[billnchristy]

A couple stories from my time at MTG (maintenance training group) at NPTU Ballston Spa. MTG was basically shipyard for the prototypes and while there was a civilian, union shipyard group on board, they only wanted the glamorous jobs and if a job sucked they would bid it through the roof so we would get it. We spent a lot of time in the reactor compartments of MARF and a lot of valve repacks on nuclear and non-nuclear valves. Occasionally we would get some cool jobs too.

One was a condensate pump rebuild on MARF, which had a WWII surface ship engine room. I'm not sure what class it was, but it was wild seeing pumps and turbines from 1943 in operation. We rebuilt the pump in question, which like I stated, had a 1943 build tag and had moved on to the laser alignment portion of the package. The package stated to align the shaft with 5 thousandths runout and we spent the entire day trying. I think the best we got was in the 20s. We finally had to bring the package back to engineering and get them to revise the runout number as there was no way in hell a 60 year old (at the time) pump was going to have that kind of number!

Another cool job was lapping and aligning the poppets on the main engine. They have a sort of cammed valve system that opens sequentially, as the first one is opening the second cracks and so on down the line, I believe there were 7 and they were basically just big globe valve discs on a cam connected to the throttles.

They had shims that set their closing force and after the valves and seats were nice and clean we had to make sure they all shut properly. The package spec'd a metal type, can't remember the number, it was just in there with whatever the mil-spec was. The machinists found a chunk of it in our metal storage container and proceeded to use their band saw to cut the rough shims and then would grind them down to the thickness required.

We were in the plant waiting for a long time and finally gave up when we realized we weren't getting the shims right away as promised. We went back to the shop to check on the progress and the machinist was like "Man, I don't know what this shit is but I've broken 7 blades trying to cut it and I have one piece ready". We might have needed several shims for each so knew this was not going to work.

We went to the engineer with the Machinist in tow and asked what the hell the material was. The engineer clacked away on his computer for a minute and muttered something like "oh shit". It was battleship armor! We quickly got an exception and used a normal shim material instead.

I got to see the chunk we had of it and it was an impressive piece, almost like a brick or paver tile, maybe 8" square and about 3" thick and heavy as hell. I think that poor bastard would probably still be cutting if we didn't get the package changed!

Another good one was changing a condensate pump in S8G. They were on like a mid level off to the side of the upper level. The shipyard had a Russian guy that had defected during the cold war. He got his family out to somewhere in Europe and eventually walked his way to freedom, probably with many encounters he would not talk about. He was a pretty secretive dude but he knew submarines and was a hell of a mechanic. The bolts holding the pump impeller to the motor housing were torqued to 600ft lbs and this was the first time the pump was being changed so they had been there a while (decades). We had cheater bars, we were putting our backs against the other pumps and trying to use our legs to break the bolts free, we tried everything and could not get them to budge. The Russian guy was walking by and saw us struggling. He watched us for a while and eventually came down the ladder. He motioned us to get up, rolled up his sleeve and loosened the bolts one by one with one damn arm! He handed us our wrench and said "You are girls" and walked off.