# Replacing the Economizer



## jamesgpobog (Feb 18, 2012)

Another one of my sea stories...


Replacing the Economizer

It was very soon after I had reported on board, probably just a matter of a day or two, that B division embarked on a rather amazing repair job to one of the boilers, a Babcock & Wilcox 450lb sectional header (“K”) type.

Before I had come on board, the economizer on #3 (starboard aft) boiler had gone bad. The project to replace it went to Chief Wassom, that never-smiling (seemingly) old man who was all of 30. Under his direction, the old economizer had been cut out, but then had to be removed from the boiler room and the new one brought in and installed. I don’t know how the old one was taken out, if it went in one piece, or was cut up, but I do know that the new one was about eight feet long, close to three feet wide, five to five and a half feet tall, and weighed about ¾ of a ton. Think of a giant steel multi row car radiator. This thing was big and heavy.

Chief rounded up all the grunts in the division, probably 12-15 of us and that’s when I realized…”He wants us to carry this damn thing!” It gets even better….it was stowed in a wooden crate up on the 03 deck next to the smokestack, and it needed to get four decks down into the boiler room.

I did not think it was going to be possible and someone was going to get hurt or killed moving the monster. Chief obviously thought otherwise.

So, we began, everyone grabbing where they could, pushing, pulling, and manhandling the brute as best we could. I don’t know how we did it, but we actually moved it down two very steep ladders (open stairways) completely by manpower alone. That brought us to the point where we had to move it inside the ship, up until now it had all been work out on deck.

It had to come inside, go down one more deck, move into the boiler room, and then be maneuvered onto the boiler. Chief had actually planned the move pretty well and several holes had been cut in the bulkheads (walls), a ladder cut out, and pulleys rigged in several places. We still had to push and pull it around, but once it got inside it actually was easier to move around and it was placed on the boiler ready to be hooked up without anyone getting hurt. The whole project only took a few hours too. I’m sure building the Pyramids was harder, but back then it felt pretty darn close to the same thing for me.


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