I'm 6'4" and banged my head on a lot of things in the overhead when I was stationed on my ship. I have a total of 6 stitches in 2 different places on my head/face from low hanging angle irons. We had an Ensign who was 6'6 or taller and the more senior officers made him wear a WWII steel pot helmet until he stopped hitting his head on things.
I'm in your height range too and find it's a lot worse when you're wearing a cap with a visor. Without the visor you would see obstacles with "up and down peripheral vision" but wearing a cap you can't see them and run right into them.
I am 6'4" tall too. That is a small reason why I served in both the active Air Force and MI Army National Guard. In the Guard, for a bit I was nicknamed Too Tall. I could flat-footed plug-in signal cables to the shelter. Everyone else on the team had to find something to stand on. So my team leader just one day said, "I was just Too Tall. Of all the things I could have been called, I won't argue with it!
Hello again, GMG2 (frocked) Jason Pribyl (Turret 3) here. and I just wanted to note that it was (at the time) GMG2 David Mckinnon and GMG2 or 3 Mark Denny who painted the Fosters beer can on the tank when we went to Australia for their bicentennial and the worlds fair. the eye piece on the periscope was used for a few graphite grease shiner gags and who knows how it made it as long as it did. It was not there in the vid. We didnt use that bore brush. I'm 6'2" and you learn to do the MASH helicopter walk as soon as you can on board. You never truly escape a nice headbanger every once in a while. I've used it in civilian life when needed. Dave Mckinnon was and is a over the top guitarist and artist and Mark Denny was and probably is still a professional clown. In the best sense of the word...artist that is.
I am a Marine but I spend a week on the New Jersey in 1968--was taken on tour of the entire ship--watched them shuttle a1780 lbs shell to the elevator and then up to the gun--watched them put the 100 lb power bags on elevator and move up to the gun---round was loaded by hydraulic rammer and watched them load 3 powder bags at once for a total of 6--was inside the torrent when the man inserted what looked like a shotgun shell into the breach after it was locked--was allowed to stand with the loader inside the turret---when the gun was fired the breach recoiled back within6 inches of my belt buckle..Vibration, noise and some smoke filled the turret ----at that time I was taken out of the turret ---that enough for me------what a gun, it kept moving to allow for roll of ship but it hit its target 22 miles away---THANKS FOR THE TOUR GUYS
Les Hopkins, I was on board a DDG doing gunfire support training off of San Clemente Island. We were told to stand down while another ship took a shot. I was a Signalman and looked for the ship and couldn't see anything. Next thing I know I hear a freight train passing over us. The ship was the New Jersey and it blew the hell out of the target. Glad those guys loaded 3 powder bags and not 2, I might not be here to reply to you. 😃
The multiple weld beads are how you get a proper connection for thick plate. If you only had one weld bead, the amount of metal connecting the two plates is only one weld bead thick. All of the extra weld beads are so you can get a weld connection that is as strong as the plates it’s connected to. Not trusting welding may be why they zig-zagged the weld. That gives you a longer weld seam length, and thus more area of weld connecting the plates.
I noticed in the other video where it showed the top of the belt armor (I think it was the belt) had the same zigzagging. I was thinking it might there to better resist the shock of getting hit by large naval shells. A zigzag is far less likely to shear than a straight weld.
@@aaronp3411 I think you've got it. The forces / energy that impacting major caliber artillery shells would deliver are stupefying. Where possible the designers and builders tended to be conservative, "if 'X' is good then 'X' + 'Y' would be better." The 'zig zag' joint is a design feature as probably the multiple weld seams are as well, though I wouldn't doubt professional pride entering into the extra care and effort. "Hey, Iowa is being built in New York. 'Everybody knows' what slobs those guys are, let's prove WE can do the job better." And of course the workers in New York were saying the same thing about the guys in Philly.
@@robertf3479 I agree. Redundancies and over design were the order of the day for these ships. The more I learn about them, the more this fact shines through. On the matter of professional pride- I worked with a man when I was in high school who had served in a turret of one of the Iowa class ships in the 80s. I was a night stocker and he the assistant manager in a local grocery store. This was some 16-17 years ago, so I was much less interested in such things then. But you could tell he still beamed when he talked about his time aboard ship. I’d love to run into him again, I would definitely have a lot more questions.
My Semi- Dad-in-Law was a welder in the petroleum industry and I was a mere soldered. He taught me about building up zigs on top of days to build up a stronger weld. I'm sure there's a right way a wrong way and a Navy way anyway.
@@aaronp3411 It prevents straight shearing as well as if the welds for whatever reason get a crack, the crack would only travel down one weld area as opposed to eventually cracking all the way across. On a Zig zag weld, if 1 weld zag cracked, the others picking up the stress can do so more easily instead of the entire weight that weld area supported being on a single straight weld thus further causing the crack to travel across more quickly before maintenance can be done on it to repair it since ships were typically out at sea for long periods of time.
The “ears” on the other battleships may have been intended to keep the turret’s ventilation system from sucking in water. By moving the source of the air higher up, it’s further away from any green water on deck.
@@joshuamcdonald5621 Green water refers to when a ship takes a huge quantity of water over the deck in heavy seas. This would be such as when waves are big enough that the bow plunges though them rather than over them. Certain ships had issues with low air intakes and green seas causing the interior of the ship to become very damp. The HMS Hood was known to be very unpleasant inside in rough seas for this reason.
@@joshuamcdonald5621 blue water refers to deep ocean, brown water is fresh water rivers, green is when its on the ship in places it's not supposed to be, black water is sewage, grey water is used water such as from the galley but not contaminated with human waste.
Great video! One thing that occurred to me during a visit to the North Carolina was how unusual it is to encounter metal construction as heavy as this. Most of our interaction nowadays is with plastic, wood, or sheet metal (car bodies, pots and pans, office furniture). To knock-knock-knock on a piece of 16” armor is like hitting a piece of the earth’s bedrock-it doesn’t move or flex or ring or react AT ALL. Same with the equipment on board. Turning the knobs and dials on one of the firing control computers tells you immediately that you’re dealing with a level of engineering and construction that’s completely outside of our everyday experience. That was one of the most dramatic discoveries from my battleship tour, and my son (about 10 at the time) still talks about it.
Great video on steel ships and iron men. I toured the Missouri with my nephew years ago and remarked that the thing that impressed me the most was the fact that these ships were designed by men at drafting tables with blueprints, slide rules and formula books. My then teen age nephew pulled out his phone to find out what a slide rule was......
Slide rules were already osolete 40 years ago when I started studying engineering in college. I bought a very nice Pickett multi-function one as a keepsake from one of the campus bookstore's (private store off campus) clearance sale in 1981.
When I toured HMS Belfast, I noticed that the valves for flooding one magazine were in part of the adjacent turret and visa versa. I was told that this was to save the men having to flood their own magazine with 22 of their mates in there (although I guess if the magazine had to be flooded, the turret above would already have been hit). A sobering prospect.
The engineering teams kept reams of pages of logs cross-referencing the various drawings, details, and bills of materials... which were checked multiple times, by multiple people, by hand, with colored pencils to keep track of it all, and all of the changes required to get things right.
I have a thought about the uncomfortable chairs. My first job during college was at a manufacturing plant. The toilets in the plant areas were very low and uncomfortable to sit on. The break areas were painted in the most hideous color with a horizontal accent color around the room of an even more ugly color at eye height. When I asked the most senior guy there why that was he told me that when the plant was built they didn't want the employees hanging out instead of working. The toilets were designed to be uncomfortable so that there was no incentive to stay in the bathroom reading the paper instead of working. Similarly they had used a study that the Navy had done on colors that ranked they by levels of color (most calming, most exciting, etc.) to find the most disturbing colors to paint the break areas with so that as soon as the guys got done with their break they would go back to work rather than sit there surrounded by those horrible walls.
As a person who's been in Mfg for decades these stories of "to keep the lazy workers from being lazy" continue to amaze me. I'm hoping we've learned our lesson and have moved past that weird behavior. Treating people with respect seems to get more stuff done.
Speaking as a dues paying member of the International Order of Lazy Sods I can assure you no amount of uncomfortable furniture or rancid colors will interfere with our abilities to shirk the tasks we are be paid to perform. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to avoid doing it.
@@jeffreyhenion4818 As a fellow member of the IOLS I can attest to what Jeffrey has stated. The ugly walls and lump chairs will not stop us from doing the bare minimum!
Ryan, totally understand that you must keep production costs low. With that in mind I have a suggestion. It would really be helpful to visualize what part of the ship you are showcasing by briefly cutting to some sort of graphic image of the ship with a highlight of where you are. Again, understand that features cost money but that one would really improve your presentations.
