Month: December 2022

12/12

Final week of this internship! Despite being done with INSURV there was lots to do around the ship, many of which included cleaning up and reorganizing after the inspection. As the ship is going to be in port until the new year we took off the CTD and put it on the dock, where it will get taken away to have all its sensors calibrated. Most of the sensors need a calibration every year or every other year, and with the calibration log I worked on earlier in this internship it was clear all the sensors onboard needed calibration. 

The engineers are working on a project of their own, rebuilding one of the engines. This doesn’t overlap with the technicians at all, apart from needing to open a hatch on the starboard side deck. The hatch in question happens to be underneath the tracks for the CTD cart. So this meant for us, once we offloaded the CTD we started work on doing all the bolts for the track pieces that cover the hatch. Luckily the whole thing didn’t have to come apart, and we could get away with removing only about half of the track. 

This made for a great opportunity to pull off the gaskets beneath the tracks, they were extremely gross and caked with salt deposits, so one of my tasks of the day was scrubbing these gaskets.

My scrubbing was interrupted in the afternoon however, because of a small operation to bring the ship port-side into the dock. This was done to make life easier for the divers who were diving on the sea chest on the port side. Now, the ship can dock on either side, but they really prefer the starboard side as the decks have been designed with that in mind. This just meant for me, I had a very interesting time running the fiber internet cable from the connection on the starboard side all the way up to the focsle deck and over to the port side. Where there is a will (and enough velcro) there is a way, and soon the internet was restored! The ship will stay docked in this position while the divers complete their work over the next few weeks. 

12/13

Tuesday I finished scrubbing the gaskets for the CTD track, and I also re-labeled them so hopefully whoever has to resemble them has an easier time. After working in the morning on the gaskets, the deck crew was ready to bring on our wire baskets containing all the things we took off for the inspection, and the rest of the technician’s day was devoted to unloading the wire baskets and re-organizing everything in the hold. This proved a much more difficult task than taking everything off the ship, as we put everything back on we really tried to figure out exactly what it was, and if it was a back up that we needed to bring with us at all times. We were able to purge some extraneous equipment, but with the equipment we kept we labeled it obsessively and organized it much better than it had been. Part of being a technician aboard a ship like this, I’m learning, is keeping track of your processes and logging what you do, because you’re not on the ship all the time, the other technicians need to be able to figure out what you did during your time here.

12/14

The weather has gotten much chillier these past few days, but I found a great way of warming up, also an important one, cleaning all the hardware for the CTD track. This track is exposed on the deck to the elements and I believe the technician said it had been taken apart last year, only a year later it is already caked with salt and corrosion, as you would expect. My great task was standing over a sink running very hot water to clean all of the bolts and plates used to secure the track to the deck. This allowed me to stay in the relative warmth of the wet lab over a nice steaming bucket of bolts. Most bolts only needed cleaning with a wire brush, but some plates used to keep the track together needed some extra care with a wire wheel attachment on a drill.

Cleaning these little pieces took up most of my day, until we were informed about a delivery of a new lithium cabinet. This cabinet was deemed necessary by the Shoreside people as we have many tools that use lithium batteries. The battery containment unit is on wheels, but if you’ve been reading this blog you know that this ship rocks quite a bit, so a good part of the cabinets design is that it is intended to be able to put fires out on its own. As I understand it, the battery is placed inside the cabinet where the fire suppression system keeps it at bay. Of course, hopefully we never need to find out!

12/15

Thursday began very windy and rainy which was unfortunate for the new printers that have been delivered to the ship. They were out of their boxes already but wrapped with shrink wrap, so we believe not too much water got in, however these new printers are not the ship board technicians job to install. As I understand it Shoreside support will send people to install the printers, leaving us free to pursue other tasks today.

Emily and I moved on to removing some plumbing from the port side and contaminated sea water pump, which is all the way up in the bow thruster room. The corrosion on the plumbing for this pump was quite severe, and it took both of us to pry the pieces in question off. Once we got the pieces off, we sent them down to the deck crew for needle gunning and painting.

