Interesting boats

Marin said:

Triples are the way to go.

Click to expand...

Heck yeah, because twins may break down halfway across the bay,and you need back up propulsion.

ben2go said:

Heck yeah, because twins may break down halfway across the bay,and you need back up propulsion.

Click to expand...

So that "spare" would be the "get home" Packard V-12?

Those engines were totally awesome, called the 4M-2500, it produced 1200 HP at 2400 RPM with an emergency rating of 1350 HP at 2500. A 60 degree V-12 with four valves per cylinder, and total displacement of 2490 cubic inches. At full chat each engine would get through 120 gallons of 100-octane aviation gas per hour. Over 12,000 of these engines would be built for the war effort. Not many left today.

The Elco 70', 77', and 80' were designed by Brit Hubert Scott-Paine, at one point he told an interviewer "Thank God for Packard engines." Perhaps intimating that it takes more than good hull design to produce reliable fast boats.

Sure.Why not?

Pura Vida-C-Dory Manufactured near Marysville Washington area. The parent company was Marben which is the manufacture of our boat in our logo. C Dorys are very popular boats in the Pacific Northwest.
Al.

In reaarcing the book I'm currently working on, my wife and I were given the opportunity a number of years ago to ride on an under-restoration PT and learn about, watch, and listen to these [Packard 4M-2500] engines. Our "teachers" were men who had crewed PTs during the war. To hear all three of the engines at full song is the most impressive man-made sound I have ever heard in my life.

How were the three engines geared? I guess I am assuming only two props/shafts. Were there three shafts? If only 2, how do you pslit the power of the third engine?

THD said:

How were the three engines geared? I guess I am assuming only two props/shafts. Were there three shafts? If only 2, how do you pslit the power of the third engine?

Click to expand...

From www.pt-boat.com "In many of the different types of PT Boat and certainly in the Elco 80' boat the center engine faced aft and drove the center prop shaft directly but the port and starboard wing engines faced forward and needed an angled Veedrive gearbox to then drive the wing propshafts back down under these engines. The reason for this was to set the center of gravity of the boat further back and to compress the engine room into a smaller space, this allowed very large fuel tanks to be closer to the centre of the boat.

(It seems that Elco Boats after PT612 may have had all three engines facing aft and no Vee-Drive gearbox, there is some evidence for this in photo's showing the engine room configured this way and the fact that the rear torpedo's were moved much further aft, as well as a photo showing the propellers much further apart than earlier boats.)

Note that even with the VeeDrive gearbox all three propellers turned the same way, clockwise looking from aft."

And here is a photo of a 78' Higgins Boat - 3 Engines - 3 Shafts - 3 Props.

THD said:

How were the three engines geared? I guess I am assuming only two props/shafts. Were there three shafts? If only 2, how do you pslit the power of the third engine?

Click to expand...

Each engine drove its own propeller. So three props, and in the case of the Elco boat, three rudders. In the case of the Higgins boat, two rudders (but still three props).

There were two types of PTs used by the American Navy in WWII. The more numerous type was designed and built by Elco in Bayonne, New Jersey. The other was built by Higgins near New Orleans.

(Higgins also built a vessel known to the Navy as the LCVP (Landing Craft Vehicle Personnel) which some war historians claim was responsible for the Allies winning in both theatres. Like the PTs, the LCVP was made of wood except for the bow ramp which was steel.)

There was a handful (one squadron) of PTs built by Huckins, but these boats, while beautifully made, were deemed by the Navy to be unfit for combat missions and so were used only for training and harbor patrol duties.

The Elco and Higgins boats were quite different from each other outside of their mission and the number and type of engines that powered them. I have interviewed hundreds of PT vets in the course of my research, and while the Elco guys said their boat was the best and the Higgins guys said their boat was the best, once you got a few beers into them, the general consensus was that the Elco boat was the better boat to crew on. A good part of the reason for this was the difference in the configuration of the engines.

The 78' Higgins boat (the one my wife and I were invited to ride on, although my book takes place on an Elco) retained the same engine configuration for the duration of the war. The three Packard 4M-2500 engines were arranged side by side in a fairly spacious (long) engine room. All three engines faced forward and had direct drive to the three props. The center engine was staggered slightly from the wing engines to provide better access to each engine.

