As mentioned on July 8th, several unsuccessful attempts in the removal of the wheels led us to plan B: Disassemble the side plates by removal about 30 bolts… Fortunately, we have not had to remove every single bolt (yet), but by using Ridgid screw extractors we’ve made a great start! Removing only the bolts around the wheels released enough pressure to get us back to plan A (push and pull the wheels out).
Enjoy the following photos from last week’s work.
Photo 1 (left): Pushing the front inboard wheel down with a hydraulic jack. A gap opened between the wood and the iron plate. Photo 2 (right): The wheel finally separated – the 2-inch thick grey part visible on the wheel used to be against the iron plate.
Photo 3: The carriage was elevated on sawhorses to attempt pulling out the wheel. Cleaning around the wheel with various small tools and water helped free the wheel.
Photo 4: Having cleaned the interstices surrounding the wheel as much as possible, we installed the jack straight under the wheel to pull it.
Photo 5: Pumping up the jack, hoping that the wheel will move down (and not the clamp and its protective rubber padding).
Photo 6: The tension is fairly high… we’ve been working all day on this wheel.
Photo 7: OK, it is working; the wheel is moving down slowly but steadily. Now we tied a strap under it so that Gary’s hands are not the only support under the wheel when it drops free.
Photo 8: Here it is, a magnificent 80-pound piece, 10 inches in diameter and 4 inches thick. This process was repeated three more times for this carriage, resulting in the removal of 320lbs of copper alloy wheels!!!
3 Comments
Wow, that is amazing! That gun carriage looks pretty solid, hard to believe it’s been in the ocean for more than a hundred years. What kind of tools have you been using to disassemble the carriage? Do they make special conservation tools so that you have enough force to remove things but not too much force to damage the artifact?
Hi Jason!
There are no “conservation tools” on the market for “gun carriage disassembly”… unfortunately. Gary custom built the set up you can see in the pictures to push and pull the wheels from the carriage. Also, some of the bolts were fairly easy to remove, but about a third of them were so well embedded that we had to use easy outs (Ridgid #5). They worked quite well. But we actually broke a few tools in the past weeks and you can see one of them still stuck in a bolt in the second picture (next to the wheel). It is a tricky balance to use the proper amount of force to remove or disassemble something without causing harm to the artifact. But the reality of marine artifact disassembly is that many tools are “consumable” for us, and in some situations we have to fabricate our own rigs.
Nice job and awesome photos. Elsa, nice to see you are right in there with Gary “The Man” I wonder when was the last time these wheels saw the light of day? Hope you guys still sometimes stop to reflect that these wheels carried the weight of the gun as it was pulled into action back in 3/9/1862. Very cool stuff.
Fran