually very little equipment of interest on the port side of the engine room with the upper deck having electrical switchgear cabinetry and the lower deck being completely bare.

This is the kind of stuff that makes this model both enjoyable and a bit scary. Working with no net!

3 Likes

Starting designing the HP Turbine in earnest and concurrently, its foundation. Speaking of foundations, I got another 9 drawings from John Miano including details of the bracing system around the Main Reduction Gear and Auxiliary Turbo-generators, and the lube piping for the latter. Here’s a couple of WIP shots.

For those technically interested: the HP turbine has 7, cam-operated throttle valves that come on squentially as the forward throttle wheel is turned. But they don’t all enter the turbine at the same place. The first few feed into the 2-wheel impulse turbine at the start of the spool, with the remainder feeding into wheels further along the spool. This enables 600 pound steam to be evenly applied through more of the machine. I will be detailing some of this mechanism. It will be small, but it will be there. There’s still more work to do on this drawing.

Screenshot 2024-12-19 at 10.11.49 PM.png

This is the beginning of the HP Turbine foundation. I hope John can get me some more drawings about this assembly, otherwise, I’m going to be taking some “modeler’s license”. The non-detailed square log on the right is the wall bracket that I will be detailing further. I bought the large format styrene sheeting for the base decking and bulkheads. The bulkheads will not be full since it will block to many sight lines. Instead, I’ll just show bits that are critical to show things like where steam enters the room and the bearings for the prop shafts that pass through the space.

Screenshot 2024-12-19 at 10.18.04 PM.png

4 Likes

Quite the project. You’ll know as much as the guys that built it before you are done!

Holy cow! What scale are these projects? I’ll have to look for them at the museum?
I’m in PA, and belong to the Delaware Valley Scale Modelers out of Philly. There’s a ship modeler’s club down there, too; their president is in the DVSM, too. They do regular display projects aboard the New Jersey. You wouldn’t happen to be local here, too?
Best regards,
Brad

The big gun is 1/72 as it was based on Takom’s 16" turret shell kit. The 5" system is 1/48 and the engine room is that scale also. I wish I was local. I live in Louisville, KY, but was a Philly area resident for most of my life. Moved here 15 years ago to be near grandkids when I retired. L’ville is wonderful with a fantastic hobby shop and great train store. The two models are in the Ofc’s Ward Room Lounge on the Big J’s main deck easily accessible by all.

1 Like

I hope all of you have had a happy and healthy Christmas (Hanukkah) holiday, and hope for an equally happy and healthy New Year.

Besides spending Christmas night (First night of Hanukkah) with our daughter and family, I did a lot of design work over the last week. I am declaring the HP Turbine Designed and ready for printing. I now have the actual engineering drawing of the welded foundation that supports this vital piece of propulsion and feel confident that at least the main propulsion portion of the project will be as accurate as I can make it. Even with hundreds of pictures and lots of actual drawings, there are still unknowns that i have to guesstimate.

The drawing of the frame on my last post was from my imagination and I will now draw it exactly as it was originally designed.

Meanwhile, the HP Turbine rotor, with my previous experience with the LP Turbine, was pretty straight forward. i can’t say the same for the complete throttle valve structure. This bit took days to get into an acceptable form… and I don’t know if it’s printable in this form. It depends on where the supports are going to fall. The HP throttle consists seven similar mechanisms. I drew them the same even though there may be some variatons between them, but no one will know. They’re very hard to visualize in their 1:1 form due to the forrest of piping and insulation that surrounds them.

Let’s get started looking at a nice finished rendering of the completed unit. Like the HP, it will be printed in multiple parts. I would like to print the throttle body integral with the upper housing if I can. But I could print it separately.