Some points about armored gratings: They are made of the same steel as used in STS/Class "B" armor. The holes have cylinder top facing the incoming weapon and widening cones at the back side, so the back-side openings are somewhat larger. The holes are made by using boring bars to drill them one by one into a full-thickness, fully hardened, tempered, and completed STS plate (part of the hull so I think that they are STS under BuC&R/BuSHIPS -- made only by Carnegie/Carnegie-Illinois -- and not the virtually identical Class "B" armor of BuORD -- made by Carnegie. Midvale, or Bethlehem); they were not cast with the holes already in them since that made inferior-strength armor (about 10% more brittle). Against large AP shell impacts at a highly-oblique angle, such as the plates used to fill the openings at the armored 2md-deck level made by the large funnels, one of these plates was found to be only 40% as thick, in effect, as the solid STS plate was before the holes were drilled in it. For example, if you had a 6" deck plate, to get the same resistance, you would need a 15" grating of the drilled-hole type shown here. Against near-vertical-falling aircraft SAP/AP bombs, the resistance I think is about the same, though I have not seen any tests on that kind of hit. It is expected that a hit will knock out chunks of metal between the holes ("webbing" material), but most of the plate will merely deform, not break apart (tough steel?). If a bomb or shell explodes on the face of one of these gratings, much of the blast and fumes will go through the holes, so the grating must be kept at some distance and, if possible, offset sideways from whatever it is protecting behind it (engines and boilers for the deck gratings, obviously). These gratings are rather new (for WWII, that is). Older armored warships used crisscrossing steel bars in several stacked layers to create a grating, which was not nearly as strong..
That seat you mention isn't a 'Bicycle' seat but is very similar to the seats found on pre-1960s farm equipment. Some tractors and a whole bunch of other pieces of towed (tractor or horse-drawn) and self propelled equipment had them. Let me tell you, even to a young, pre-teen butt they were not the most comfortable things to sit on. There were also dozers and other construction equipment that used them. Even though I did some work aboard Iowa right after she recommissioned in the 80s, I never got to visit one of the turrets. I did tour the aft turret of the North Carolina with my 5'11" son. I'm 5'7" but even so equipment in that turret was finding my head and my son ... "Dad, I don't see how they did it." And yeah, it was hot in there.
The seat is actually looking more comfortable than the seats for the gunners on a 3-inch M1902. But there is a disproportion between the cost of the gun and the comfort of the seats, obviously.
Look around on RUclips. There's an old Navy training film someone uploaded of the drill for the firing cycle of an Iowa's 16" guns. The turret design and layout was pretty much the same on the South Dakotas and North Carolinas, though the longer guns on the Iowas meant the turrets were slightly larger.
When I joined the NAV in 1968 I was maybe one or more inches below the min height requirement at the time. (Tiptoe at the MEPS station). Therefore, I could stand on the rim of a watertight door and not hit the top rim with my head. My shins, however took a beating until I learned to walk like an ostrich. In 21 years as a Radarman/Operations Specialist, I was stationed on DD836, CLG5, DD880, CG18, CV61, and AR5. It was always a dream to be stationed on a BB but I never got the chance.
The sound quality is the best it has been on any video I've seen so far. I know you've said it's hard to concentrate on that inside a steel box, but you've done well on this one!
I went on a tour of the turret 1 gun house on USS Iowa for my birthday this year, and it was incredible. Honestly, seeing the breach of the 16in guns put their size into perspective better than anything else. Thanks for the inside look today!
@ Matthew Burg, I live not to far from Iowa, are her turrets (except #2 of course) open on the tour? I toured her soon after she opened, and it was pretty much all above main deck only. Not nearly as in depth as New Jersey.
@@markwatson3135 they’ve done a lot of work since it’s opening. New Jersey has been open as a museum for a long time, and that’s given their staff all the time (and less regulations) to open new spaces and increase access to the ship. The Iowa now has tours of its engineering, gunnery, admiral, and regular spaces. They’re all worth while to see as even among the Iowa’s each ship is has a unique service and maintenance history
Those old electromechanical analog computers are amazing. The skillset for building those have all died off. It would take great, deliberate effort to replicate that sort of technology. Those servo, synchro, integrator, etc are some high precision mechanical components.
I would imagine the biggest problem with replicating the technology; It wouldn't be worth the time or effort in the modern day. You can do anything that old EMAC can do with a 5$ raspberry pi, both faster and easier. And that's only including dirt cheap consumer grade products.
@@dakota9821 Analog versus digital computers - A digital requires that you pre-decide what your accuracy/resolution is. 8, 16, 32, 64 bits, etc. An analog one can calculate a 'smidge' more or less. Like cutting a board "Leave the line" or "to the line?" Most tapes have 1/16 or 1/32 accuracy... your line width is around 1/128 with a sharp pencil. Even finer if you use a marking knife rather than a pencil. Also, Analog computers directly compute their results from inputs and so are constantly providing the solution. No AtoD converters - which add their own inaccuracies. No waiting for the loop to come back around. No buffer overflows, stack errors, etc. Hence Iowa's maintained their analog equipment through their service life into the late 90's. Now, that isn't to say that modern encoders, AtoD converters, FGPAs, etc. couldn't replace this equipment. But, a lot of testing and recalibration. Plus, this older stuff is just really cool looking!
Don't underestimate the magic of CAD software and CNC machined prototypes. We don't need droves of extremely skilled manual lathe and mill workers to build those anymore. That does not mean that it wouldn't take considerable effort - but we could probably crank them out at a higher pace than before, and also are able to simulate their functionality before starting the build process speeding up the prototyping stage.
Over the years I’ve avoided watching video presentations having suffered listening to horrible speakers on others. Finally took a chance …. WOW. The detail on the systems engineering complexity of these ships is humbling. The majority of average people in the population have no idea how complicated the design is (without the modern spiffy computers) … and how well they functioned. Thank you.
Footnote … after watching these videos, the importance of preserving these examples of technology are on the same level as the Fields Museum in Chicago and The Ford Museum in Dearborn-Detroit
I live 1 mile away from where the Battleship Massachusetts is. The have so many places off limits including the guns it is nice to finally see what they look like inside! Thank you.
These are great videos. Thanks. I like the non rushed approach to describing what you experience as you see it. Truly more of a conversation than a tightly edited 60 second piece most share. So much to see and learn. Appreciate it!!
Turret 1 was open years ago when we visited! Very interesting to see all the systems in there. I'm still surprised at how BIG everything on the Battleship is, yet so many of the crew stations were in such cramped, little spaces!
This is really cool to see!! My dad was a gunners mate on the Jersey on turret 2 in the 80s. Where we live now the sister ship Wisconsin is docked as a museum so we get to see something close to his gun a lot..
One eye for you, one for the ship. One divo on board walked at full speed into a fire main valve in a main p-way and one guy in my workcenter walked dead into a platform that was too low.
I was careful during my tour of the USS Iowa #1 turret. It had the rangefinder removed, supposedly because she was a wet ship and water and the rangefinder let water into the turret. I did not bang my head on anything in there, but I remember all the obstructions. I wear a ball cap to keep light out of my eyes and it also keeps me from seeing headhunters. Bang!!!
My first thought when I climbed up in the number 2 turret of WisKy was, "this looked a lot taller from the outside," then I remembered how much armor was over my head
Thanks for a fascinating mini-tour 👍 With your seats at 3:50... I'd wager the 'chair' in the foreground was added after it was taken out of service. The saddle or pommel-style stools are common on heavy machinery like tractors & old artillery because they are strong, abIe to be used by different sized people without adjustment, and take up limited room (so they are easy to manoeuvrer large, heavy objects around). And ironically enough, a shaped stool is also far better ergonomically than a hard flat chair with a back support for those types of jobs... it encourages you to sit upright & hold your spine's natural curve. Seat comfort is a whole other issue though!
Man!! Thank you for doing all these videos Ryan!! You are teaching so much about the hustory of not just your ship but others too. All the information you give about the wars themselves too is amazing. Even the little things like the armored caps they welded over bolt and rivit ends. People may notice those if they went through a space but would never know what they were. Ill bet you point out obscure things like that on your tours. I am going to make it a point to save up money for a vacation. A vacation to come see your ship just because the videos you have done almost make me feel at home on the ship. I feel that for all I have seen of these videos. All the nook and crany videos of seeing the keel, the armor belt, the anchor storage pit and more will make me feel I have a leg up on the other tour takers. Hopefully I will have the money saved about the time you all start doing tours again. If your duties take you away from this when things get going again for tours then please, please find or hire someone to host and do the videos. I am sure you have a volunteer locally who was a sailor, maybe not on New Jersey, but a sailor who likes to talk and would love to do it.
Ryan is six feet or one curator tall. He has a unique speaking style. It allows him to give extremely detailed and informative details about the battleship. Great video, as always.
Truely priceless..🙏🙏🙏 Humbled to think of those crews.., the struggles/ suffering/ absolute discomfort they must’ve faced.. saving our beautiful Pacific 🙏🙏🙏🌹🇺🇸
Always interesting. Thanks for doing these. At 6ft3in I would have knocked myself senseless in those spaces. Better you than me. I can’t imagine those cramped spaces crammed with men, all trying to communicate while deafening noises are making it nearly impossible, the vessel pitching, rolling and heaving during maneuvers. Hitting the enemy with any accuracy must have been quite the achievement. We owe all of those sailors a debt of gratitude.
My favorite part of working in Turret 3 was timing myself from the time it took to climb into the turret to the time my boondockers hit the powder flats. Also climbing over to the top of center gun to remove the yoke
My Grandpop Built that ship as a welder in the Philadelphia Navy Shipyard ... He has the Christening Plaque hanging up at my Grandmothers in South Philly to this day.
