This past week the 30,000 gallon tank containing Monitor’s steam engine was drained for a key milestone in the conservation of this unique artifact. The purpose for the tank drain was the installation of a new support system under the engine that will enable the eventual disassembly of  the object.  Up to this week, the engine which [...]

    After a successful season of hands on work removing concretion from the Monitor’s Turret, conservators have cleaned the tank fitted anodes for electrolytic reduction, and added 90,000 gallons of water purified by reverse osmosis.   When the electrolyte had been added, everything was ready to begin active desalination and start the process of removing [...]

This is our 100th post, and it’s an important one!  The Virginia Collections Initiative in conjunction with the Virginia Association of Museums is once again generating its list of “Virginia’s Top Ten Endangered Artifacts”.  http://www.vatop10artifacts.org/ USS Monitor‘s revolving gun turret is on the list of nominees for 2011, and we hope to be selected for [...]

After the removal of remaining roof stanchions on the turret (see previous post below), conservation staff shifted their work efforts to its interior.  Over the last several weeks we have been using an assortment of pneumatic and other hand tools to remove remaining concretion and loose corrosion products embedded in between the roof rails and [...]

The Mariners’ Museum and Monitor Conservation Project were fortunate to attract the attention of John Tierney and the New York Times.  John visited the museum on two recent occasions and published an article about the Monitor in the NY Times on August 8.  The article coincides with the 150th anniversary of the publication (in the NY [...]

It was Friday afternoon and Conservator Elsa Sangouard did not say a word; she didn’t have to say anything.  Her smile told the whole story.  Elsa and Gary Paden, the Objects Handler for the USS Monitor Conservation Project, had just successfully removed a beautiful and shiny copper alloy tallow cup from Monitor’s 25-ton steam engine [...]

Time flies… the last blog update about the wool coat was April 30th of 2010! Since then, a significant part of the garment’s conservation treatment was completed. The coat is now clean, dry and thoroughly documented! Prior to freeze-drying, each one of the 138 pieces of wool were drawn for the record as well as [...]

It’s not often that we take group pictures here but the engine work created the occasion. So here is the team before we started touching the engine: From left to right: Will, Mike, Dave, Gary, Elsa and Tina. Eric was off that day so below is another one where he actually was the center of [...]

We are wrapping up our second week of deconcretion in the engine tank.  It was a particulary exciting week because we continued to expose more original surfaces of the engine.   This may sound silly, but the engine is starting to look more like an engine!  In addition to deconcretion, we also began planning for our [...]

Much work has been carried out on the object along with several interesting discoveries since the initial blog post about the artifact on March 15, 2010. The best thought at the current time is that the artifact is some kind of swing valve. After several weeks of the object having gone through electrolytic reduction, the [...]