As everyone on this forum knows, every boat is a compromise and the PTs were no exceptions. The motor macs on the Higgins boats had pretty nice engine rooms to work in (at least I thought it was), but that meant the crew accommodations up forward were pretty cramped.

The engines in the 80' Elco boats were mounted differently. The center engine was mounted facing forward with a direct drive to its prop. The two wing engines were mounted backwards and drove their shafts and prop through V-drives. This made it possible to have a shorter engine room. Which in turn made it possible to have more spacious and user-friendly crew accommodations, although as mentioned in the previous post, the balance of the boat was a bigger consideration than the accomodations. So perhaps it was more a matter of the Elco crews lucking out. But I've always thought it was a very clever way to get a lot of power into a fairly small room and it's the inspiration behind a project we are currently undertaking.

As the war progressed, the PT mission gradually changed. By the end of 1943 its role as a torpedo boat was pretty much over even though they usually continued to carry a pair of the smaller aerial torpedoes that replaced the huge, heavy, and totally unreliable WWI era torpedoes the PTs and our subs started the war with. What the PTs turned into were gunboats, and by late 1944 the Elco PT was, pound for pound, the heaviest armed ship in the Navy.

Problem was, all these guns and rockets and mortars were heavy. The Packard 4M-2500 started life rated at at about 1200 hp. By the end of the war this had been boosted to about 1500 hp. But in the Elco boat, some of that power was being eaten up by the V-drives on the two wing engines. So at some point in 1945, in an effort to put the maximum power possible to the props, Elco reconfigured its engine room and mounted all three engines facing forward with direct drives to the props. The wing engines were mounted with their carburetor/supercharger ends right up close to the forward bulkhead while the center engine sat slightly aft.

Since the dayroom, officers quarters and galley, and crew compartment were unchanged, I can only assume that if Elco needed a bit more length in the engine room to do this they stole it from the lazarette. But I don't know that for sure.

The change in the Elco engine arrangement entered production right at the end of the war, and very few boats of this type were made. The restored Elco that's on display at Battleship Cove in Fall River, Mass. is one of these late boats; in fact I believe it was delivered just after the war ended.

The photo is from the Fall River boat and shows the starboard engine. In the majority of Elco boats, it would have faced the other way and been mounted farther aft with the V-drive forward.

In the V-drive configuration, the motor mac sat on a metal tractor seat bolted to the forward (bow) end of the inboard rocker box of the starboard engine. The long shift levers from all three transmissions were bent so that they all came up right next to him. The motor mac shifted the transmissions in response to an indicator panel in front of him. The skipper on the bridge operated the throttles, which also operated the shift indicators.

There were also sound powered phones, but the motor mac vets I talked to said you couldn't hear though them when the engines were running. Every one of them told me that after a mission--- the boats would go out at sunset and get back just before sunrise--- it took about half a day to get their hearing back. Every one of them I met said they'd been wearing hearing aids for decades. No OSHA back then......

Way more than you wanted to know, I'm sure, but I've got a whole office and two computers stuffed full of PT info and I've crawled around for hours on both types of boats, so there it is.

That's some seriously cool boat history.

Everybody-thanks for the info. A good bit of interesting history! Marin-the research must have been fascinating. A good thing you are doing it, there can't be too many living PT vets out there.

THD said:

Everybody-thanks for the info. A good bit of interesting history! Marin-the research must have been fascinating. A good thing you are doing it, there can't be too many living PT vets out there.

Click to expand...

No, there aren't now.

However, I'm not doing a history of PTs or PT vets or anything like that. There are actually several really good books on PT history already. I am writing about a specific mission that I learned about in Hawaii back in the 1970s from some of the crew members who were on the mission, which ended disasterously. Ever since hearing the basics of the story I've thought it would make a great book/movie.

After the book project I worked on through the 90s was published, I started writing up the PT story. But work and then a pair of books I was hired to write got in the way, and the PT story is not as far along as I'd hoped it would be by this point. Actually, I thought it would be finished but I'm only nine chapters in.

But the second hired-gun book project has just been published and I can get back to the PT story (when work gives me the time to write).

My research was all aimed at enabling me to write the story in the most accurate way possible, although at the rate I'm going there won't be any PT vets left alive to tell that I was wrong about something. But I'm a stickler for historical accuracy, so all the interviews and climbing around in restored PTs was well worth it, besides being flat out fascinating.