I was stationed on PBR Mobile Base 1 which was north of Da Nang. We saw the New Jersey firing turrets 1 & 2 on a fire mission. Both turrets and all 3 barrels on each fired together and It was an awesome sight. I had forgotten about this until i watched this episode. Thanks.
I think you're overestimating the amount of power in those batteries. Based on the circuit diagrams that I have they are intended to be an emergency power source for the firing circuits. They don't have nearly enough power to rotate the turret or elevate the barrels, which is why there are 2 independent power sources for each turret. Even if the batteries were to be powerful enough to run the large motors for traverse and elevation there was no practical way (in the ship's design timeframe) to change the DC from the batteries into 440VAC 3-phase to power the A end motors.
The turret roof armor was 7.25" of Class "B" armor butt-edge mounted (interlocked, but not overlapped) with keying, bolting, and welding at the joints to make them as close as possible to a single huge plate. Welding such small objects to their back surface will nots compromise the armor protection in the slightest (now Class "A" face-hardened armor is a different thing altogether and there were lots of restrictions to anything that might compromise the hard face layer). Older battleships at Pearl Harbor had overlapped turret roof plates (4-5" Class "B" armor plates of the quality at the time they wer3e made), This involved having the part of the plate facing toward the front of the turret tucked a few inches under the rear portion of the plate closer to the turret face, like shingles, with heavy bolting through the overlapping portions to strengthen them against a hit coming from the front, since it was assumed that the enemy would be the ship that the US battleship was shooting at and thus toward the target it was facing. This would give the turret roof protection a somewhat improved resistance at a highly-oblique angle from a ricocheting enemy AP shell. This overlap was NOT used in the new US Navy battleships built starting in the 1930s. The reasoning was that any shells might be coming from the side or, possibly, from the rear, and this could make the overlap weaker than a flat top would be. This turned out to be absolutely true at Pearl Harbor. Two old battleships, WEST VIRGINIA and TENNESSEE, had one of their turret roofs hit each by the several level bombers that dropped converted obsolete 16.1" AP bombs (made by remanufacturing old pre-1930 NAGATO Class AP shells) -- the same group that had a bomb blow up ARIZONA. The two turret roof hits were coming from the rear of the turrets hit, steeply falling but still having a tilt due to the horizontal speed of the aircraft that dropped them. The bombs could penetrate the rather thin deck armor of those old battleships (ARIZONA showed this dramatically), but they should not have been able to punch through the much thicker turret roof armor. But they did punch through, though the bombs were heavily damaged in the process (since there was nothing explosive in the turrets, the damage to them was relatively superficial and could be repaired quickly). What happened was that the bombs did exactly what the turret designed of the new battleships thought might happen: The bombs hit and began to have their noses rotated away to ricochet, but the nose of the bomb caught the back edge overlapping lip of two joined roof plates and bent it up, ripping out the bolts and allowing the bomb, partially crushed in the process, to wedge itself through the narrow "mouth" that it had just made and into the turret. I think some modifications to all of the older battleship turret roofs was made to make this less likely.
Taofledermaus, you should have asked him where the Marines kept their Mossberg 590 shotguns, and whether the US Navy ever experimented with a 16" antiaircraft cannister rounds for the Iowas.
@@MartyInLa The Japanese had an AA shell for the 18" guns on the Yamato class. They rarely used it, mostly because the actual AA guns and the main battery ... well, not that they /couldn't/ be fired at the same time, but being outside when the big guns go off was ridiculously unpleasant, to put it mildly.
Never been much of a boat guy but my great grandfather served on the Iowa in the 40's so i do like to watch some stuff about the Iowa class, from what little i know he served in the mail room; and when I visited the Iowa several years ago they even let my family go off tour to see where he would of worked! My mother in particular really enjoyed that as she had a close connection with him until his passing, she always talked so fondly of him wish i had the chance to meet him.
I worked for a computer maker in the 80s. We had a computer system near the turret that blew up in 1989 on the USS Iowa. All the boards popped off the frame and when they put them back in, it still worked! That was amazing. Those were amazing ships. I hope they can preserve them.
Have you ever talked about hearing protection for people in various areas of the ship while the main guns were in use? I have to imagine the concussion was crazy!
I agree that would be a very interesting topic to cover... though from videos of the turret in action firing and interviews with sailors it's apparently not actually that bad in the turret/gun house its self... **shrug** just what I've heard, I def. don't speak from experience, somewhat unfoetunately =)
Not really, all the 'BOOM' goes out the muzzle. The rest of the machinery would require hearing protection, though, even more so in the engineering & boiler spaces. Look at the RUclips videos of the USS Silverside running their diesel engines & get an idea of how noisy a ship / sub is.
@@danquigg8311 yeah- standing next to a marine diesel running at speed is incredibly noisy- you FEEL the noise and you really have to wear ear protection. very long time ago I was with a company developing big diesels, like 1500hp per cylinder. funny thing- we once had a 9cyl 4stroke on the test rig at idle... and you could hear the bangs coming from different areas of the engine following the firing order. made me realize how big the thing was.
I was born in Fall River Massachusetts. I have toured the USS Massachusetts, many times. I have been I the gun houses. Very impressive in all around scale.
I was an EM (Electrician's Mate) onboard an Aircraft Carrier. We used to move very heavy electrical motors for repair. Those steel rings welded overhead are very useful in lifting and moving heavy motors from one room to another.
It's said that battleships were the most complicated objects ever made by man and I can believe it. I don't know how they ever worked out where all the pipes and cables went and were connected.
Funnily enough I once saw a photo of a mocked up area of a battleship when they were planning where things go. Amazingly, they used thick rope to simulate the cables and heavy duty wiring. Very clever. But yes, can imagine how mind boggling it would be to think of everything and how they all connected up to work correctly!
Much better then an architect did on the prints for a hotel a few years ago. Every few floors the room for the equipment was located on the opposite corner. It was supposed to be a chase for pipes, venting and power.
Fantastic stuff Ryan, oddly enough I’ve been to the North Carolina yet never been to the New Jersey, I promise I’ll be there soon thanks for all you do!
As .95 curators tall, I don't think I would have many issues with head clearance on the battleship. Also looking for a new job and am willing to crawl around the battleship for food.
Hmmm…🤔🤔🤔 I don’t think they leave food just laying around a battleship. I don’t think they stored food in tiny little crawl spaces either… I don’t think they need someone on the battleship crawling around looking for food like that; maybe if you could use a broom, that would be more helpful? Just kidding! I know what you meant! It would be absolutely awesome to just walk around on your own; checking things out as you wanted too!
@@RichardAmmo1 Rats! Has to be plenty of fat, juicy, tasty rats in those crawl spaces. A handy blowtorch removes hair and cooks the rat to snacking perfection. Also kidding! But if you get lost inside that ship a rat just may save you from starvation. "Food For Thought". LoL
Love the Foster's Beer Can sailor art. I remember this was shown to Australian media during the ship's visit to Australia in 1988. Wonderful to see it is still on show 👏🇦🇺🇺🇸👍
I was on the USS Ingersoll on the West Pac cruise to Australia in 1988 with the New Jersey. I would say out the 65 ships from navies around the world, the New Jersey was the highlight for everyone...
Regarding the welds, I used to work for a company that was a tier 2 supplier to a few government prime contractors. Some of the work I did was welding armor. For thick armor (half-inch or more) we would do multipass overlap welds on joints. We did it for a few reasons, primarily to create a large fillet and ensure we have a large area of the parent metal to spread loading. What I find so fascinating is I suspect back then they did it because as Ryan pondered the Navy didn't trust welding yet and it turns out it's the best way to do it. Fun fact, I did some welds on butt joints that started with a non-filled pulsed TIG pass followed by multiple MIG cap passes
It makes sense. You don't trust the weld so you come up with a mechanical design that's stronger. Even once the welds are proven it's still a mechanically strong design.
A multi-run pass will generally be weaker than a single run (of the same total size as the multiple runs) due to heat effected zones (HAZ) of later passes impacting the former, while the contraction stress area will be lower diameter. But reaching those sorts of immense deposition rates was probably not economical given how new large scale welding for of ships ect was... and they didn't have the benefit of hindsight to know lots of that tech/gear would last 80+ years, rather than being replaced again in a decade or two with something equally revolutionary, so going all in on tooling/training wouldn't have been seen as wise (although Japan did basically opt this route, and some early teething issues aside, it did pan out).
@@SheepInACart I used to work for a trailer building company. We had to switch from a single 1/2” weld on the king pin to a 3 pass weld because the amount of heat that the single pass put into the plate caused the king pin to periodically be ripped out through the 3/8” plate.
@@jordan4777 As a cost economical switch if its still adequately strong, thats a fine solution, but the heat itself isn't the enemy, indeed it'd be stronger overall if you'd increased the preheat to reduce the heat affected zone (itself formed by the difference in temperature, not total amount) of the single run.
6:30 I have a question for someone who actually served in a gun house. What repairs were likely to be done on that bench inside the gun house? I'm just figuring if the had a common setup there must have been a pretty regular need to use those tools? What was most likely being repaired?