HP Turbine WIP.pngHP Turbine WIP 3.pngHP Turbine WIP 2.png

This drawing project, although it may not appear as such, was one of most challenging I ever drew and forced me to get better using a plug-in call “Curviloft”. I keep forgetting I have this app because I don’t have many times I need it, but when I need it, I REALLY NEED IT. I permits SketchUp to create organic, compound curved shapes. There were two instances where I needed this on the HP Turbine. The first was the funnel-shaped discharge outlet that conveyed 46psi steam to the LP Turbine. I first made it a regular cone, but it looked terrible. I used the Curviloft function where you draw a series of contoured frames and the app skins it over like building an RC airplane out of balsa old-school.

Screenshot 2024-12-23 at 5.23.38 PM.png

The next opportunity presented itself in properly shaping the 600 psi steam inlets on either side of the throttlle housing. There are no square edges on most of this equipment since they all massive casting and they are usually associated with lots of filets. In this case the shape had to curve in one plane and then in two when it had a full-surround filet where it joined the main body. Again, I tried to do it with simole SU shaping, but woke up thinking about how to form the frames and use Curviloft.

This shows the early attempt with its square entry.

Screenshot 2024-12-25 at 12.07.47 PM.png

Here was the shaped object drawn off the main housing.

Screenshot 2024-12-25 at 12.01.17 PM.png

And lastly, after attaching and forming the rest of the area around the protrusion. It took a lot of work removing the old shapes and preparing the area for the new work. This is often a problem with what I’m doing. I first draw the parts as best I can directly from the drawings. Then I start heavy editing and modifications based on pictures and then, worst of all, getting it all in a position to be printable. My drawing time would be hours shorter if i didn’t have to be concerned with solids, reversed faces and thickness to make things printable.

Screenshot 2024-12-25 at 12.07.13 PM.png

The last utterly enigmatic design work was coming up with something resembling the 7-valve cluster that makes the ship go slow or fast. I have another plug-in that quciky lets you draw springs (or any kind of spiral/helix) which I put to good use creating the valve springs. I was going to do a cutaway of part of the valve body, but the innerds are not right and making them so is more time than I want to spend. Furthermore, the details would be so small in 1:48 as to be meaningless. As it is, some of the details may be too small to render successfully… think about those turbine blades in scale thickness. I am not duplicating the cam mechanism that controls the sequential valve opening. I don’t have any accurated information about it and it’s buried amid the valves so it can’t be seen.

HP Turbine WIP 4.png

​Like this….

At each point in the drawing process I would export the parts as an STL file and load it into my ChiTuBox printer slicer to see if it is a full solid object and printable. I don’t spend time adding supports, but it’s a good way to catch anything missing.

HP Turbine Upper.png

Screenshot 2024-12-25 at 12.27.19 PM.png

This is a complicated part as it is, so including the valves on top might be overkill for the printer. My other choice is to print the entire valve body separately and attach later. With the HP unit designed I can turn my attention to building its foundation based on the scale drawings I now possess. Stay tuned!

3 Likes

Very interesting! I really need to get up to speed on a good 3d drawing program. Been doing 2d for so many years I seem to be stuck in a 2d rut.

There’s a lot of choices out there. I’m a SketchUp user out of sheer habit. I started with it at Ver 1.0 when it was first introduced by a few guys in Boulder, CO. I’ve lived through the Google and Trimble ownership periods. SU can do whatever you want, but you do have to finesse it. Blender is free and does pretty much everything, but… and to me that “but” is a killer… it has a significant learning curve and is very complicated. I’ve attempted to learn it when I lost my SU subscription, but when that was resolved, I gave up on learning a new package with lots to do besides being in a massive learning mode.

Lots of folks swear by Fusion 360 and it too has a free as well as paid version. SU has a free, web-based version, but its limitations prevent me from doing the kind of work I now need to produce these highly engineered projects.

I’m in the process of finishing up a book specifically geared to using modern tech in custom scale model building, entitled, 21st Century Model Making: The Fusion of 3D CAD, 3D Printing and Traditional Skills. It’s in its final edits, but can be viewed by others. In fact, I’ve had modelers all over the world reviewing it in preparation for publication. If you like to veiw it, send me a private message and I will forward you a copy. Haven’t decided on pricing (if any), but I think it’s going to be published as a eBook since it’s free to set it up on Apple Books.

