Warship Preservation (Formerly HMS Plymouth - Urgent Campaign)

Bring Hermes home to were she was built Here at Barrow , right on the edge of the lake district, what a tourist attraction , and loads of space to put her

 

1817 - 12 October
Trincomalee was launched amid great celebrations. The cost of her construction was £23,000. or £576,150.00 in today's money.

Looking superb today, and afloat!

Why is it Victory falling apart? Maybe re-floating her, in her dock, might be better than standing it on props?

 

I seem to recall an old shipwright stating that she should be afloat in moving sea water, something to do with oxygenation???

 

Addition, just googled Trincomalee yes, well remember her up the creek, as it were, but as the Foudrouyant

 

I've always known her as the Foudrouyant, and I thought she was a French prize ship, but as the Trincomalee, she's a real star again. I saw the Unicorn, and I was surprised to see she looked quite good and afloat. That would be 20 years ago. Victory has always been under repair, everytime I've seen her, so there can't be much left of the original ship.

 

This article makes for unsettling reading: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ear...-being-pulled-apart-under-its-own-weight.html
& this one in the Mail adds a bit: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...e-used-sailors-HMS-Victory-300-years-ago.html

Reading those, it looks as though at least **some** of Victory's problems have resulted from the assumption that new-fangled materials trump the traditional ones & have been compounded by a lack of understanding of how an 18th C. warship is put together.

The photo of the rotten beams in the Mail article are a classic example of timber rotting from the inside out. This tends to have a number of causes...

1 - The use of unseasoned timber that's then painted. This locks the moisture in & the core of the baulk turns to mush - just like a life-expired sleeper that looks fine until you step on it & disappear in a cloud of wasps.
2 - A leak that allows seasoned timber to get wet. If the leak is cured but the affected timber is still wet & can't breathe, then the same pattern of rot will happen.
3 - Oak + Steel. The natural tannins in oak attack steel & promote rust. Rust takes up something like 6 times the volume of the steel, so as it expands it splits the timber allowing water to get in...

Oak is vicious stuff & will make mincemeat of modern BZP screws - at Didcot we use stainless screws for pretty much everything C&W related these days, ditto for knee-brackets & scarf-plates.

Pete S.

 

Just as an aside, when the Trincomalee (ex Foudrouyant) was being restored, the HLF turned down an application for funds because she was actually built in India, at Bombay, iirc.