The next task of the day was taking apart the motor for the CTD track, which had suffered the same fate as the track itself (very corroded). An interesting detail about this motor is it appears to have as many as three different types of metal used on it, one of them being aluminum. We did finally get the motor apart from the driving gear, and the pictures will tell you how difficult it was!

12/16

Here we are at last, the final day of this internship. Unfortunately for you readers, it wasn’t the most thrilling of days, finishing up an internship like this has a lot of paperwork involved. Luckily it was a rainy day and no one was working outside anyways.

I want to thank everyone who has been reading this blog, and keeping up with my adventures! This internship has meant so much more to me than I could’ve imagined two months ago.

As I wrap this blog up, I can now say that part of the reason I had so much paperwork to do on Friday was not only the combination of the internship’s paperwork, but also I began the process of new employee paperwork! I feel so lucky and privileged to say that Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has hired me on as a casual technician for the Armstrong. This will allow me to train with this ship’s systems a whole lot more and I will be joining them on a few cruises in the 2023 schedule. While I won’t be blogging those experiences, this internship has definitely reinforced the importance of noting everything that I’m doing, because the time really does fly!

12/5 

We began the week with three days left until the INSURV inspection, and everyone was running in high gear! In the morning I added the final coats of paint to the bullseye on the platform and Emily and I started working on fixing the gaskets for the CTD platform track. The track goes over several deck plates and hatches, and the gasket eventually gets displaced as the ship rocks. Putting it back into place just meant undoing the bolts holding the track, and (professionally) shoving the gasket back under. This also gave us an opportunity to work on the track itself, grinding down any corrosion and aligning the track pieces better. This, along with the motor rebuild Emily did last week means the CTD cart has never moved smoother! 

As rain came in for the afternoon, I shadowed Sonia as she updated any out of date workstations, which can be a delicate process for some machines that operate a specific version of Windows or Ubuntu. This is not a quick project so we busied ourselves with other minor projects for the rest of the afternoon while also babysitting the computers.

The weekend had a slight glum, after the cold weather and only short trips around town my car was dead! We went to the front desk of the Smith Laboratories to borrow a work truck to jumper it and the security guard there said “I’ll do you one better” Thanks!

12/6

The rain continued into Tuesday so we all continued inside projects, most of which included continuing computer updates and cleaning, yay! I worked off and on between checking for security updates on computers to cleaning down in the transducer room. The transducer room is vast so some deckies were cleaning down there also. They painted and dusted while I cleaned off all the tops of the transducers and transducer equipment, and also scraped off tons of excess masking tape on pipes. 

The big success of the day was removing the tape from the CTD platform, finally revealing my masterpiece, the bullseye!

This process was challenging for me technically to combine all my skills recreating the pieces and fitting them together, and then artistically painting the bullseye in Rustoleum so that it could be seen from the winch operator’s booth (since that’s who this is for, so the winch operators have something to aim for). Overall I think it came out great, and it gives everyone a laugh when they walk by!

We finished the day at the tech’s weekly meeting in person, where everyone wished us luck on the upcoming inspection. 

12/7

Final day before INSURV! The morning started with meetings for the SSSGs and then frantically finishing up all projects. For me this included a final round of cleaning in the labs and staring hard at all the SSSG spaces, trying to find things that had been missed. The crew worked so hard preparing for this inspection, the ship is looking spotless! 

I fine tuned my little bolt cover for the CTD, as the last one was too small by about 0.5 mm. This proved an exercise in frustration as the 3D printer decided for half my prints to stick, and half of them to unstick part way through. The machine cant be blamed for this (as much as I’d like to) and it just keeps printing as if nothing happened, leaving you with a wonderful ball of filament spaghetti in the end. Eventually I printed enough good ones to attach. 

12/8

Everyone woke early for even more last-minute preparations, but before we knew it, we had almost twenty Navy guys onboard setting up in the mainlab. In the briefing before we set out from the dock the Navy commander gave us a run down of which departments would work with which inspectors. They also explained that this team solely does inspections, moving around the country doing all the Navy ships. The techs were assigned one inspector who specialized in IT and the process began! 