1 Like

This is most impressive. One of these days I’ll get back down to see my ship, and I’ll look for your models. (And maybe mine? Don’t know if they’re on display.)

Dude…this is intense!! I’ve seen your other work in other genres before but this is gonna take the CAKE!! So much going on with this that I don’t know where to jump in first. I’ll be frequenting this as well as reading through this whole thread to get all caught up with it.

Jeaton… haven’t forgotten about you. I’m in process of doing a few more edits on the book before sending it out again. Joe, Ryan Syzmanski would be very happy to visit the boat (as would I). The ofcs Ware Room Lounge is very easy to get to on the main deck. Mustang… I didn’t get started in custom building until my early 70s. I’m turning 80 this summer and am not slowing down. I know there’s a time limit out there somewhere, but sincce I don’t know what it is, I’m just going to keep going. Some of this project, while definitely stretching my comfort zone, is going better than I would have imagined.

And I just love that FSM dumped that clung of a web engine and got on board with what others are using. I post this thread on four sites. The WW2Aircraft site uses a different engine, so I do the original there and just copy/paste, pictures and all, to the other three and that includes this one. Before, I had to do this one first and copy it to the others. Putting up the images on the Posti picture site was a huge time waster for me. Did I mention I’m gong to be 80… and time is getting more important,

After returning from a New Years Eve wedding in Miami, I got a gift from Southwest Airlines; a nice, annoying head cold. This kept me out of the shop, but not off the laptop and a lot of design work contrinued. The HP turbine is done and with accurate drawings of its foundation, I was able to draw that too. I stopped work on that because it was now esssential to finalize the main reduction gear since the MRG’s fore foundation also supports the aft end of the HP turbine foundation. I continued designing the steam piping, but I foresee a decision lurking. Too much piping will obscure the wonderful machinery that lies below. Converssely, I’m also thinking that the undersides of the main piping could serve as convenient locations for LED lighting.

I was able to estimate the actual MRG gear diameters using the overall ratios, the output speed, and the relative space within the housing. I produced a spreadsheet to do the calculation. There is a slight difference in diameters between the first stage on the HP and LP sides. The HP input rpm is 4,905 and the LP is 3,913, but the second pinions on the bull gear have to be spinning at the same speed to create the 202 rpm at the properller shaft. After doing all this, I realized that viewer could not discern this sublety, so I made both sides the same. I’m cutting away the gear covers on both sides so the innerds can be viewed from either direction. i did a test setup in the print slicer to print the gear set (sans bull gear) as a single part facing vertically meaning no supports will go on ANY gear teeth. It will work.

Screenshot 2025-01-07 at 10.31.25 AM.png

This was a very challenging piece to draw. I was fighting all the usual SketchUp challenges coupled with the mechanics of creating parts that will assemble correctly.

The frames were equal on both sides. I drew the overall shape and then slice in half using a big rectangular brick as the cutter and insecting the faces and removing the half I didn’t want. You group the good half, MOVE-COPY it directly next to it, and mirror is using the MIRROR tool. Match them up a mating corner, explode both parts and then remove the center line making them a single part with perfectly symetrical features on both sides.

Screenshot 2025-01-08 at 6.25.25 PM.png

Another annoying, but necessary detail with making a SU drawing 3D printable is all the faces being “normal” not reversed. I set my default colors so reveresd faces are quite obvious. When reboring some of the bearings, the inside faces come out reversed. If this was just for an illustration, it wouldn’t matter a whit, but to print they must be all forward faceing. I had to go back and reverse then on facet at a time. It’s very finicky, time-consuming work that must be done. Reveresed faces are seen as missing in the slicer and missing faces don’t print. This screen shot was taken in the middle of the face reversing task.

Screenshot 2025-01-06 at 12.52.36 PM.png

I “line bored” the bearing mounts by creating a set of shafts that were used to “cut” their channels in all the support struture. Even with this cleverness, I still created problems for myself when I didn’t have the frames properly aligned when I did the cutting. I have to close up all the bearing holes and redo the whole operation. I used the same setup to cut corresponding bearing in the gear covers.