Side note here. I´m a welder/fabricator, and i had one of those vices in my shop, that had been bought out of an old decomissioned frigate from my country Portugal, by my father who is a retired Navy man. Had to sell it a few months ago, after i got sick and unable to work. It´s funny, but my vice looked like an exact copy of that one, and probably was made by the same maker. I had it tracked to a model made in the 1940s or 50s by Rock Island, model 542-BX. It was a monster vice, probably well over 50kg in weight. As soon as i saw it on this video i recognized it immediately. I was very sorry to sell it, it was one of my most prized tools...
Tank crew members of all nationalities wear helmets - leather or otherwise - to protect their heads from bashing into low-lying metal stuff. Perhaps such items of kit would be eminently suitable for this context also. Thanks (again) for your video! Fascinating and engaging stuff. I have seen a good number of your New Jersey videos now and find the commentaries on internal aspects of the ship well worth my time watching. They tell the story of these historic ships so well! Got to see both NJ and Missouri in Sydney when they were each visiting here in Aus in the late 1980s. However - such internal tours and detailed commentaries are such an entirely different thing again.
I'm 5'11" and I'd have whacked my head on everything. I worked 7 years as industrial safety in a commercial power plant that resembled your engineering spaces, I'd have given myself at least one concussion daily without a hard hat.
I saw the New Jersey when it visited Hobart in 1988, I was around 2 years old. A few years later her sister ship the USS Missouri visited Hobart on her way back from the Gulf War
I'm a Plank Owner of the USS New Jersey BB-62. I decommissioned it in 1991. I'm 5'11" and was in 'R' Division. My work center was near DC Central just off of Broadway. At 5'11" there were a few areas I had to walk with my head crooked over to not smack it on anything. For the most part anyone under 6' tall you were good to go.
I'm 6'4" so as much as I love me a battleship, I'd probably cuss my entire time there... Thank you for your work, love your videos!! Also from Canada, I plan on visiting an Iowa before I die!
🇺🇸Ryan🇺🇸 The Zig/Zag welding is also a crack preventer. A straight horizontal weld can crack easier than that zig zag pattern which prevents a fractured weld from a shock.
Sadly not really, the issue being the stress raisers of the corners create propagation points for an unzipping failure, which is why pressure vessels are welded in one continuous band with as wide of a bend radius as possible.
Having served on two Sumner class DDs (Zellars DD 777 and briefly on Laffey DD 724) I remember keeping my head down. Love your videos. I wish someone would do the same for Laffey.
The zigzag weld seam may be to prevent cracks from propagating if the turret gets hit. A single straight weld joint could "zipper" open along its full length.
The zig-zag welding lines: You do not want adjacent plates to move away from each other in any direction. By using "dragon's teeth" edges, the plates cannot move sideways without literally bending the armor teeth over for the full thickness of the plate. As was mentioned, it also adds more surface for the welding to lock into if they were pulled upward vertically or sheared front-to-back.. If you look at the armored 2nd deck, it is made of two layers: A underlayer of 1.5" STS that is directly part of the ship hull construction material and an overlying 4.5" STS heavy plate covering the underlayer, This makes the armor deck somewhat thinner than 6" of solid STS, close to ~5.5" against a highly oblique AP shell skipping off of it (hopefully), while that is thick enough to stop most regular AP bombs -- those huge British Tallboy or larger bombs, or German radio-controlled heavy AP bomb (used against ROMA and WARSHITE) made by the end of WWII could punch through, but such is progress. One thing that this laminated design allowed was that the upper and lower plates were offset from one-another so that there was no ingle crack at the edges of plates on a single layer between the two layers, so that if a hit succeeded in pulling two plates apart on a layer at their joint, there would not be any continuation of the crack to the other layer. This made the decks much stronger than a single edge-connected layer would be if hit such that two adjacent plates tore free from one-another. That this was a good idea is shown by some German warships that only had a single armored deck layer and a torpedo hit in the stern literally snapped the stern armor at a joint free and the entire stern was only held on by the sides and lower portions of the hull -- not a good thing (much like the weakness from those Japanese AP bombs on the turret roofs of the old US battleships hit at Pearl Harbor).
I clear 6'5" most days, so I'd be a good candidate for walking into things. This is actually good to know as its looking like next spring a few friends and I may be looking into taking your curator tour
As someone of pretty much the same height as you are (if my conversion from metric is accurate) I wish you a great trip - and the foresight to bring some painkillers against the inevitable headache ;-) Since I am living on an entirely different continent I probably won't get to see the ship in person myself, as such I have to make do with these videos - although the perk of plenty head room is a benefit.
We tend to come prepared anyway, all of us are fire breathers, performers or prop builders. Be a good story for them to tell if one if the dragons hurts their head on a bulkhead or something lol
That metal seat at the range finder seems pretty normal when you remember it's from the 1940s. Look at farm tractors from that era and you'll see very similar seats on machines like the '44 Massey (many of which are still in functional condition today, just like their contemporary battleships lol).
My grandfather was about 5’ 4” tall and maybe 110 pounds, of course he was nicknamed “Heavy” and when he did UDT training in Ft. Pierce Florida he said that they as a team would have to hold a big log above their head and he was so short his fingers wouldn’t touch.
Thanks for doing this video Ryan! At 1 curator tall it's probably a good thing we didn't go any farther into turret 3 than the opening into the barbet when we visited, otherwise I probably would have brained myself at least twice!
I'm only 5'8" and I swear the Aegis Burke class destroyer was built for someone my height. I never had issues of hitting my head or going up and down ladders. I even had a top rack with the piping going around the edges above is so I could fully sit up in my rack.
Years ago saw a documentary about building heavy construction equipment. Hard hats were banned, you needed to have visibility upward when the overhead cranes were moving.
Yes! Finally caught you on an error! There are in fact TWO ways in and out of the gun pit, as you demonstrated. Things of up to 16 inches can also take the other way.
Some poor swab would occasionally have to crawl the barrels to check the wear in the rifling and make sure the gun tube wasn't developing cracks or other damage. Tight squeeze to be sure. :D
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I like how "one curator " is a unit of measure.
We often use it here, I like it because it's a good sense of scale, you can see how Ryan lines up as a regular person.- Libby the producer
@@BattleshipNewJersey promoted to producer eh?
@@BattleshipNewJersey That makes Ryan a perfect 1" tall in 1/72 scale.
my favorite new unit of measurement!:-) 🖖
@@BattleshipNewJersey How many apples does one curator equal? (Smurf reference...lol)
I'm 6'4" and banged my head on a lot of things in the overhead when I was stationed on my ship. I have a total of 6 stitches in 2 different places on my head/face from low hanging angle irons.
We had an Ensign who was 6'6 or taller and the more senior officers made him wear a WWII steel pot helmet until he stopped hitting his head on things.
I'm in your height range too and find it's a lot worse when you're wearing a cap with a visor. Without the visor you would see obstacles with "up and down peripheral vision" but wearing a cap you can't see them and run right into them.
Yes, an hard hat sounds like an good idea there, even an bicycle helmet would work.
I am 6'4" tall too. That is a small reason why I served in both the active Air Force and MI Army National Guard. In the Guard, for a bit I was nicknamed Too Tall. I could flat-footed plug-in signal cables to the shelter. Everyone else on the team had to find something to stand on. So my team leader just one day said, "I was just Too Tall. Of all the things I could have been called, I won't argue with it!
I bang into things in front of me alot, if you catch my drift. lol 😏
At least you weren't a crew member in a russian ww2 tank. :D
Hello again, GMG2 (frocked) Jason Pribyl (Turret 3) here. and I just wanted to note that it was (at the time) GMG2 David Mckinnon and GMG2 or 3 Mark Denny who painted the Fosters beer can on the tank when we went to Australia for their bicentennial and the worlds fair. the eye piece on the periscope was used for a few graphite grease shiner gags and who knows how it made it as long as it did. It was not there in the vid. We didnt use that bore brush. I'm 6'2" and you learn to do the MASH helicopter walk as soon as you can on board. You never truly escape a nice headbanger every once in a while. I've used it in civilian life when needed. Dave Mckinnon was and is a over the top guitarist and artist and Mark Denny was and probably is still a professional clown. In the best sense of the word...artist that is.
Over the last year Ryan you have got a LOT better at these
You still have your style but delivered much more confidently well done
Seconded, I was about to write the same. He seemed in his comfort zone talking about the this turret.
@@notmenotme614 He really has relaxed it shows
This is how he is when he's standing next to you.. he has a great sense of humor.
Agree. Now he just needs to stop putting his hands in his pockets.
