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chrishelen

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Just watching this on TV, the main engine of the 'Umiak' which has the biggest engine in Canada never has an oil change! The same oil is used for the life of the ship. Amazing. I change mine on my little perkie ever 250hrs,and get twitchy if I go a few hours over.
 
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A crosshead diesel engine has separate cylinder oil and crankcase oil systems. The cylinder oil is expended, using a total loss lubrication system, and the crankcase oil has quite elaborate purifiers (and gets topped up - indeed when you build a ship the oil companies will routinely give you the first fill of crankcase oil for free, to make sure you use their stuff, knowing how much of it you will be buying over the next couple of decades!)
 
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Used to drink with a big ship engineer (I liked his sister..) and he said that the sump oil tank was 600 gal. (hope I got that right) and it was analyzed and additives put in with the top up. Not replaced. Woe betide any engineer that let things go to the point where a change was needed.
 
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chrishelen said:
Just watching this on TV, the main engine of the 'Umiak' which has the biggest engine in Canada never has an oil change! The same oil is used for the life of the ship. Amazing. I change mine on my little perkie ever 250hrs,and get twitchy if I go a few hours over.
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How much did they pay for the engine, how much did you pay for your engine?
 
Sandy said:
How much did they pay for the engine, how much did you pay for your engine?
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I doubt chrishelen was exacerbated at the unfairness of it, think of it as just a simple comparison, for entertainment purposes.
 
chrishelen said:
I was just amazed that's all, I trained as a marine engineer back in the 70s, we had nothing like this.
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My late father served his time on the Clyde in the late 1940s then spend the 1950s at sea. In about 1995 he blagged his way into the engine room of a cross channel ferry and and was amazed at how tiny the main engine was, he had steam tickets and never converted to diesel.
 
After being on a small Motor Ship. I went on a very large Steam Ship. The engine room was huge, had trouble finding the engine though it was a tiny wee thing.

Take a tour of HMS Belfast. Its the only Naval Vessel I’ve ever been on. You will be amazed by the sise if the engine,
The gears were pretty impressive. :)
 
Uricanejack said:
After being on a small Motor Ship. I went on a very large Steam Ship. The engine room was huge, had trouble finding the engine though it was a tiny wee thing.

Take a tour of HMS Belfast. Its the only Naval Vessel I’ve ever been on. You will be amazed by the sise if the engine,
The gears were pretty impressive. :)
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One of my nephews was a stoker on an Australian DDG... HMAS Perth.... took me on a tour of the boiler room .... scariest place... OK one of the scariest places I have ever been.... vertically integrated ... his 'station' was over the condenser on the next 'flat' up ... putting burners into the boilers and taking them out again on the command of a CPO or some such on the flat above ..

Chance of survival if things stopped going to your advantage? Zero negative...

Next time I saw Perth was when I swam through her bridge in Albany, WA..... pretty eerie when you had once walked through it.

Like you I recall big - for the time - steamship engine rooms ( not the boiler room )... 99% fresh air ( 50K dwt tanker 55 years ago when that was quite big ).
 
Uricanejack said:
After being on a small Motor Ship. I went on a very large Steam Ship. The engine room was huge, had trouble finding the engine though it was a tiny wee thing.

Take a tour of HMS Belfast. Its the only Naval Vessel I’ve ever been on. You will be amazed by the sise if the engine,
The gears were pretty impressive. :)
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+1. I recall standing on the top plates of a steam VLCC and peering down through the “atrium” of this Temple of Steam as enthusiastic chaps with steam tickets and immaculate white boiler suits* strolled around, so unlike the noise and dirt of a motor ship’s engine room, to see a tiny little thing no bigger than a car, swathed in white lagging, at the bottom... that was 33,000ihp of steam turbine... amazing what pure water at 600 degrees and fifty bar can do...

* known as “steam queens” by the oily handed sons of Diesel...
 
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I started off on steam ships, I was amazed when the chief engineer showing us boys around did his party trick to show us how dangerous superheated steam was. He would hold a stick up with a towel on the end and open a valve and the stick and towel would vaporise. Did a short time on gas turbines then diesel. I remember part of our duties each watch was to test the lube oil, my memory is letting me down, but I think it was called the speedy moisture test.
 
Whilst being a young RN Apprentice, I spent a year on a Guided Misile Destroyer. In my least favourite watch keeping position in the electrical workshop, rounds were conducted hourly and took 59 minutes to complete going round the whole ship. On the list of 'places where I would rather not be' was the loooong climb down one side and up the other of the six storey boiler room to check one of the pairs of stabilisers. The fourth time in one watch was a sweaty affair.

The engine room of a steam powered submarine is another. Big space but packed with noisy hot things. The engines are big.

For power out per size though, a visit down to the depths of the reactor compartment revealed that the box of magic moonbeams is not very big at all and the newest ones can power a boat throughout its thirty or so years of its expected life.

Crawling in and out of torpedo tubes at depth is focusing too but there is nothing whirly and hot.
 
I've never worked on anything bigger than the York engine in my transit, but I well remember standing at a doorway looking into the engines on a paddle steamer whose crankshaft drove the paddles directly and being fascinated. A few days later we were on another ferry, with a propeller this time and being so disappointed at the lack of moving parts.

I must have been about 4 at the time, so about 65 years ago
 
capnsensible said:
Crawling in and out of torpedo tubes at depth is focusing too but there is nothing whirly and hot.
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Crawling along the duct keel of Jebsen's M/V "Bernes" at sea was not much fun.

bernes.jpg

It was a long way to the ballast valve that needed a repair, and a long way back to get any tool you had forgotten!

But, compared to what some coal miners had to do every working day, it was a piece of cake.
 
Poignard said:
Crawling along the duct keel of Jebsen's M/V "Bernes" at sea was not much fun.

View attachment 76482

It was a long way to the ballast valve that needed a repair, and a long way back to get any tool you had forgotten!

But, compared to what some coal miners had to do every working day, it was a piece of cake.[/QUO
Wot! No trolley? Ah, well, Jebsens...
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