Screenshot 2025-01-05 at 4.09.46 PM.png

Speaking of gear covers. While seemingly uncomplicated, they took a lot of hours to get resonsable. I was shaping them without paying enough attention to my pictures. Like the gears, I don’t have technical drawings of these highly-visible parts. When you come down the ladder into the engine room, the first thing you see is the top of the MRG. I tried to fix my errors, but gave up and redrew the part from scratch. Since the same on both sides—although one side has the electrical turning gear attached—Made one, copied it and then mirrored it using a -1.00 scale factor.

When I first drew the gear covers I had the lid face curved on all sides. After closer look at the pictures, it was only curved on the front and back edges, not the sides. Making the curved edges is EASY. I have an SU Plugin, Fredo6Corner, where you dial in the amount of edge to be curved, select the edges and click. Voila! Curved edges. But… to fix curved edges, or in this case, remove some of them and re-square the edges, it’s a complete pain-in-the-derriere. It’s not hard to erase the curve, but it’s very finicky, re-laying the lines to create the square edge. You make heavy using of SU’s “inference” facility that highlights the line end that corresponds to an adjacent/nearby edge. You draw out one segment at a time to the inference point of the bottom line, and then connect these lines to make faces, and finally close the long wall. It’s complicated to write about it and complicated to pull it off. This shows the lines pulled out to the correct distances waiting to be connected to the same form on the other end of the part.

Screenshot 2025-01-10 at 3.38.32 PM.png

Today I spent time building the output end of the MRG. I didn’t have a drawing of this, but a good photo I took. So the upper works are complete. I still have work to do on the MRG lower foundation and lubeoil tank upon which it all sits. The cutaway area is what’s going to be printed.

NJ ERP MRG 3rd Render.pngNJ ERP MRG 4th Render.png

The X-ray view shows the bull gear and why the housing so darn big. The bull gear is about 13’ in diameter. The real one could be bigger or smaller. I don’t have any information about it, but this size fits the housing appropriately, and I do have housing drawings.

Screenshot 2025-01-11 at 1.55.55 PM.png

So here’s some eye candy to brighten up a cold winter day (for us Northern Hemisphere folks). It’s definitely starting to shape up. Notice that there’s now machinery on the top of the main condensate pump. The big four (HP/LP turbines, MRG and Condenser) are now almost finished. I don’t expect that any of the auxiliary equipment should be more difficult.

This is the high pressure side:

Master Draw WIP-1.png

And the low pressure side:

Master Draw WIP-2.png

3 Likes

I’m almost finished designing all the parts of the primary propulsion system. In addition to the drawings, these parts have been prepared for printing. I just placed an order for a larger ultrasonic cleaner to replace my smaller (and no longer working) unit. Bigger parts require bigger cleaning systems. I also ordered another UV curing light to double the illumination in my post-cure box. With the larger box, and with the inverse square rule regarding electromagnetic radiation, the curing power was diminished. The second lamp will solve that problem too.

To the best of my ability I created the aft-end main reduction gear foundation that abuts the bulkhead to the #4 fire room. It’s a very hard location to photograph and the drawing of this area in cross-section is equally ambiguous. I never let confusion stop me. I just added my own bit of naval architecture and pressed on.

This shows the aft-end of the MRG and the #3 propeller shaft penetrating that bulkhead. You can see the structural steel retaining the unit, but it’s a very oblique view so getting good dimensions was dificult. Furthermore, the space is only about 3’ wide and hard, if not impossible, for an 80 year old guy to get any closer. You can see piping and valves buried in there. In 1:48 and considering the lack of visibility, I’m not modeling them! You wonder how a human can reach that valve in 1:1 scale. I found a lot of valves in places like that. It has to be reached from the bilge which lies below all this.

IMG_6375.jpg

And here’s the drawing showing that area from the same side. I challenge you to make sense out of it.