I agree, his delivery has come such a long way. Its been fun to watch his growth as a speaker/youtuber. Keep up the Great work
I am a Marine but I spend a week on the New Jersey in 1968--was taken on tour of the entire ship--watched them shuttle a1780 lbs shell to the elevator and then up to the gun--watched them put the 100 lb power bags on elevator and move up to the gun---round was loaded by hydraulic rammer and watched them load 3 powder bags at once for a total of 6--was inside the torrent when the man inserted what looked like a shotgun shell into the breach after it was locked--was allowed to stand with the loader inside the turret---when the gun was fired the breach recoiled back within6 inches of my belt buckle..Vibration, noise and some smoke filled the turret ----at that time I was taken out of the turret ---that enough for me------what a gun, it kept moving to allow for roll of ship but it hit its target 22 miles away---THANKS FOR THE TOUR GUYS
Les Hopkins, I was on board a DDG doing gunfire support training off of San Clemente Island. We were told to stand down while another ship took a shot. I was a Signalman and looked for the ship and couldn't see anything. Next thing I know I hear a freight train passing over us. The ship was the New Jersey and it blew the hell out of the target. Glad those guys loaded 3 powder bags and not 2, I might not be here to reply to you. 😃
The multiple weld beads are how you get a proper connection for thick plate. If you only had one weld bead, the amount of metal connecting the two plates is only one weld bead thick. All of the extra weld beads are so you can get a weld connection that is as strong as the plates it’s connected to. Not trusting welding may be why they zig-zagged the weld. That gives you a longer weld seam length, and thus more area of weld connecting the plates.
I noticed in the other video where it showed the top of the belt armor (I think it was the belt) had the same zigzagging. I was thinking it might there to better resist the shock of getting hit by large naval shells. A zigzag is far less likely to shear than a straight weld.
@@aaronp3411 I think you've got it. The forces / energy that impacting major caliber artillery shells would deliver are stupefying. Where possible the designers and builders tended to be conservative, "if 'X' is good then 'X' + 'Y' would be better."
The 'zig zag' joint is a design feature as probably the multiple weld seams are as well, though I wouldn't doubt professional pride entering into the extra care and effort. "Hey, Iowa is being built in New York. 'Everybody knows' what slobs those guys are, let's prove WE can do the job better." And of course the workers in New York were saying the same thing about the guys in Philly.
@@robertf3479
I agree. Redundancies and over design were the order of the day for these ships. The more I learn about them, the more this fact shines through.
On the matter of professional pride-
I worked with a man when I was in high school who had served in a turret of one of the Iowa class ships in the 80s. I was a night stocker and he the assistant manager in a local grocery store. This was some 16-17 years ago, so I was much less interested in such things then. But you could tell he still beamed when he talked about his time aboard ship. I’d love to run into him again, I would definitely have a lot more questions.
My Semi- Dad-in-Law was a welder in the petroleum industry and I was a mere soldered. He taught me about building up zigs on top of days to build up a stronger weld. I'm sure there's a right way a wrong way and a Navy way anyway.
@@aaronp3411 It prevents straight shearing as well as if the welds for whatever reason get a crack, the crack would only travel down one weld area as opposed to eventually cracking all the way across. On a Zig zag weld, if 1 weld zag cracked, the others picking up the stress can do so more easily instead of the entire weight that weld area supported being on a single straight weld thus further causing the crack to travel across more quickly before maintenance can be done on it to repair it since ships were typically out at sea for long periods of time.
The “ears” on the other battleships may have been intended to keep the turret’s ventilation system from sucking in water. By moving the source of the air higher up, it’s further away from any green water on deck.
Is there another color of water besides specifically green?
@@joshuamcdonald5621 whitewater, black water.
@@joshuamcdonald5621 Green water refers to when a ship takes a huge quantity of water over the deck in heavy seas. This would be such as when waves are big enough that the bow plunges though them rather than over them. Certain ships had issues with low air intakes and green seas causing the interior of the ship to become very damp. The HMS Hood was known to be very unpleasant inside in rough seas for this reason.
I'm thinking they might also prevent sucking up dust and smoke from battle.
@@joshuamcdonald5621 blue water refers to deep ocean, brown water is fresh water rivers, green is when its on the ship in places it's not supposed to be, black water is sewage, grey water is used water such as from the galley but not contaminated with human waste.
Great video! One thing that occurred to me during a visit to the North Carolina was how unusual it is to encounter metal construction as heavy as this. Most of our interaction nowadays is with plastic, wood, or sheet metal (car bodies, pots and pans, office furniture). To knock-knock-knock on a piece of 16” armor is like hitting a piece of the earth’s bedrock-it doesn’t move or flex or ring or react AT ALL. Same with the equipment on board. Turning the knobs and dials on one of the firing control computers tells you immediately that you’re dealing with a level of engineering and construction that’s completely outside of our everyday experience. That was one of the most dramatic discoveries from my battleship tour, and my son (about 10 at the time) still talks about it.
Great video on steel ships and iron men. I toured the Missouri with my nephew years ago and remarked that the thing that impressed me the most was the fact that these ships were designed by men at drafting tables with blueprints, slide rules and formula books. My then teen age nephew pulled out his phone to find out what a slide rule was......
Slide rule apps are a thing (yes really).
Slide rules were already osolete 40 years ago when I started studying engineering in college.
I bought a very nice Pickett multi-function one as a keepsake from one of the campus bookstore's (private store off campus) clearance sale in 1981.
@@chemech I represented my high school in state-wide competition on the SLIDE RULE TEAM -- go team!! 1962
When I toured HMS Belfast, I noticed that the valves for flooding one magazine were in part of the adjacent turret and visa versa. I was told that this was to save the men having to flood their own magazine with 22 of their mates in there (although I guess if the magazine had to be flooded, the turret above would already have been hit). A sobering prospect.
Horrific, don't commit suicide so your mates will drown you instead.
Mind blowing the amount of thought that went into everything inside the turret and the thousands of details that had to be addressed.
Every detail is from a prior mistake.
Just think, the engineers didn't have any computer aid to design these huge weapons of war.
The engineering teams kept reams of pages of logs cross-referencing the various drawings, details, and bills of materials... which were checked multiple times, by multiple people, by hand, with colored pencils to keep track of it all, and all of the changes required to get things right.
I have a thought about the uncomfortable chairs.
My first job during college was at a manufacturing plant.
The toilets in the plant areas were very low and uncomfortable to sit on.
The break areas were painted in the most hideous color with a horizontal accent color around the room of an even more ugly color at eye height.
When I asked the most senior guy there why that was he told me that when the plant was built they didn't want the employees hanging out instead of working.
The toilets were designed to be uncomfortable so that there was no incentive to stay in the bathroom reading the paper instead of working.
Similarly they had used a study that the Navy had done on colors that ranked they by levels of color (most calming, most exciting, etc.) to find the most disturbing colors to paint the break areas with so that as soon as the guys got done with their break they would go back to work rather than sit there surrounded by those horrible walls.
As a person who's been in Mfg for decades these stories of "to keep the lazy workers from being lazy" continue to amaze me. I'm hoping we've learned our lesson and have moved past that weird behavior. Treating people with respect seems to get more stuff done.
Make me happy to be colorblind
Speaking as a dues paying member of the International Order of Lazy Sods I can assure you no amount of uncomfortable furniture or rancid colors will interfere with our abilities to shirk the tasks we are be paid to perform. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to avoid doing it.
@@jeffreyhenion4818 As a fellow member of the IOLS I can attest to what Jeffrey has stated. The ugly walls and lump chairs will not stop us from doing the bare minimum!
Ryan, totally understand that you must keep production costs low. With that in mind I have a suggestion. It would really be helpful to visualize what part of the ship you are showcasing by briefly cutting to some sort of graphic image of the ship with a highlight of where you are. Again, understand that features cost money but that one would really improve your presentations.
I want to see a Ryan Szimanski action figure with curator gesturing action
Some points about armored gratings:
They are made of the same steel as used in STS/Class "B" armor.
The holes have cylinder top facing the incoming weapon and widening cones at the back side, so the back-side openings are somewhat larger. The holes are made by using boring bars to drill them one by one into a full-thickness, fully hardened, tempered, and completed STS plate (part of the hull so I think that they are STS under BuC&R/BuSHIPS -- made only by Carnegie/Carnegie-Illinois -- and not the virtually identical Class "B" armor of BuORD -- made by Carnegie. Midvale, or Bethlehem); they were not cast with the holes already in them since that made inferior-strength armor (about 10% more brittle).
Against large AP shell impacts at a highly-oblique angle, such as the plates used to fill the openings at the armored 2md-deck level made by the large funnels, one of these plates was found to be only 40% as thick, in effect, as the solid STS plate was before the holes were drilled in it. For example, if you had a 6" deck plate, to get the same resistance, you would need a 15" grating of the drilled-hole type shown here. Against near-vertical-falling aircraft SAP/AP bombs, the resistance I think is about the same, though I have not seen any tests on that kind of hit.
It is expected that a hit will knock out chunks of metal between the holes ("webbing" material), but most of the plate will merely deform, not break apart (tough steel?). If a bomb or shell explodes on the face of one of these gratings, much of the blast and fumes will go through the holes, so the grating must be kept at some distance and, if possible, offset sideways from whatever it is protecting behind it (engines and boilers for the deck gratings, obviously).
These gratings are rather new (for WWII, that is). Older armored warships used crisscrossing steel bars in several stacked layers to create a grating, which was not nearly as strong..
That seat you mention isn't a 'Bicycle' seat but is very similar to the seats found on pre-1960s farm equipment. Some tractors and a whole bunch of other pieces of towed (tractor or horse-drawn) and self propelled equipment had them. Let me tell you, even to a young, pre-teen butt they were not the most comfortable things to sit on. There were also dozers and other construction equipment that used them.
