Working with bigger guns - BB-35 Battleship Texas

[David2011]

This is an elevation disc for the 5" gun. Each side is engraved for a specific muzzle velocity. This side is engraved for 2,300 fps from 100 to 7,800 yards.




This is the moving part of the 5" mount. Behind it and just in front of the cutting torch bottles is the fixed portion of the mount that bolts to the deck. About all that can be seen of it is the big gear and the deck plate full of mounting holes.




Restored mounts for the 20mm Oerlikons. After looking at 5", 3" and 40mm guns for a year the 20mm Oerlikons look pretty small. I lifted the receiver end of one while I was working yesterday. They're not as small as they appear!




One of the ship's searchlights waiting its turn for restoration. There are some of this size and some smaller ones; all are carbon arc lights.

[Kestrel4k]

Thank you for the restoration pics; in our years of reading military history we get to admire pics of the classic hardware, but never what the disassembled components looked like.

[David2011]

You’re welcome. Before long I hope to have some closeups of the internals of the training and elevation “displays.” All analog, operated by some of the most beautifully machined gears I’ve ever seen and all made with manual machines.

[buckwheatpaul]

Went to: Texas Battleship Foundation last night. They have videos of what is going on right now; their is section if you want to volunteer, have a tour, or things available for sale to help fund the restoration. It is worth the look if ya are interested....

[David2011]

Thanks, Paul. We could definitely use a few more volunteers with good mechanical skills. There is such a thing as a free lunch, on workdays! The CEO and I were talking while I was shooting video this week. He's a major fund raiser and was commenting how incredible it is to see things that they didn't foresee just 2-3 years ago, like the insides of the machinery and to have the guns off of the ship for restoration. The dollar cost of the restoration is mind boggling but it's finally to the point of improving the ship instead of just literally keeping her afloat.

[David2011]

Wow! Can't believe it's been over 3 months since I added anything. The state Legislature has allocated an additional $25 million for repairs while the ship is in dry dock. That will help with some superstructure repairs and hopefully a new wooden deck. Meanwhile, back at the warehouse, now dubbed "The Texas Gun Factory," we're banging away trying to get the 5" guns restored because they have to go back onto the ship while still in dry dock. One of the goals is for this to be a "Please touch and feel" museum ship. We expect that all of the 20mm, 40mm Bofors Quads, 3" and 5" guns to be moved in training and elevation by the visitors. A grade school child can elevate a 3" gun to full elevation. The staff and volunteers are doing a phenomenal job of repairing the guns.


This is what the 5" mounts look like coming in straight off of the ship. The rust and corrosion is incredibly bad. Fortunately, many of the add-on accessories are bronze and in much better shape.




A 5" mount base after quite a bit of cleanup.




A 5" mount nearing completion. Not only are the gears that you can see bronze; the entire gear housing is bronze as well.




This is the sight windage adjustment for a 5" gun.




This is a repeater that tells the gun crew what the training (azimuth) and elevation need to be set at. The internals are beautifully machined steel, much like a fine wall hanging clock. The housing is all bronze.




A 5" barrel is on the way to the sandblasting booth with a nearly finished 3" gun behind it and a 5" mount in the far back.




How do you move a barrel that weighs 11,000 pounds? Very slowly. The block of wood is on machinery skates.




I machined these Fillister head screws on my home shop lathe. Nobody sells them that big (1/2"x1") any more. They secure a big cover plate in the top center of the 5" mounts.

[armoredman]

Nifty, thanks!

[buckwheatpaul]

David, I cant tell you how impressed I am with all the work you and the other volunteers are doing to restore this treasure for the Great State of Texas....please keep up the good work and keep the pictures coming.....the work and the pictures are wonderful!

[Mk42gunner]

Always interesting to see your updates.

It is amazing just how little effort it takes to move a gun mount manually.

Robert

[David2011]

Thank you all. The ease of moving the big stuff is made up for by the amount of effort to do the little things. One day my entire accomplishments were to remove a taper pin, get a bronze bushing off of a steel shaft and get the bushing to rotate freely on the shaft. It wasn’t big stuff either. The taper pin was 3/16” at the big end and the bushing was on a 1-1/4” or so shaft. I’m getting more bold about heating bronze until it glows. Saves tons of time. Even when we have manuals we don’t always have good assembly drawings. Lots of guess work when it comes to taking 100+ year old things apart.

[Rapier]

The first few hundred years of the big gun navies of the world were all about battleships, floating big gun platforms. Being a Forward Observer I have a real appreciation for the navy gunners and their equipment. We shot field artillery and navy guns, both, and the moving ship, on a moving sea, with changing ranges, moving guns on mounts, hitting a target and then another target at 10-20 miles is quite impressive. Really, compared to a lot of our field artillery, on the ground guns, that many times had trouble getting to within 50 yards of a target at 5-7 miles. Causes a FO to pause shooting when they get a crew behind them, shooting a shotgun pattern with HE. Been there done that, including having a short round.
Hats off to the navy gunners and their guns.

[popper]

Yupper, Navy gunners are pretty good. I was skippers tele talker for a while, got to watch all the gun shoots. Them 8" went a long ways.
330# @ 2500 fps for 17 mi range.

