Brackets, Bulkheads, & Beams! (Patreon)

The first Kyle Update of 2024! Happy New Year to all, I hope this year has been good to you so far!

Now that I have basic frames in place, I've been working on some stuff in the aft part of the ship. Specifically, the shaft tunnels.

The shaft tunnels were compartments at the stern of the ship, located between the Electric Engine Room and the aft peak water tank, which housed essentially nothing but the propeller shafts. The three shafts ran through these spaces, sitting on bearings, on their way to the propellers proper.

The center propeller was powered by the the Turbine, and its shaft (along with the entire engine) was angled downward. The two wing propellers, powered by the Reciprocating Engines, were level but angled or "spread" outwards, running outside the normal lines of the hull were the plating and framing "bossed" out to enclose the shafts.

Towards the aft ends of the wing shafts there were two sets of brackets of "boss arms" which held the shafts in place. These were huge objects cast in steel as halves that were bolted together on the ship.

The boss arms are now pretty much done aside from polish, though I anticipate minor adjustments later on when I do the plating around the bossings. These boss arms were actually made many months ago by one of our volunteers, but I ended up having to remake them due to changes in the shape of the bossings and other aspects of the surrounding structure I didn't get to until now. This speaks to the difficulty of making something as complex as this and why, for the most part, it's mainly going to be me doing all this structural work. There are just too many unknowns and curveballs these ships like to throw at you.

Before I could really finish the brackets, I had to start putting some beams in place. I started with the beams over the aft shaft tunnel space, making up a section of the Orlop Deck. This part of the deck was dropped a couple of feet at Watertight Bulkhead O and had a considerable slant towards the aft end due to its need to clear the bossings. Figuring this aspect of the structure out helps to make the rest of the structure in this part of the ship.

Fun fact: It turns out Britannic had to go and be different from Olympic and Titanic in this area. Britannic's wing propellers had a slightly wider spread, so the bossings were also a bit higher up where they met the hull, which then necessitated changes to the Orlop Deck's elevation. It was very annoying to dig through all this.

With the basic beams in place, I also added the brackets that held the beams to the vertical hull frames. Pretty much every beam was connected to the frames this way, so there will be many brackets to make or adjust going forward. And yes, the beams have camber which amounts to 3 inches over 92 feet.

To make the boss arms properly, I also had to figure out the angles of the propeller shafts. Once that was done and I had the other stuff in place, I could then finalize the boss arms and do a couple other things.

As seen in my previous update, I also got a start on the watertight bulkheads, with WTB O being the first one up. So far I only have the plating and will add all the stiffeners later. Making the bulkheads will be a little tedious but not impossible. We have iron plans for every single watertight bulkhead as well as every bunker bulkhead, and these plans show the sizes and layout of all the steel plates and all of the stiffeners, even the thickness of the plates. Making all these bulkheads will be a fairly simple matter of following the plans.

Next I will continue working on this aft part of the ship. My screenshots so far are deceiving; there are actually way more structural elements of various types and sizes here, such as large web frames, more brackets, and frames for the bossings. I used to say that I started with the most difficult part of the ship with the double bottom, but this may be the new most difficult part due to just how much is going on structurally.

Once this area is more or less done (aside from hull and deck plating for now), it will give a good idea of how these shaft tunnels looked on Titanic. It's space not depicted often, at least not accurately. You'd be surprised just how much volume was given over to some shafts.

In the end, this is one of the reasons for building the ship this way. As I always say, the steelwork IS the ship more often than not. When you're standing in the shaft tunnel of the finished ship, every frame, beam, plate, web, angle, stiffener, and bracket is visible. Even from the outside you can see some of the boss arms. There was a time when we considered not bothering to make this part of the ship because we didn't have the plans we do now and it felt too mysterious and complex. Now we're tackling it head-on.