Even though I did some work aboard Iowa right after she recommissioned in the 80s, I never got to visit one of the turrets. I did tour the aft turret of the North Carolina with my 5'11" son. I'm 5'7" but even so equipment in that turret was finding my head and my son ... "Dad, I don't see how they did it." And yeah, it was hot in there.
That seat is basically the same seat in brass.. that's on my '45 Farmall A.. wildly uncomfortable to sit on.
The seat is actually looking more comfortable than the seats for the gunners on a 3-inch M1902. But there is a disproportion between the cost of the gun and the comfort of the seats, obviously.
My great uncle was a GM on turret 3 BB58 USS Indiana, thanks for the tour. It was good to get some understanding of what these men were tasked with.
Look around on RUclips. There's an old Navy training film someone uploaded of the drill for the firing cycle of an Iowa's 16" guns. The turret design and layout was pretty much the same on the South Dakotas and North Carolinas, though the longer guns on the Iowas meant the turrets were slightly larger.
I'm one curator tall. On the submarines, I always wore a ball cap with the brim as far up as possible to act as a warning bumper before I hit my head.
When I joined the NAV in 1968 I was maybe one or more inches below the min height requirement at the time. (Tiptoe at the MEPS station). Therefore, I could stand on the rim of a watertight door and not hit the top rim with my head. My shins, however took a beating until I learned to walk like an ostrich. In 21 years as a Radarman/Operations Specialist, I was stationed on DD836, CLG5, DD880, CG18, CV61, and AR5. It was always a dream to be stationed on a BB but I never got the chance.
The sound quality is the best it has been on any video I've seen so far. I know you've said it's hard to concentrate on that inside a steel box, but you've done well on this one!
I went on a tour of the turret 1 gun house on USS Iowa for my birthday this year, and it was incredible. Honestly, seeing the breach of the 16in guns put their size into perspective better than anything else. Thanks for the inside look today!
@ Matthew Burg, I live not to far from Iowa, are her turrets (except #2 of course) open on the tour? I toured her soon after she opened, and it was pretty much all above main deck only. Not nearly as in depth as New Jersey.
@@markwatson3135 they’ve done a lot of work since it’s opening. New Jersey has been open as a museum for a long time, and that’s given their staff all the time (and less regulations) to open new spaces and increase access to the ship. The Iowa now has tours of its engineering, gunnery, admiral, and regular spaces. They’re all worth while to see as even among the Iowa’s each ship is has a unique service and maintenance history
@ Matthew Burg thanks! I’ll have to check Iowa out again! But they don’t have Ryan, and I hope to visit New Jersey one day and get a Curator tour.
Those old electromechanical analog computers are amazing. The skillset for building those have all died off. It would take great, deliberate effort to replicate that sort of technology. Those servo, synchro, integrator, etc are some high precision mechanical components.
And the engineers did all that with SLIDE RULES. And brain power.
I would imagine the biggest problem with replicating the technology; It wouldn't be worth the time or effort in the modern day. You can do anything that old EMAC can do with a 5$ raspberry pi, both faster and easier. And that's only including dirt cheap consumer grade products.
@@dakota9821 Analog versus digital computers - A digital requires that you pre-decide what your accuracy/resolution is. 8, 16, 32, 64 bits, etc. An analog one can calculate a 'smidge' more or less. Like cutting a board "Leave the line" or "to the line?" Most tapes have 1/16 or 1/32 accuracy... your line width is around 1/128 with a sharp pencil. Even finer if you use a marking knife rather than a pencil. Also, Analog computers directly compute their results from inputs and so are constantly providing the solution. No AtoD converters - which add their own inaccuracies. No waiting for the loop to come back around. No buffer overflows, stack errors, etc. Hence Iowa's maintained their analog equipment through their service life into the late 90's. Now, that isn't to say that modern encoders, AtoD converters, FGPAs, etc. couldn't replace this equipment. But, a lot of testing and recalibration. Plus, this older stuff is just really cool looking!
The good thing about this technology is if there was ever an EMP attack, these guns can still be accurately fired
Don't underestimate the magic of CAD software and CNC machined prototypes. We don't need droves of extremely skilled manual lathe and mill workers to build those anymore. That does not mean that it wouldn't take considerable effort - but we could probably crank them out at a higher pace than before, and also are able to simulate their functionality before starting the build process speeding up the prototyping stage.
Over the years I’ve avoided watching video presentations having suffered listening to horrible speakers on others. Finally took a chance …. WOW. The detail on the systems engineering complexity of these ships is humbling. The majority of average people in the population have no idea how complicated the design is (without the modern spiffy computers) … and how well they functioned. Thank you.
Footnote … after watching these videos, the importance of preserving these examples of technology are on the same level as the Fields Museum in Chicago and The Ford Museum in Dearborn-Detroit
It’s so remarkable that a ship that size with all that steel and heavy components actually floats … amazing engineering 🤠👍
I live 1 mile away from where the Battleship Massachusetts is. The have so many places off limits including the guns it is nice to finally see what they look like inside! Thank you.
Turret 1 is always open
@@ussmassachusetts1154 thanks for the info!
These are great videos. Thanks. I like the non rushed approach to describing what you experience as you see it. Truly more of a conversation than a tightly edited 60 second piece most share. So much to see and learn. Appreciate it!!
6'3" tall. That's why I went Army. The only head hunters there were snipers :^)) Keep up the great work. I enjoy all you videos.
I am a 6'4" veteran of both Active Air Force and MI Army Guard. I can duck and cover with the best!
Weren't there limits on how tall guys can be in tanks, IFVs, self propelled artillery etc?
Turret 1 was open years ago when we visited! Very interesting to see all the systems in there. I'm still surprised at how BIG everything on the Battleship is, yet so many of the crew stations were in such cramped, little spaces!
This is really cool to see!! My dad was a gunners mate on the Jersey on turret 2 in the 80s. Where we live now the sister ship Wisconsin is docked as a museum so we get to see something close to his gun a lot..
Love the “curator” measurements
One eye for you, one for the ship. One divo on board walked at full speed into a fire main valve in a main p-way and one guy in my workcenter walked dead into a platform that was too low.
I was careful during my tour of the USS Iowa #1 turret. It had the rangefinder removed, supposedly because she was a wet ship and water and the rangefinder let water into the turret. I did not bang my head on anything in there, but I remember all the obstructions. I wear a ball cap to keep light out of my eyes and it also keeps me from seeing headhunters. Bang!!!
Interesting facts, finally a different perspective than just the guns and the elevators.
This is such a nice show, this channel is one of my favorites !!
My first thought when I climbed up in the number 2 turret of WisKy was, "this looked a lot taller from the outside," then I remembered how much armor was over my head
Thanks for a fascinating mini-tour 👍 With your seats at 3:50... I'd wager the 'chair' in the foreground was added after it was taken out of service. The saddle or pommel-style stools are common on heavy machinery like tractors & old artillery because they are strong, abIe to be used by different sized people without adjustment, and take up limited room (so they are easy to manoeuvrer large, heavy objects around).
And ironically enough, a shaped stool is also far better ergonomically than a hard flat chair with a back support for those types of jobs... it encourages you to sit upright & hold your spine's natural curve. Seat comfort is a whole other issue though!
I bet that in every training, drill and battle use it never even rated a passing thought.
I was down in the powder flats and powder magazines on the Missouri
Man!! Thank you for doing all these videos Ryan!! You are teaching so much about the hustory of not just your ship but others too. All the information you give about the wars themselves too is amazing. Even the little things like the armored caps they welded over bolt and rivit ends. People may notice those if they went through a space but would never know what they were. Ill bet you point out obscure things like that on your tours. I am going to make it a point to save up money for a vacation. A vacation to come see your ship just because the videos you have done almost make me feel at home on the ship. I feel that for all I have seen of these videos. All the nook and crany videos of seeing the keel, the armor belt, the anchor storage pit and more will make me feel I have a leg up on the other tour takers. Hopefully I will have the money saved about the time you all start doing tours again. If your duties take you away from this when things get going again for tours then please, please find or hire someone to host and do the videos. I am sure you have a volunteer locally who was a sailor, maybe not on New Jersey, but a sailor who likes to talk and would love to do it.
Another great video very informative! Thanks Ryan! Watch your head!
Ryan is six feet or one curator tall. He has a unique speaking style. It allows him to give extremely detailed and informative details about the battleship. Great video, as always.
Truely priceless..🙏🙏🙏
Humbled to think of those crews.., the struggles/ suffering/ absolute discomfort they must’ve faced.. saving our beautiful Pacific 🙏🙏🙏🌹🇺🇸
Never a dull moment in your vids Ryan. You are a busy man. 👍✌️👊
Saw Missouri's. Was crazy. Especially the cannon loading section
Good job Ryan. I am impressed with the passion you show for the ship and it’s innermost workings. Keep it up sir!
sharp haircut too!
When I visited USS Massachusetts last time, I definitely brained myself while exploring Turret 3, and I'm only 5'6".
Always interesting. Thanks for doing these. At 6ft3in I would have knocked myself senseless in those spaces. Better you than me. I can’t imagine those cramped spaces crammed with men, all trying to communicate while deafening noises are making it nearly impossible, the vessel pitching, rolling and heaving during maneuvers. Hitting the enemy with any accuracy must have been quite the achievement. We owe all of those sailors a debt of gratitude.