Ele Cross-sec MRG aft.jpeg

That said, I did get something that can be created in 3 dimensions. And it looks like this.

Screenshot 2025-01-15 at 2.09.46 PM.png

I also finalized the HP turnine foundation. I was wondering why the #3 fireroom bulkhead was on an angle. I then realize that it wasn’t! The entire propulsion system is on an angle to correspond to the slight angularity of the how the propeller is attached to the ship. All four props and their shafts are angled outboard by, what seems to be, about 3 degrees for the inboard and more for the outboard shafts. Notice too on this overhead of the bilge level the amount of abaft space is taken up by voids and armor for torpedo protection. The ship has a 108’ beam, but usable space inside is only 80’ at the widest. It was a warship after all, not a cruise liner.

Screenshot 2025-01-15 at 12.44.52 PM.png

I had to come up with a better way to attach the HP turbine itself to the its foundation. The plans show the turbine hovering above the frame rails, but I couldn’t determine what’s actually holding it there. I extended upwards the inner stiffeners and matched their curved surface to the HP’s bottom contours. This will facilitate getting all this stuff together and in line.

Screenshot 2025-01-15 at 12.19.36 PM.png

I’m planning on printing the entire HP foundation as a single part, again to facilitate alignment and assembly. The new printer should have no trouble executing this. This part would be too big for my now-obsolete Mars 3 printer. Elegoo just announced a new iteration of the Saturn 4 Ultra with a 16K LCD screen, and some other refinement such as an integral vat heater to stabilize resin temperature, plus a light to accompany the included camers. I’m happy with the one I have, and will upgrade again in a couple of years, if I still doing this stuff.

Screenshot 2025-01-15 at 11.45.28 AM.png

The thing done in this session was to refine and design the #1 & 2 prop shaft bearings. I originally faked this, but then found a good image of the same in the Iowa and, once I have a real thing, I’m no longer at ease faking it. There are a lot of these bearing throughout the length of the shafts. The #1 shaft is 340’ long!

Just to keep y’all from getting too excited, there’s still a massive amount to design, including, but not limited to, 2-1,250 KW auxiliary turbo-generators and their condenser systems, the deaerator, 3-evaporators to generate potable and feedwater from seawater, lots of small pumps and auxiliaries, the main control panel, electrical panels. And then there’s the labyrinth of catwalks, gratings and ladders. Of the latter, I’m quickly coming the realization that too much of this these will hide a huge portion of the equipment itsef. The goal is to show the equipment in ways you can’t see when visiting in person. I have to include some ladders and platforms for scale, but not all.

1 Like

One of my blog readers on another forum that I post this story, sent me links to two Ryan Syzmanski videos that addresed the prop shafts. I was very happy with my 24" prop shafts. I thought I read somewhere that this was their diameter. Then I looked at the video and found out that they’re 32" in diameter, and solid steel except for the 8" hole down their center. Once I know an “actual” dimension I’m compelled to make the model conform.

That generated about 2 hours of work modifying everything affected by the prop shaft. I also got a good view of the bulkhead Prop Shaft Seals so I changed them also. The 24" shaft scales nicely to a 1/2" in 1:48 so I could use a standard piece of tubing for it. At 32", it scales to something between 5/8" and 11/16". I’m going with 5/8"… 32" is 20% bigger than 24" so I was able to scale up the spring bearings and their supports. I also got a good view of the prop shaft couplings enlarged its thickness and then scaled it up 120%.

I didn’t scale up the MRG’s output bearing becasue they wouldn’t fit in the space. Instead, I intersected the front face with the new diameter shaft and redrew and edited the parts with the new diameter. It also changed the tapered end and that… was a pain in the butt. As I’ve said many times before (and it’s worth repeating), in SketchUp, it’s often easier to draw a part from scratch than to modify it.

The new shafts do look much more massive and, frankly, look bettter to me.