Example--- Did you know that JFK was a terrrible boat skipper, had the highest crew turnover rate of any PT skipper in the war, and was only prevented from being court martialled for his PT109 fiasco by the intervention of his famous, weathly and vey well-connected father? I didn't, until skippers who had been in his squdron told me what he was really like, and what actually happened on PT109.

A strange hull design I had never heard of.

The Russian Military Despises This Strange Wedge Shaped Spy Ship

Marin said:

Example--- Did you know that JFK was a terrrible boat skipper, had the highest crew turnover rate of any PT skipper in the war, and was only prevented from being court martialled for his PT109 fiasco by the intervention of his famous, weathly and vey well-connected father? I didn't, until skippers who had been in his squdron told me what he was really like, and what actually happened on PT109.

Click to expand...

Good TF Members:

Not meaning to hijack PT posts (as they are simply tooo cool of boat-hull designs and power sources – for which “Human-Insane” war filled results were originally planned)... but, due to the above quote, I feel it pertinent to interject the following tidbits.

Just imagine what really happened regarding "Bay of Pigs"... let your mind wander. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion

MOF... Just imagine what happens in "leaders" minds during most if not all of the Really Big Top End crisis’ points/decisions… throughout history. Especially those decisions/desires leading to or occurring during wars. Then imagine what shenanigans "leaders" pull off to get those "war" positions lined up and carried forth in the first place! I’d like to add into this that “promotional-hypnotism” and “black-flag” (i.e. blatant trickery) actions have always been a Big Part of what gets warring factions pitted against one another and persuades entire nations’ populations or races of people or religious denominations to get in place accomplishing to-the-death battle (i.e. killing/slaughtering one another by the thousands/millions!). These shenanigans to encourage and propagate wars are carried forth by not only government and military leaders, but, also by religious and big business and big finance leaders.

I leave the following for conjecture:

IMHO - in general: Our intelligent human race, when considered as a single living entity on Planet Earth, Is Blooming Insane!

A Definition of Insanity:

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Albert Einstein

Therefore I submit - Human Race’s never ending historic diatribe-like eruptions of life taking wars, pillaging, and basically "ones-up-man-ship" has always been and can only remain being carried forward via Human-Insanity!

Dear, TF Patrol Persons: With fullest respect and fondest thanks for all your do, I ask you to please not obliterate this post as its content is true and correct. However, I do ask you to place it as new thread of OTDE… if you feel so obliged. A partial quote from one of Marin’s posts in this thread regarding JFK, that is on the top of this post, simply got my neurotransmitters hot-firing on all cylinders… due to fact that I am in middle of multi-year national and international university led scientific/engineering debates that will reach a fulcrum deciding much of future for civilization. And, no, what I deal in at this time is not blood and guts war… but, if not handled correctly… it is near positive that wars will be one of the many outcomes. A portion of the dealings (people and organizations) I am required to work with or around do have strong factors resembling Human-Insanity described above.

Cheers! - Art

BaltimoreLurker said:

A strange hull design I had never heard of.

The Russian Military Despises This Strange Wedge Shaped Spy Ship

Click to expand...

Thanks, BL

Amazing Ship! - Built to keep handle on Human-Insanity that lead to wars.

Could be real good for all types of scientific peaceful research too!

Example--- Did you know that JFK was a terrrible boat skipper, had the highest crew turnover rate of any PT skipper in the war, and was only prevented from being court martialled for his PT109 fiasco by the intervention of his famous, weathly and vey well-connected father? I didn't, until skippers who had been in his squdron told me what he was really like, and what actually happened on PT109.

History repeats. He will not be the last a wealthy, well connected father keeps his son, a future President from being Court Martialled.
__________________

Interesting at least.
The wedge vessel.

Wedge shaped hulls tend to steer themselves usually in an undesirable direction. If you were to tip, lean or otherwise roll the wedge hull a bit it will take off in the direction it's leaning. Kayakers call it lean turning and they use it as a steering aid. I can steer Willy that way (to a degree) but a significantly wedged shaped hull is much more susseptable to the effects of "lean turning".

The leaning or rolling essence can come about by waves as the "draft" can change almost instantly from on side to the other. One would think WAY too much yawing would be the result of a big vessel shaped like this in rough waters. However active rudders like active stabilizers could tame the yawing but the forces to overcome would be IMO very large.