My favorite part of working in Turret 3 was timing myself from the time it took to climb into the turret to the time my boondockers hit the powder flats. Also climbing over to the top of center gun to remove the yoke
My Grandpop Built that ship as a welder in the Philadelphia Navy Shipyard ... He has the Christening Plaque hanging up at my Grandmothers in South Philly to this day.
I was stationed on PBR Mobile Base 1 which was north of Da Nang. We saw the New Jersey firing turrets 1 & 2 on a fire mission. Both turrets and all 3 barrels on each fired together and It was an awesome sight. I had forgotten about this until i watched this episode. Thanks.
I think you're overestimating the amount of power in those batteries.
Based on the circuit diagrams that I have they are intended to be an emergency power source for the firing circuits. They don't have nearly enough power to rotate the turret or elevate the barrels, which is why there are 2 independent power sources for each turret.
Even if the batteries were to be powerful enough to run the large motors for traverse and elevation there was no practical way (in the ship's design timeframe) to change the DC from the batteries into 440VAC 3-phase to power the A end motors.
The turret roof armor was 7.25" of Class "B" armor butt-edge mounted (interlocked, but not overlapped) with keying, bolting, and welding at the joints to make them as close as possible to a single huge plate. Welding such small objects to their back surface will nots compromise the armor protection in the slightest (now Class "A" face-hardened armor is a different thing altogether and there were lots of restrictions to anything that might compromise the hard face layer).
Older battleships at Pearl Harbor had overlapped turret roof plates (4-5" Class "B" armor plates of the quality at the time they wer3e made), This involved having the part of the plate facing toward the front of the turret tucked a few inches under the rear portion of the plate closer to the turret face, like shingles, with heavy bolting through the overlapping portions to strengthen them against a hit coming from the front, since it was assumed that the enemy would be the ship that the US battleship was shooting at and thus toward the target it was facing. This would give the turret roof protection a somewhat improved resistance at a highly-oblique angle from a ricocheting enemy AP shell.
This overlap was NOT used in the new US Navy battleships built starting in the 1930s. The reasoning was that any shells might be coming from the side or, possibly, from the rear, and this could make the overlap weaker than a flat top would be. This turned out to be absolutely true at Pearl Harbor. Two old battleships, WEST VIRGINIA and TENNESSEE, had one of their turret roofs hit each by the several level bombers that dropped converted obsolete 16.1" AP bombs (made by remanufacturing old pre-1930 NAGATO Class AP shells) -- the same group that had a bomb blow up ARIZONA. The two turret roof hits were coming from the rear of the turrets hit, steeply falling but still having a tilt due to the horizontal speed of the aircraft that dropped them. The bombs could penetrate the rather thin deck armor of those old battleships (ARIZONA showed this dramatically), but they should not have been able to punch through the much thicker turret roof armor. But they did punch through, though the bombs were heavily damaged in the process (since there was nothing explosive in the turrets, the damage to them was relatively superficial and could be repaired quickly). What happened was that the bombs did exactly what the turret designed of the new battleships thought might happen: The bombs hit and began to have their noses rotated away to ricochet, but the nose of the bomb caught the back edge overlapping lip of two joined roof plates and bent it up, ripping out the bolts and allowing the bomb, partially crushed in the process, to wedge itself through the narrow "mouth" that it had just made and into the turret. I think some modifications to all of the older battleship turret roofs was made to make this less likely.
Is it even possible to get a camera to look through the range finder?
Nope, it's been blocked off unfortunately
That would have been cool
Taofledermaus, you should have asked him where the Marines kept their Mossberg 590 shotguns, and whether the US Navy ever experimented with a 16" antiaircraft cannister rounds for the Iowas.
An absolute joy to see you here!
@@MartyInLa The Japanese had an AA shell for the 18" guns on the Yamato class. They rarely used it, mostly because the actual AA guns and the main battery ... well, not that they /couldn't/ be fired at the same time, but being outside when the big guns go off was ridiculously unpleasant, to put it mildly.
North Carolina still has her periscopes!
Never been much of a boat guy but my great grandfather served on the Iowa in the 40's so i do like to watch some stuff about the Iowa class, from what little i know he served in the mail room; and when I visited the Iowa several years ago they even let my family go off tour to see where he would of worked! My mother in particular really enjoyed that as she had a close connection with him until his passing, she always talked so fondly of him wish i had the chance to meet him.
Ryan, I just wanted to say that this is a great channel, extremely informative.
I worked for a computer maker in the 80s. We had a computer system near the turret that blew up in 1989 on the USS Iowa. All the boards popped off the frame and when they put them back in, it still worked! That was amazing. Those were amazing ships. I hope they can preserve them.
Have you ever talked about hearing protection for people in various areas of the ship while the main guns were in use? I have to imagine the concussion was crazy!
I agree that would be a very interesting topic to cover... though from videos of the turret in action firing and interviews with sailors it's apparently not actually that bad in the turret/gun house its self... **shrug** just what I've heard, I def. don't speak from experience, somewhat unfoetunately =)
Not really, all the 'BOOM' goes out the muzzle. The rest of the machinery would require hearing protection, though, even more so in the engineering & boiler spaces. Look at the RUclips videos of the USS Silverside running their diesel engines & get an idea of how noisy a ship / sub is.
@@danquigg8311 yeah- standing next to a marine diesel running at speed is incredibly noisy- you FEEL the noise and you really have to wear ear protection. very long time ago I was with a company developing big diesels, like 1500hp per cylinder. funny thing- we once had a 9cyl 4stroke on the test rig at idle... and you could hear the bangs coming from different areas of the engine following the firing order. made me realize how big the thing was.
I was born in Fall River Massachusetts. I have toured the USS Massachusetts, many times. I have been I the gun houses. Very impressive in all around scale.
Another superb video.
It’s not often we get to see the “back of house “ of the turret.
You used to be able to climb in to turret 3 on the North Carolina. Haven't been there for a while so I'm not sure it's still open.
The deck is looking good, nice work.
I was an EM (Electrician's Mate) onboard an Aircraft Carrier. We used to move very heavy electrical motors for repair. Those steel rings welded overhead are very useful in lifting and moving heavy motors from one room to another.
Great videos. Fantastic content and super presentation. I could listen to you for 5 hours straight….GREAT JOB. BB New Jersey is lucky to have you.
It's said that battleships were the most complicated objects ever made by man and I can believe it. I don't know how they ever worked out where all the pipes and cables went and were connected.
Funnily enough I once saw a photo of a mocked up area of a battleship when they were planning where things go. Amazingly, they used thick rope to simulate the cables and heavy duty wiring. Very clever. But yes, can imagine how mind boggling it would be to think of everything and how they all connected up to work correctly!
Much better then an architect did on the prints for a hotel a few years ago. Every few floors the room for the equipment was located on the opposite corner. It was supposed to be a chase for pipes, venting and power.
Fantastic stuff Ryan, oddly enough I’ve been to the North Carolina yet never been to the New Jersey, I promise I’ll be there soon thanks for all you do!
As .95 curators tall, I don't think I would have many issues with head clearance on the battleship. Also looking for a new job and am willing to crawl around the battleship for food.
Hmmm…🤔🤔🤔 I don’t think they leave food just laying around a battleship. I don’t think they stored food in tiny little crawl spaces either… I don’t think they need someone on the battleship crawling around looking for food like that; maybe if you could use a broom, that would be more helpful?
Just kidding! I know what you meant! It would be absolutely awesome to just walk around on your own; checking things out as you wanted too!
@@RichardAmmo1 Rats! Has to be plenty of fat, juicy, tasty rats in those crawl spaces. A handy blowtorch removes hair and cooks the rat to snacking perfection.
Also kidding! But if you get lost inside that ship a rat just may save you from starvation. "Food For Thought". LoL
@@j.t.harrison3203 HaHaHaHaHa!! True!
Another wonderful video can't wait to visit at some point
Love the Foster's Beer Can sailor art. I remember this was shown to Australian media during the ship's visit to Australia in 1988. Wonderful to see it is still on show 👏🇦🇺🇺🇸👍
Excellent job on the gun house tour! Very informative. And just plain cool!
This is fascinating! Thanks so much, Ryan!
I was on the USS Ingersoll on the West Pac cruise to Australia in 1988 with the New Jersey. I would say out the 65 ships from navies around the world, the New Jersey was the highlight for everyone...
Regarding the welds, I used to work for a company that was a tier 2 supplier to a few government prime contractors. Some of the work I did was welding armor. For thick armor (half-inch or more) we would do multipass overlap welds on joints. We did it for a few reasons, primarily to create a large fillet and ensure we have a large area of the parent metal to spread loading. What I find so fascinating is I suspect back then they did it because as Ryan pondered the Navy didn't trust welding yet and it turns out it's the best way to do it. Fun fact, I did some welds on butt joints that started with a non-filled pulsed TIG pass followed by multiple MIG cap passes
It makes sense. You don't trust the weld so you come up with a mechanical design that's stronger. Even once the welds are proven it's still a mechanically strong design.
