News

This week we entered the home stretch of major steel work and topside painting of the ship.

Aside from the Air Castles all structures on the main deck have been blasted and painted. The culmination of which was the completion of the Galley area this week. The ten man blast and paint team also set up the containment for the foreward superstructure this week. Blasting has already started in that area. Once this area is completed in the coming weeks major paint activities on the exterior of the ship will be done.

Simultaneously, the excellent welders and fitters, who have been working hard to stay ahead of the paint team, finished up major repairs to the forward superstructure this week. They will be shifting to areas previously blasted and painted to repair damaged steel uncovered by the abrasive blasting process. Then the painters will come behind and touch up these freshly repaired areas.

Concurrently, the wood decking crew reached 48% of the bow decking laid and bedded down this week with almost all the portside of the bow laid. At present they are in the time consuming phase of fitting the margin pieces for all the structures that stick up through the deck between anchor chains.

Our maintenance staff and volunteers continue to bang away at restoring our 3” gun mounts, varnishing wood mess benches, restoring the ships navigation lights, repainting components from CIC, finish restoring the fire control components that go on the 5” guns, and getting the shop ready to handle bring in USS Kidd’s twin 40mm mounts and start restoration work on them.

And lastly, we visited we our friends at Certified Pipe Services (CPS) Houston to see the progress on the latest fabrication project they are doing for us. CPS is generously donating the fabrication of the missing 40mm platforms that go on the Superstructure Deck by the crane posts. Once they are blasted and painted they will be installed on the ship later this year.

All in all, a pretty typical week for the Battleship restoration team.