I pause videos that have useful imagery and then do a screen print isolating the parts I want. I did the same with the other video and found some good still images that I didn’t have in my reference library. Every image, even if it’s just a small detail that is exposed, is worth it.

NJ ERP Master Drawing.png

Shame on me for exporting a lot of these affected parts as STLs and then producing sliced print files. I now have to go back and do some of them over again. I was jumping the gun.

Also, my new Ultrasonic Cleaner arrived yesterday and the additional UV curing light for the enlarged post-cure chamber arrived today. That means some of these now-designed components are going to be printed this coming week.

2 Likes

Back in the shop for the first time since before New Years. I removed my old printer and cleaned it up. It works perfectly, but I’m pressed for worktop space. Funny… the touch pad was getting all munged up and looked terrible. Upon closer inspection it appeared to be delaminating. Turns out there was a protective film over it that should be removed. I put the new touch pad cover when I replace the electronics a couple of years ago. There was no instruction about removing any film. Now there’s a pristine touch pad for anyone who buys the machine. Then I looked closer at the new printer, and there was a protective film on its touch pad too. I removed that right away. The film made it hard to remove any errant resin that got on it.

​Removing the printer freed up space for the new Ultrasonic cleaner which is much larger.

Like the old cleaner, the first thing I did was cut some aluminum screen wire for the bottom of the parts basket to captivate any smaller parts. The machine comes with a tiny jewelry basket, but the screen is for things a bit larger.

I then installed the second UV curing light in the lid of my enlarged post-curing box. Between hot glue and some scrap pieces and cardboard, I made a semi-secure mount for the light. I added a front door to the box so I really don’t have to fully remove the lid; just tip it back a litte to let the door open. This doubles the lumens in the box and exposes the tops of parts along with the sides. I would still have to invert the parts to ensure the bottoms are cured.

I hadn’t used the printer in a long time and it needed a firmware upgrade before I could load the new files. I modified all the files that were affected by the propeler shaft size changed and will be printing all these parts over the next couple of weeks. My goal is to have the main propulsion parts done in two weeks. While the printer’s working I will be designing the auxiliaries and working on another modern styrene plastic kit, the Trumpeter 1:32 F-35B STOVL. I was planning on 3D printing a 2nd propulsion plant for this plane and attempted to scan an assembled conventional take off engine that would power the F-35A. The scan is not usable as a 3D printing model. I may serve as a guide to modeling it on SketchUp, but I’m not too optimistic. I was planning on having one system out of the model and the other installed.

I had forgotten a quirk of the printer. When it’s in the rest position, the vat is in “down tilt position”. When you fill the vat with resin, you can’t get anywhere near the MAX marking. You really need to fill amost a 1/4" below it. When the printer energizes, the vat moves up to the level position and if you added resin level too close to the max mark, it will cause an “Overfill” alarm and stop the print. I overfilled it today. I lost track of the right spot to fill (note to self: put some kind of marking to show the actual fill line), and had to empty some resin before restarting the print. Emptying resin is always sloppy and can get out of control really fast. I should buy a cheap turkey baster to do this when it happens again. Later tonight the first of the modified parts will come off the machine.

1 Like

Printing went ahead full speed with the new equipment in service. First was the modified discharge end of the main condenser with the erroneous angle frames removed. I also modified the part for printing by adding X-bracing as I did on the other end to reduce warping. In this case, once the part was post-cured I cut it out with a carbide router. It would block seeing the coolant tubes in the curaway. It didn’t warp!

Next up was the spring bearings and their mounts. The actual scale size of the 32" propeller shafts is .666". That’s close enough to.625 and I used a left over piece of 5/8 plumbing tubing as the propeller shafts. It’s a nice slip fit through the bearing. For some reason, I got the legs and rear brace uneven lengths on the starboard side. Rather than fixing the drawing and reprinting, I just added a shim. When it’s installed in the model, I will open the hold floor and inlay the shim.