A multi-run pass will generally be weaker than a single run (of the same total size as the multiple runs) due to heat effected zones (HAZ) of later passes impacting the former, while the contraction stress area will be lower diameter. But reaching those sorts of immense deposition rates was probably not economical given how new large scale welding for of ships ect was... and they didn't have the benefit of hindsight to know lots of that tech/gear would last 80+ years, rather than being replaced again in a decade or two with something equally revolutionary, so going all in on tooling/training wouldn't have been seen as wise (although Japan did basically opt this route, and some early teething issues aside, it did pan out).
@@SheepInACart I used to work for a trailer building company. We had to switch from a single 1/2” weld on the king pin to a 3 pass weld because the amount of heat that the single pass put into the plate caused the king pin to periodically be ripped out through the 3/8” plate.
@@jordan4777 As a cost economical switch if its still adequately strong, thats a fine solution, but the heat itself isn't the enemy, indeed it'd be stronger overall if you'd increased the preheat to reduce the heat affected zone (itself formed by the difference in temperature, not total amount) of the single run.
6:30 I have a question for someone who actually served in a gun house. What repairs were likely to be done on that bench inside the gun house? I'm just figuring if the had a common setup there must have been a pretty regular need to use those tools? What was most likely being repaired?
Hydraulic or Pneumatic hoses/piping is one example, electric motors or hydraulic pumps is another
Side note here. I´m a welder/fabricator, and i had one of those vices in my shop, that had been bought out of an old decomissioned frigate from my country Portugal, by my father who is a retired Navy man. Had to sell it a few months ago, after i got sick and unable to work. It´s funny, but my vice looked like an exact copy of that one, and probably was made by the same maker. I had it tracked to a model made in the 1940s or 50s by Rock Island, model 542-BX. It was a monster vice, probably well over 50kg in weight. As soon as i saw it on this video i recognized it immediately. I was very sorry to sell it, it was one of my most prized tools...
Yet another fascinating video. Thanks Ryan!
Tank crew members of all nationalities wear helmets - leather or otherwise - to protect their heads from bashing into low-lying metal stuff.
Perhaps such items of kit would be eminently suitable for this context also.
Thanks (again) for your video! Fascinating and engaging stuff. I have seen a good number of your New Jersey videos now and find the commentaries on internal aspects of the ship well worth my time watching. They tell the story of these historic ships so well!
Got to see both NJ and Missouri in Sydney when they were each visiting here in Aus in the late 1980s.
However - such internal tours and detailed commentaries are such an entirely different thing again.
Love these! Can't wait to visit your beautiful ship.
I'm 5'11" and I'd have whacked my head on everything. I worked 7 years as industrial safety in a commercial power plant that resembled your engineering spaces, I'd have given myself at least one concussion daily without a hard hat.
I saw the New Jersey when it visited Hobart in 1988, I was around 2 years old. A few years later her sister ship the USS Missouri visited Hobart on her way back from the Gulf War
cheers for the upload team.
I'm a Plank Owner of the USS New Jersey BB-62. I decommissioned it in 1991. I'm 5'11" and was in 'R' Division. My work center was near DC Central just off of Broadway. At 5'11" there were a few areas I had to walk with my head crooked over to not smack it on anything. For the most part anyone under 6' tall you were good to go.
I'm 6'4" so as much as I love me a battleship, I'd probably cuss my entire time there... Thank you for your work, love your videos!! Also from Canada, I plan on visiting an Iowa before I die!
Hope your team is staying dry! Once it's safe, would be cool to see the effects of the heavy rain on the ship and museum.
There weren't any real impacts on the ship this time around. A few drops of water inside doorways, some tossed around life rings
It's pretty safe to say that the old girl has definitely seen worse!
@@BattleshipNewJersey Glad to hear there were no issues!
I was reading this with my wife and her immediate comment was "where is the link to the video", from Ryan?
🇺🇸Ryan🇺🇸 The Zig/Zag welding is also a crack preventer. A straight horizontal weld can crack easier than that zig zag pattern which prevents a fractured weld from a shock.
Sadly not really, the issue being the stress raisers of the corners create propagation points for an unzipping failure, which is why pressure vessels are welded in one continuous band with as wide of a bend radius as possible.
Having served on two Sumner class DDs (Zellars DD 777 and briefly on Laffey DD 724) I remember keeping my head down. Love your videos. I wish someone would do the same for Laffey.
This ship would be insanely fun to explore off tour.
Knowing how much the navy liked redundancy, they probably could communicate with the gun pit crew with hand signs thru the observation ports
The zigzag weld seam may be to prevent cracks from propagating if the turret gets hit. A single straight weld joint could "zipper" open along its full length.
i LOVE how those old switches on that switchboard has GE switches on them. a relic from the older days.
Well I'm 6'4 barefoot and I beat my head to death throughout the whole ship. But I loved every bit of it!
HaHaHaHaHaHa! You got the “Brutal Tour treatment “! 😇
I'm glad you got the authentic experience 😂😂😂
Visiting Battleship New Jersey is on my kick bucket list
The zig-zag welding lines: You do not want adjacent plates to move away from each other in any direction. By using "dragon's teeth" edges, the plates cannot move sideways without literally bending the armor teeth over for the full thickness of the plate. As was mentioned, it also adds more surface for the welding to lock into if they were pulled upward vertically or sheared front-to-back.. If you look at the armored 2nd deck, it is made of two layers: A underlayer of 1.5" STS that is directly part of the ship hull construction material and an overlying 4.5" STS heavy plate covering the underlayer, This makes the armor deck somewhat thinner than 6" of solid STS, close to ~5.5" against a highly oblique AP shell skipping off of it (hopefully), while that is thick enough to stop most regular AP bombs -- those huge British Tallboy or larger bombs, or German radio-controlled heavy AP bomb (used against ROMA and WARSHITE) made by the end of WWII could punch through, but such is progress. One thing that this laminated design allowed was that the upper and lower plates were offset from one-another so that there was no ingle crack at the edges of plates on a single layer between the two layers, so that if a hit succeeded in pulling two plates apart on a layer at their joint, there would not be any continuation of the crack to the other layer. This made the decks much stronger than a single edge-connected layer would be if hit such that two adjacent plates tore free from one-another. That this was a good idea is shown by some German warships that only had a single armored deck layer and a torpedo hit in the stern literally snapped the stern armor at a joint free and the entire stern was only held on by the sides and lower portions of the hull -- not a good thing (much like the weakness from those Japanese AP bombs on the turret roofs of the old US battleships hit at Pearl Harbor).
I was finally down there last weekend and I'm 6'8" - I've got a great pic of myself squeezing through the left gun door :)
I clear 6'5" most days, so I'd be a good candidate for walking into things. This is actually good to know as its looking like next spring a few friends and I may be looking into taking your curator tour
As someone of pretty much the same height as you are (if my conversion from metric is accurate) I wish you a great trip - and the foresight to bring some painkillers against the inevitable headache ;-)
Since I am living on an entirely different continent I probably won't get to see the ship in person myself, as such I have to make do with these videos - although the perk of plenty head room is a benefit.
Best part is one of the other guys coming along is 6'8" 😄
@@shawnarner469 Then you better bring double the amount of painkillers - just in case.
We tend to come prepared anyway, all of us are fire breathers, performers or prop builders. Be a good story for them to tell if one if the dragons hurts their head on a bulkhead or something lol
@@shawnarner469 heh. For sure.
Ryan they are called multiple pass welds, they are stronger and they wanted to make sure it was anchored down with more than just one bead......
That metal seat at the range finder seems pretty normal when you remember it's from the 1940s. Look at farm tractors from that era and you'll see very similar seats on machines like the '44 Massey (many of which are still in functional condition today, just like their contemporary battleships lol).
I'm 6' 3" and served in the #2 engine room of a small destroyer. Many many scars on my head.
My grandfather was about 5’ 4” tall and maybe 110 pounds, of course he was nicknamed “Heavy” and when he did UDT training in Ft. Pierce Florida he said that they as a team would have to hold a big log above their head and he was so short his fingers wouldn’t touch.
Thank you for these vids! I wish I was born to be part of the greatest generation.
Thanks for doing this video Ryan! At 1 curator tall it's probably a good thing we didn't go any farther into turret 3 than the opening into the barbet when we visited, otherwise I probably would have brained myself at least twice!
I'm only 5'8" and I swear the Aegis Burke class destroyer was built for someone my height. I never had issues of hitting my head or going up and down ladders. I even had a top rack with the piping going around the edges above is so I could fully sit up in my rack.
Years ago saw a documentary about building heavy construction equipment. Hard hats were banned, you needed to have visibility upward when the overhead cranes were moving.
Yes! Finally caught you on an error!
There are in fact TWO ways in and out of the gun pit, as you demonstrated.
Things of up to 16 inches can also take the other way.
He mentioned that at 10:00.
@@ghost307 That is not what I ment.
@@TheEvertw Sorry...I missed the joke.
@@ghost307 Agreed, it is a bit lame...
Some poor swab would occasionally have to crawl the barrels to check the wear in the rifling and make sure the gun tube wasn't developing cracks or other damage. Tight squeeze to be sure. :D