FTV Back to Sea and back to Work Engine Maintenance:

Snaking Drains

While we have great weather we are able to do a lot of outside maintenance. Now I talked about deck maintenance a few days ago and with that being said, one would think that for engine maintenance the cadets would do maintenance in the engine room on the engines, but that is not exactly true all of the time. A lot of engine maintenance is actually outside of the engine room. We do maintain the engines, but it is not needed as much as the little projects we have all of the ship.Seeing that we are living on a steel ship, there is a lot of rust and problems of that nature.

Our engineers are all taught how to weld in a welding class back on campus and now they get to put their skills to the test. Since Thursday afternoon, I have been walking around the ship and many engineering cadets have been welding small things like hooks and latches that have rusted off of the bulkheads and hatches (walls and doors). In the pictures below you can see 1/C Brenda Weeks getting ready to weld a new latch on one of the quarterdeck doors.

In the photo below you can see two sophomore cadets getting rid of what is left of a latch to weld a new one on that one of the fabrication rates made in the machine shop.

Now, the engineers do not just weld things, but they also fix all of our daily appliances. They will go around fixing vents, bathroom fixtures, and basically do a lot of the dirty work. One large problem we have on board is that a lot of our pipes are so old they have rust settling in them which disables them to drain properly. One job that the engineers do is that they will go around and snake all of them. This means they will put this long metal wire down the drain and its spin it around to loosen whatever is stuck in the bottom so we do not have any standing water in the heads (bathrooms). In the picture at the top you can see three sophomore cadets and one senior cadet snaking a drain in one of the berthing areas.

Over all the engineers are the handy people that can fix whatever you put on the table for them. They do a great job applying all of their skills that they learn at school and around the ship!

Until Next time,

Courtney

Welding allow the joining of similar and dissimilar metals to build and repair common structures and tools. To the untrained eye a welding rod is just a rod of metal alloy. However when charged with an electrical current and placed fractions of an inch away from a conductive material, it seems like magic happens: an arc (plasma) is formed, radiating intense light, and heat fuses the metals together.

Watch this video to learn more

Welding is the most common way of permanently joining metal parts. Because of its strength, welding is used in all types of manufacturing industries, such as shipbuilding, automobile manufacturing and repair, and aerospace applications. Welding also is used to join beams when constructing buildings, bridges and other structures, and to join pipes in pipelines, power plants and refineries. Other applications include the manufacturing of small electronic devices, medical components and nanotechnology, which is the latest development to revolutionize the world of manufacturing, at the molecular level.

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