We departed the dock at the 1030 slack tide, with plans to steam down into Vineyard sound for the propulsion tests. The INSURV inspector followed us around as Emily and Sonia explained how the network is set up onboard and answered his questions about the servers and router(s). It was very interesting to hear him compare the Armstrong to other Navy ships, we must seem tiny! The Navy guys were especially impressed with the food, complementing the stewards endlessly. The tech inspection finished quickly after he checked out all the server racks and printers, then we were free to lay low until our next test. 

After lunch the techs gathered back for a CTD cast, which was quite short because we were only in about 25 meters of water. The goal was just to demonstrate the operation of the LARS arm that deployed the CTD, and this was also a test for the termination I did, luckily the CTD operated well and my termination held! (losing the CTD in front of the Navy might have been the subject of my nightmares)

This concluded the inspection for the techs, and we got to relax a bit while the deck crew did more operations on the way back for slack tide at 1545. After buttoning everything up for the night, it was time to get some rest for the last part of the inspection tomorrow!

12/9

The INSURV team was back bright and early, continuing with the rest of the engineering checks at the dock. The techs hung out for any questions that might come up, but the only ones were helping the team connect to the wifi. The team then left before lunch without much fanfare, but during the crew debrief we were told just how well we scored and then the celebrations began. Overall the Navy sounded very impressed with the ship and especially the crew! 

I spent the afternoon fixing the only thing the tech department got dinged on, which was missing screws from the server racks, and easy fix. I then moved onto investigating an ethernet cable that had stopped transmitting, apart from the crusty corrosion on the termination, another bad sign was when I cut the cable and water started dripping out. Sonia helped me to find a replacement cable to run and I re-terminated the end to fit where it needed to. While we aren’t sure how the water got in the cable, the sun was setting and I lost the light to finish the project. 

Weekend plans no longer include a short cruise, as the wave conditions were forecasted to be rough. This just means we have a more relaxed window to set back up after INSURV. Another disappointing note is we wont be installing the new ADCP transducer this week either. While we had the transducer itself onboard, the parts for the elevator needed to lower it through the sea chest are not ready yet, so the project has been tentatively moved to February. I am disappointed of course, this install promised to be a great learning experience involving multiple departments onboard, working together to install a transducer without taking the ship to dry-dock. However I know Emily has other projects we can dive into this coming week! 

This by no means leaves us bereft of projects for this last week! INSURV gave us an opportunity to purge and clean, and this has unearthed several projects to keep me nice and occupied. 

11/28

    We woke after the Thanksgiving holiday with a full crew again and lots of things to do! The techs first task was to test the .322 cable used for the CTD. This testing involved the use of a Megger instrument to test each wire within the cable for insulation resistance and a few other things.

The insulation resistance (as the name implies) measures how well insulated the wire in question is, and this mainly tells us how damaged each wire is. The techs test the cable before and after cutting it each time for re-termination, and the results compared to each other are how they gauge the health of the cable. A high insulation resistance reading means the cable is performing well, and a low reading (especially compared to a previous reading) means its probably time to re-terminate. 

    The techs re-terminate this highly-used cable about every six months or so, so when our readings were complete and to no one’s surprise, the numbers were a bit low, Sonia handed me the angle grinder and had me cut the cable. 

(The new end, taped up and ready for re-termination later this week!)

    We then all moved onto one of the biggest tasks, removing the hatch from the science hold to empty the space of all the SSSG equipment. The hatch was unbolted and wire baskets were lowered down!

We ended up filling five baskets with secondary and backup equipment! It took most of the afternoon but in the end it was great to get this task done at the beginning of the week while we were very motivated! 

11/29

    The weather prevented some outdoor operations, so we worked on inside projects like securing the cable runs in each lab space and taking down even more unnecessary runs. 

    The biggest excitement of the day was a run to Home Depot! Sonia and I used one of the WHOI trucks available to employees, (since the plywood we needed definitely wouldn’t fit in my car) and drove up to get some 2x4s and sheets of plywood to build a new platform for the CTD cart. Construction on that project will begin tomorrow!