While cleaning up these parts, the printer was dutifully printing the bull gear. It came out perfect! In fact, everything out of this printer is just about perfect. I’m using the default layer

setting of 50 microns, but yet getting absolutely no layer lines. I think it’s the 12k X-Y resolution that contributes to this. It creates very small pixel sizes and very strong supports. I’m using all medium supports except for the very lowest edges that start printing first. Many pull off with cutting and leave no damage. The printer counts the number of total layers printed. It tells you to change the PFA vat film at 60,000. I’m getting close, but it’s working so well, I don’t want to screw anything up. I’ve had only one print failure since running this machine in August. That was my fault.

Here were the two halves of the bull gear the print completion.

After cleaning the teeth looked beautiful.

The rear of the halves has ribs I built in again to reduce any tendancy to warp. There was no warpage.

I test assembled the gear and hung it on the that piece of pipe. it will have its own shaft which will be printed shortly. Right now the gear train is on the printer.

I was also working on the F35-B today. While all this printing is going on, I need other projects to keep me busy.

1 Like

It sure is funny!

Thanks guys! The new printer is astounding in both it’s resolution and producing parts without any failures. And of course, the paint’s barely dry on this one and Elegoo is now marketing the Saturn 4 Ultra 16k. Mine has a 12k LCD screen, so the new one has a 30% resolution. I don’t know what that means, but in the case of the my Saturn, the increase from 4k in my Mars 3 to 12k in the Saturn has made a huge difference in apparent performance. I used “apparent” becuase of the increase area of the larger build plate decreases the absolute increase in pixels per unit area, Regardless, it is a higher resolution machine. Since the new Saturn model has the same size build plate, it’s pixel pre unit area is increased proportionately.

I’m producing one to two runs per day. Today, I cleaned up the full reduction gear sets and started printing the HP turbine in all its entirety. It will be done at 6:30 p.m. so I’ll know if its a good print tonight. I’ve come to expect that all the prints are going to be good. I only had a single failure since I got this machine, and that was very early on. The more accurate exposure time and the resolution making much higher strength parts enables me to use medium supports throughout the part except for the starting surfaces at the build plate. This makes support removal much easier since the medium (and fine) supports pull off by hand and leave no nibs behind.

To give you all a reference of just how massive a 53, 000 hp gear box is, here’s the bull gear with a scale person next to it.

NJ ERP Bull Gear is Huge.jpg

The Gear sets are really nice. I knew in the drawing that one set was not in direct, tight contact with the input pinion and suspected that when supports were removed, it would be a separate part. It is! Not a problem since it will settle into it’s bearing mounts and will look fine. Here’s how they looked coming out of the machine.

NJ ERP Reduction Sets as Printed.jpg

And again, with our scale 1:48 man. There are some very minor blemishes in the gear teeth, but I’m totally okay with that and am pleased with the outcome.

NJ ERP Reduction Sets Preped.jpg

Another view… I made the shafts hollow to reduce resin consumption.

NJ ERP Reduction Sets.jpg

I have all the propulsion system parts loaded (by WiFi) in the printer, so all I have to is pull the job off, fill up the vat to account for resin consumption, press go and in a few hours more parts will appear. Here’s what it looks like in time lapse from the printer’s build in camera. It’s fascinating and a little sci-fi to have parts appearing of a 1/2" deep pool of resin.

See video here: https://studio.youtube.com/video/4LnvO4P9VOY/edit

Hope the video works….

1 Like

The HP print looks spectacular!

Even that very complex throttle assembly printed perfectly and I left it attached to the upper half.

I didn’t know if it would work that way. It did!

The rotor is a beauty with no warpage and clearly define discharge-end blading.

And that very thin cross-section exhaust funnel seems to be okay too.

Lower shell is nice and clean and should work as drawn.

I haven’t trimmed it or post-cured it so things can still break.

2 Likes

Here’s that video link in the correct mode.

2 Likes

@Builder_2010 : I envy you guys who have the space to 3D print in. It’s bad enough that I’ve got a stash and work area to contend with…but a printer area?? That’d be a whole area taken up for me. lol

You’re progressing well on this one buddy. :+1: