Kearsarge Windlass Engines

[crueby]

The next engine has been decided on, its actually going to be a pair of engines that work together to drive the rope and chain windlasses on the battleship Kearsarge.  They were designed and built by the American Ship Windlass Company in 1897, and sold as the 'Providence Steam Winch' model. The Kearsage, BB-5, was launched in 1898 and named after the sloop Kearsarge that sank the Confederate ship CSS Alambama in the US Civil War.

I was able to download a complete set of drawings for the original winch assembly from the US National Archives, which has quite a large collection of engineering drawings for the Kearsarge, including a huge steering engine that I may model someday (CAD version already drawn). The archives has a lot of ship and ships engine drawings, some of which are digitized and available online, others have to be accessed and copied in person at their facility. Quite a good source of information!

Since downloading these drawings back in 2022, I have made a CAD 3D model of them at full size, and after deciding on a scale for this model (1:10), have copied that model and am generating the 2D drawings to work from at the smaller scale. Here is a screen capture of the engines:

In the center foreground is a 15x14 two cylinder steam engine that drives the anchor chain windlass behind it through a large worm gear. The handwheel visible on the back column of the engine moves the reverse links. Over on the left side is another engine, an 8x8 two cylinder engine that drives the rope drums visible at the far left and right sides. This engine has a two speed gearbox buiilt in, with the gear shifting hand lever sticking up on the left in yellow and the reverse lever next to it in pink. These two engines would be housed in a small deckhouse near the bow of the ship, with the one engine attached to the inside of the wall, the two control levers going through the walls to be accessible from out on deck. The chain winch engine was controlled from inside the deckhouse, the chain coming in through openings in the front wall of the house, and then dropping down through large openings in the base plate to a storage locker on a lower deck.

With the model made at 1:10 scale, the cylinders will have a 0.8" bore on the smaller engine, and 1.5" on the larger engine. This scale lets me stick with 2-56 screws on most of the parts, and will give a model large enough to work on easily while still being fairly compact (at least when compared with some of my other models!) When he is done helping Tghs with his Navy launch model, maybe Slim can come help on this one!   

So far I have the 2D plans generated for the smaller engine, and I'll build that one first. Most of it is like a typical 2 cylinder mill engine, with the 2-speed gears added, plus the crosshead guide has a curved cross section to keep that part interesting. The engine bed will be pieced up from flat stock, with thick stock used for the center section, and smaller flat bars used to form the outer perimeter and the supports for the engine.
I got lucky and had just enough 4" wide flat stock left over to make the two engine bed plates from. They'll get the top surface milled back to form the various mounting lugs and supports for the engine and bearing blocks, and have the perimeter added on from smaller bars. The two engine bed sections bolt together in the center. Actual construction has started today, with the blanks cut to rough length, and paper prints of the top views glued to them to help as a guide in locating all the holes/recesses:

Since printed plans are close but not precise (having worked in the printer industry I know how much they can be off across a sheet), I'll use them as a guide but will reference all locations from the edges of the actual stock. First up will be to trim the plates to length and width on the mill. To get started on that the larger plate, which will hold the engine, has been clamped onto the mill table, up on some 1-2-3 blocks to get them in reach of the end mill while keeping the cutter from hitting the mill table.

I'll start out by trimming the ends/sides, then start in on the various hole and recesses... Should be an interesting build!
Chris

[steamer]

Oh imA  digging this!

[Art K]

Chris,
Should be a really big show!
Art

[Krypto]

 

Looks like a lot of modeling coming-up!

[cnr6400]

 

[crueby]

You guys keep hogging all the popcorn!   

[crueby]

So, went around on the first engine bed and drilled the holes for mounting the bearing blocks for the gear shaft as well as the mounting holes that would hold the bed to the wall. There will be more holes for the engines and the crankshaft, but those will be up on the vertical rails still to come.

Then went around (and around) with the mill to cut back the field around the raised blocks, then plunge cuts and around the openings in the bed...

After a little filing to clean up the burs left on the openings where the end mill JUST cut through, here is the first engine bed so far. It still needs grooves cut in it for the vertical engine support rails. I think I'll do those after getting the second bed up to the same point as this one. The second bed will hold the worm gear and bearings for the rope winch drums, and it will bolt up side by side with this first one.

Thanks for following along! 

[wagnmkr]

Why am I not surprised you have started a new project already! The elves haven't even had time for a good party yet! I'll be watching this one as well.

Cheers

[crueby]

Why am I not surprised you have started a new project already! The elves haven't even had time for a good party yet! I'll be watching this one as well.

Cheers

They throw a good party almost every night!  They recover quickly, fortunately... 

[Kim]

Woo Hoo!     Another big Chris project to follow! 

I'm getting my spot on the observation deck ready! 

So, the first of many questions I'm sure...

How do the two winches actually connect together?  The rope winch seems to attach to the wall of the room (I think you said) and the larger chain winch attaches to the deck.  So there's no other connection between them than the hull of the ship? Other than that, they are two completely independent items?  If that's the case, are you going to include the skeleton of a ship deck & deckhouse to mount these engines in? 

Kim

[crueby]

Woo Hoo!     Another big Chris project to follow! 

I'm getting my spot on the observation deck ready! 

So, the first of many questions I'm sure...

How do the two winches actually connect together?  The rope winch seems to attach to the wall of the room (I think you said) and the larger chain winch attaches to the deck.  So there's no other connection between them than the hull of the ship? Other than that, they are two completely independent items?  If that's the case, are you going to include the skeleton of a ship deck & deckhouse to mount these engines in? 

Kim

Good thing you had reservations for the  front row!   


You are correct, there is no direct connection between the  two machines, they are just nested close to each other in the same little  deckhouse. Pretty sure I've got a  drawing of that, will dig it out for you. On smaller ships I've  seen windlasses where the rope and chain drums were on the same shaft, so they could use one or the other at a time. This ship was 375 feet long, quite large, and they could operate them independently.  The anchor could be raised by the chain up to the side of the ship, then the rope drum used to bring it on deck with other crane arms.

[crueby]

Okay, found the pages that show how the two machines fit together on the ship, in one shallow deckhouse with its floor below the level of the main deck. They are too large a resolution to post inline and still see the details, so I am adding them as attachments to this post. If you download them and zoom in, you can see the details. The first one is a top view of the deck, showing how they sit and where the other deck lines and chains go, as well as the cranes and cutouts for the anchors to stow at the edge of the deck.The second one shows the details of the deckhouse, and the third shows the rope windlass inside the deckhouse.
EDIT: for some reason the post is not going through with all three attachments, they are below the size limit, so I'll try it with just one and do another post with the second and third third...  OKAY, that failed too, here it is with the second and third, I'll make the first one smaller and try it seperately... That failed too. I'll re-encode the attachments and do them seperately!


Also in the plan sets for the Kearsarge, I had gotten the steering engine and all the equipment around it - they had multiple ways of steering in case one subsystem failed, including a bank of very large diameter wheels they could put dozens of men on to manually turn the rudder, that is on the left. The steam steering engine is in the middle, and the huge set of beams on the right is the rudder mechanism itself, huge screws moving huge blocks on the tiller arms. This engine is MUCH larger than the one Michael and I collaborated on, those wheels on the left are around 6 feet in diameter, and the engine has 15" diameter pistons.

[crueby]

I give up - I cannot get ANY image to go through as an attachment, even at 400K bytes. No idea why. So, here it is cropped down more and inline from my photo host, hope you can read it...

[crueby]

Here are the other two:

[crueby]

Just noticed a big goof -  I had mispelled the name of the ship in the thread title!          


Just fixed the posts I could.  Whoops!