11/30

    I began the long process of cutting all the pieces for the new platform. I use the term long, not because I had trouble cutting all the pieces out, but because all the pieces had to be fitted to their individual spots on the cart frame as I discovered none were interchangeable. Once I had all the pieces cut out I used an orbital sander to fine-tune the pieces and bevel the edges to fit close to the frame’s weld seams. This maybe was not the ‘proper’ tool for the job but with the roughest grit sandpaper I could make sure each piece fit perfectly without hefting a large saw around. 

    During the day most of the crew was occupied for an ABS (American Bureau of Shipping) inspection, the first inspection group to start our battery of inspections in the coming week. To stay out of their way we fitted all the pieces of the cart in and screwed them down, before adding the plywood and ensuring the new platform was stable. Unfortunately we had to take the platform apart for the next step in my process, paint!

12/1

    Today’s inspection was from the Coast Guard, so the techs again tried to stay out of the way by spending the morning securing more cable runs. If this sounds repetitive by now just remember I can only cut so many zip ties in a day before needing to move on to another project! Also you might be shocked at the sheer amount of cabling on a ship! 

    On a lighter note I was given a full tutorial on how to access the 3D printer onboard wirelessly and also spent time today fine-tuning my designs for parts the engineers wanted us to print. These were the outlet covers and end caps, and after a few re-designs I had two functional parts that can now be printed on-demand when they are noticed to be missing. 

    The only part of the inspection the techs were expected to participate in were the drills, these being a fire and an abandon ship drill. As we have practiced before, at the sound of the alarm we gathered our immersion suits (no one needed to put any on this time, thankfully) and life jackets and mustered ourselves in the main lab. A key to mustering for a drill is (in colder months) DRESSING FOR THE WEATHER OUTSIDE. When I got onboard it was stressed heavily in a real emergency at cold temperatures, evacuating in flimsy clothes and then freezing to death anyways was not the goal. The coast guard in a debrief later praised us all for being so prepared. 

    After the drill I embarked on the final step of the new CTD platform, the paint! This is an attempt to keep the platform from degrading with the repeated saltwater it gets on it. I say attempt here because we all know trying to keep saltwater out of places to prevent rot or rust is almost always an exercise in futility. In the spirit of trying to keep the wood from turning green and rotting beneath the CTD the techs told me to try painting it to seal it a bit more. After some research we learned that some types of paint we already had onboard, namely the Rustoleum, could also be used on wood! 

    This led us to conclude that the easiest and most efficient way of getting this platform done was to use that paint. I began by giving the plywood a light sanding with my friend the orbital sander, and going over the boards with a cloth to sweep all the dust away. I then covered both sides of each board with the Rustoleum primer, leaving them to dry for more paint tomorrow!

12/2

    Happy Friday! Thankfully we didn’t have any inspections today so I jumped right in with the first coat of white on the platform boards. I was told to let this dry for longer as the paint interacts with its primer and the interaction could be interesting because it was on wood. 

    Emily and I then moved on to one of the biggest tasks of this internship, learning that all-important skill of CTD cable terminating! We peeled back the layers of the cable, starting with the shielding layers that also act as ground, taking them back about two feet to have enough of the wires to work with. The cable has two layers of steel shielding which also acts as the cable’s ground, so two strands of this were preserved for attaching to the green ground plug. From here was standard wire terminating, stripping the wire, and blending the wire from the cable into the wire to its respective plug.

Emily then got down to showing me how to solder the wires together without burning the casing, then running layers of self-fusing tape, before adding final layers of vinyl electrical tape. This is done for all three wires encased within the CTD cable, then we added the ground connection which didn’t require soldering. All 4 of these new connections were wrapped with even more tape to attempt to keep as much water out as possible. 

    Both techs stressed that terminating this cable is something done often onboard research vessels, and every tech will have their own way of doing it. 

    We finished up the termination and celebrated! Many people were going home for the weekend so the next few days will be focused on indoor projects and organization.