A trawler that may be susseptable to this yawing is the older Mainship 34 as they have a rather wedge shaped hull. Wonderful in a head sea though.

Was under the impression these landing craft were the most armed for their size.

Art said:

I am in middle of multi-year national and international university led scientific/engineering debates that will reach a fulcrum deciding much of future for civilization.

Click to expand...

That's a hell of a sentence.

Anchor testing?

Wish Art will send me a PM recommending where I should place/change my assets.

Northern Spy said:

That's a hell of a sentence.

Anchor testing?

Click to expand...

"Eco-Systemic"

Good guess though!

markpierce said:

Wish Art will send me a PM recommending where I should place/change my assets.

Click to expand...

Guidance along those lines tain't my bag! Money's Funny and Values can get Real Screwy!

markpierce said:

Was under the impression these landing craft were the most armed for their size.

Click to expand...

I'd have to look up if it was for their size or pound for pound. But including theatre modifications near the end of the war, the 80' Elco could be fitted with two twin-fifty caliber machine guns, a 40mm cannon on the aft deck, a 20mm cannon in front of the bridge, a 37mm cannon on the foredeck, two multi-tube rocket launchers, one on each side of the chartroom, four torpedoes, two depth charges, and two to four portable mortars.

I have photos of the boats set up this way at home, but here in Seoul the best I could find on the web to illustrate this setup is a picture of a model.

A local triple-engined boat for those who are interested:



3 identical VPP's (sorry, fisheye-lens-distortion), driven by V12 1225HP-engines:


bow view:

sorry, fisheye-lens again

I'm new here, hope inline-pictures are okay.

GeorgS said:

A local triple-engined boat for those who are interested:

3 identical VPP's (sorry, fisheye-lens-distortion), driven by V12 1225HP-engines:

Click to expand...

Thanks for posting pictures. That's lots of power. What cruise speed that boat travel? WOT speed??

Air Independent Propulsion, that's a new one on me!

Is This Jumbo Diesel Electric Submarine A True Nuclear Alternative?

That said, articles like this reinforce my conviction that Naval surface warfare is the past. Submarines and Targets, that's all that's going to be on/under the oceans.

Art said:

Thanks for posting pictures. That's lots of power. What cruise speed that boat travel? WOT speed??

Click to expand...

Sorry, don't know nothing about the cruise-speed, if called for service it will probably go WOT. WOT-speed is reported to be about 17/18 knots. The boat was built in the 1980-years behind the "Iron Curtain" in the former East-Germany. The engines ("12 KVD 21 AL 4" - 1225HP at 1500 rpm, V12 4stroke, turbocharged diesels) were also used in locomotives.
The boat was recently overhauled and it's firefighting equipment updated (with a Swedish cutting extinguishing-system), the fireboat is 40 meters long and it's displacement is reported to be about 250 tons.

A little fleet of moored, Dutch-built steel-cruisers:

This boat-type is called "Kotters" in the Netherlands.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Art

I am in middle of multi-year national and international university led scientific/engineering debates that will reach a fulcrum deciding much of future for civilization.



And to think I spend time pondering such trivial questions as whether to use nonfat or 2% in my latte in the am...I need to get a life.

HOLLYWOOD

Ok. For the PT boat fans. Check out our working one at
http://www.savetheptboatinc.com
Lots of great pics there.

It has 3 running packards I and a bunch of guys in a reserve unit pulled from a rotten PT at Camp Withecomb Oregon Military museum and saved in 1986. Those old PT guys found one to restore, worked their butts off for years, and it has been operating now for about 10 years. We led in the Rose Festival Fleet when it was ready - was awesome. Lots of those guys have passed away as the years keep flying by.

And one my favorite odd boats. A Soviet trawler with torpedo tubes. wonder why they tailed our carrier battle groups and with how nasty of torpedoes they had???suicide job if they had that mission.

http://www.sinodefenceforum.com/military-history/soviet-muna-class-trawlers-strange-case-6660.html

Dan

denloe1 said:

Ok. For the PT boat fans. Check out our working one at
PT Boat PT Boats PT658 - Save The PT Boat
Lots of great pics there.

Click to expand...

That's the boat my wife and I were invited to ride on some years ago, not long after they'd got it running. Some of the vets on that project were incredibly helpful with my research.