[Mk42gunner]

One of the weird things I remember about the fire control system on my first ship is that you technically couldn't shoot a target that had zero speed, such as something on shore. The FC's said they had to input the ship's speed at zero and the target at whatever speed we were actually moving.

Robert

[David2011]

Robert, one of the upgrades to the Texas was a fire control system. Once the guns were loaded and the ready signal enabled, Fire Control set the guns to fire. When the fire control (analog) computers detected that the ship was level, the guns were electrically fired.

A little trivia, maybe not so trivial at the time. The USS Texas never engaged another capital ship in combat. All of her combat activities were shore bombardments. At Normandy the ballast tanks opposite the beach were flooded to give the guns more elevation, allowing them to reach farther inland. At the last public visitation before taken to dry dock I had the pleasure of visiting with one of the Texas crew that was there as a special guest. He’s now 101 years old. Nearly deaf but his mind is razor sharp. I didn’t record the visit because a reporter was already recording it. Since I was once a television reporter I thought it was inappropriate to piggyback onto his work. Anyway, he mostly talked about his many assignments on the ship including being a spotter way up in the forward mast. He said it was a wild ride up there in big seas.

The ship was retired from active service and came to Texas in 1948 with the support of Admiral Nimitz, a Texan. Any sailor that was on the Texas at her retirement in 1948 would have to be at least 93 years old now if my math isn’t too faulty.

We frequently talk about the sailors who were most likely the last people to touch the innards of the guns until now. When we’re on board the ship there is a mixture of awe for the quality and precision of the design and reverence for the Men that served. I also envision row after row of draftsmen and engineers in a huge room each working at a large drafting table with pencil and vellum drawing every single detail of their assigned area down to the last rivet and screw. The magnificence of the engineering accomplishment is apparent in a deep tour of the ship. In 1910 a great deal of the engineering was based on what worked on the last design. One of the most fascinating aspects of the design is the capacity for the generation of electricity. Originally the ship was fully DC powered. The capacity was huge. By the time she was refitted in the mid 1920s AC was commonplace. There are lots of AC generators powered by DC motors, often set immediately beneath the equipment that they were to power, on the deck below the equipment they powered. All of the guns 5” and smaller were AC powered for the WWII upgrade as were the newly added radio and radar equipment. I helped build the worldwide network for a Fortune 100 company 25 years ago and from that perspective, the technology of the Texas is amazing.

[David2011]

We had an interesting project yesterday. I'm not sure how it happened; I usually get called in after-the-fact. Somehow a massive bronze casting was bent while removing the shaft from it and in the process of straightening it one corner of the casting cracked. When someone heated it to try to braze it the corner came off completely. So, NOW they want me to try to fix it. This is about 100 pounds of bronze. As I've posted before, the amount of bronze on the ship is incredible. I wouldn't be surprised if the total amount of bronze on each 5" gun was a ton or more. Almost all gear housings from the "petite" aiming indicators to the big gear boxes are bronze. After looking at the area to be repaired I told the Battleship Texas Foundation employee that I had concerns that it may end up being worse off after I heated it. He told me that someone had to try; didn't matter if it was him or me if it got worse and he understood the risks.

Beyond the obvious broken corner, the metal between the corner and the web was cracked and broken away and that had to be addressed before there was any chance of making everything line up again. With trepidation I heated the cracked area with a rosebud torch tip and worked it back into alignment without it breaking off. Hallelujah! In the process of realigning it some of the cracks opened up more and I took tat as a good thing. That allowed me to flow some bronze brazing rod into the cracks to stabilize that piece. Once it cooled enough to work with I started grinding the rough edges and also ground some Vs into the mating surfaces. That allowed the parts to align plus it made room for filler rod to fully flow into the crevices. It took a tremendous amount of heat to get the casting hot enough for the brazing rod to flow freely. By the time the corner was fully brazed the casting was hot all the way to the end farthest from the work area. There was also a small crack in the web. I just filed it open a little more and added some new metal. A proper structural repair would have called for deeper grinding but the gun will never be fired again so a cosmetic repair was adequate. The paid staff knows that they can't torque a nut down on the repaired corner but it still has 5 good holes to bolt it down with so it should be good permanently. It felt fantastic to save this piece. The staff was prepared to have a reproduction made if necessary but that would have been very costly.

[Dusty Bannister]

And your efforts will preserve this piece of history, well beyond any one reading this today.

[WILCO]

Incredible!!

[steveu]

Outstanding!!!

[ebb]

Watch some of the videos about Vice Admiral Willis Agustus Lee. In his early days in the navy he was a competitive shooter on a navy marksman ship team. When he got to a leadership role he insisted his men spend way more time on marksman ship with the ships guns and knew so much about them he corrected the charts the navy had on elevations. I forget the battel, but his ship made accurate hits from the get go to win the day, I think this was the last battleship on battleship duel in history.

[RayinNH]

Very interesting thread David. Should you get to fire one of the guns, I would suggest a load of 13 grains of Red Dot behind a cast boolit