On 05/05/2012 17:24, harry wrote:
On May 5, 12:05 pm,
wrote:
On 05/05/2012 06:49, harry wrote:





On May 4, 7:45 pm, wrote:
On 04/05/2012 17:59, harry wrote:

On May 4, 10:53 am, "Dave Liquorice"
wrote:
On Thu, 3 May 2012 22:44:09 -0700 (PDT), harry wrote:
I'd assume that they would vent the steam and douse the fires
before
that stage. Certainly Jack Phillips, the Titanics radio operator,
was
sending messages that he couldn't read other stations due to steam
and air noise.

How exactly does one do that?
It's on a par with "opening the seacocks"

The boilers would have safety valves which no doubt vent somewhere
safely. Manually open them? Or far more likely have another valve
that opens to a safe vent. Dousing the fires might be slightly more
tricky due to thermal shock on the cast iron parts and not wanting to
produce too much steam that the flues/funnels couldn't cope with.

.
There are safety valves. They would lift if the engines stopped. They
do not vent to the funnels.

They vented up the side of the funnel and would have had easing gear,
which allowed them to be opened manually.

But there's no way you would want to remove tons of water at steam
temperature. It is the ultimate catastrophy for a steamboiler. The
furnace tubes would overheat and collapse in minutes.

I doubt that any of the engineers would have expected the boilers ever
to be needed again, once they saw the extent of the damage to the ship.
Boiler rooms 5 and 6 were at risk from the flooding and cold sea water
hitting a boiler under pressure would cause an explosion, to add to
their problems. It was vital to reduce pressure in those boilers as
quickly as possible, hence the venting. In fact, all boilers not needed
to run pumps or dynamos would probably have have had an emergency shut down.

And how would you "douse the fires"? You would close the dampers but
the fires would take hours to burn the tons of coal in there.

The fires would have been raked out onto the boiler room floor.

You got to be mental.
How are you going to rake out almost a hundred tons of white hot coal
onto the boilerhouse floor without burning your self to a cinder,
setting fire to the bunkers and gassing your self?

Titanic had 159 fire holes, each consuming around 4 cwt of coal per hour
at full power or around 3 cwt per hour at normal cruising power. Only
two out of six boiler rooms were at immediate risk of flooding, so the
task is nothing like as massive as you would like to imply.

Exactly how would you do it?

I would pass the order to the black gang, who would do the actual work.
Raking out is a normal procedure when fires need to be cleaned and a
recognised emergency procedure in situations like this.

The consumption of coal is neither here nor there as to the quantity
of coal in the furnace. But it used 825tons/day

825 tons per day was the maximum rate of use and equates to 4 cwt per
hour per fire.

Absolute nonsense. Boilers are never "raked out".

Evidently, you don't know a great deal about marine boilers. At the end
of each watch, one fire in each boiler would be cleaned out. This
involved winging over any good coals to one half of the fire hole, the
fireman raking out all the ash and clinkers onto the deck from the half
without coals and the trimmers dousing them in sea water, either with a
hose or from buckets. The good coals are then winged over to the half
that has just been cleaned and the other half is raked out in the same
way. There would be fumes, steam and fly ash everywhere while this was
going on. The good coals are then spread evenly and topped up with green
coal.

Raking out the entire fire, including burning coals, was an emergency
measure that would only be done in a situation such as when flooding was
expected in the boiler room.

And even if it
were, why would the coal stop burning?

It wouldn't, until quenched with sea water.

They are "sliced" to encourage the ash to fall through the grates.

That, like pricking and levelling, is simply part of routine fire
maintenance.

Nobody believed the ship was going to sink.

I doubt that was true of the people working on trying to stop it
happening. However, what they would certainly have known was that boiler
rooms 5 and 6 were in immediate danger of flooding and that if sea water
reached the boilers while they were still under pressure, they would
explode.

By the time it was
apparent,no-one would be worrying about the fate of the boilers.

There wouldn't be anything else to occupy the down below men, assuming
they had not already been killed by escaping steam or sliding machinery.
They would know they were not going to get out.

"Black gang"??? Who are they?

That only emphasises my comment about your lack of knowledge of marine
boilers. It was what the firemen and trimmers were called, even into the
days of oil.

I was responsible (managerially) for steam boilers for thirty odd
years.
And I have hand fired steam boilers too..

Presumably not marine boilers.

Colin Bignell