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Comment by breatheoften | Hacker News Reader

I used to do oceanographic research and for a time the group I was part of supported some science operations on the Healy — smaller coastguard icebreaker for use in the arctic that is also based in Seattle. Man I hated sailing on that ship compared to the smaller oceanographic vessels I was used to ... and only ever did short week long sea trials for testing on that ship ...

The polar star tho — that thing barely looked like it floated — mad respect to the people who keep that working and the amount of suffering that must involve ...

One of the things that was strange to me about the Healy was the crew rotation schedule — there was very little continuity of personnel with military design of all people must be on temporary assignments and therefore easily replaceable ... seems like they can’t possibly do that with a ship like the polar star where the deep ship specific knowledge _has_ to be on board ...?

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Would you mind describing why there was so much suffering involved? For an ignorant non-sailor, it is not obvious why that would be the case.

The constant stench of overflowing toilets could be one.

Not a sailor myself but a machine builder, however, I've worked with enough rustbuckets to imagine the pain.

On a new ship or machine, bearings are smooth. Fasteners are clean and crisply torqued, you break them free once with equal torque and subsequently can turn them out with your fingers. Hoses and wires are flexible and strong. Everything is at the beginning of its service life, and after a break-in period, likely has many years of trouble-free operation ahead.

The process for, say, installing a new gasket? 1. Turn the bolts loose with a ratchet and socket. 2. Remove old gasket. 3. Install new gasket. 4. Reinstall bolts, torquing to spec. Estimated time: 20 minutes.

Not so on an old girl.

Step 1. Wipe off the congealed grease and oil from leak above. Wire brush the paint and rust underneath so you can get the socket over the bolt head. Attempt to turn bolt loose. Get extension pipe for ratchet. Get impact driver. Apply heat with propane torch. Apply heat with oxyacetylene torch. Repeat escalation for each bolt, except #6 which breaks off in the blind hole, that will need to be drilled out and have a thread insert installed. 2. Maintenance used RTV silicone last time instead of gasket. Brush, scrape, and stone that silicone-covered, corrosion pitted surface to clean, flat metal. The more time you take here, the better the repair will be, but you're on your back in the dark instead of in the machine shop working on new metal. 3. Gasket not available commercially this time this time either, re-apply RTV silicone for the next guy to deal with (probably you). 4. Bolts are stretched from heat and corroded so don't thread in smoothly, heads rounded over, (and one broke), so buy new bolts, which still don't thread in because threaded holes are likewise corroded. Run tap into threaded holes, avoiding contamination of interior with metal chips. Reinstall bolts. Torque to spec, as if that would keep this thing from coming loose and leaking again in a couple months. Elapsed time: 4 hours.

And it needs service like,this all the time, because everything is at the end of its useful life.

It's a lot like working with a buggy and brittle legacy codebase instead of doing green-field development.

OT, but a good place to ask: are there any good sources (online or off) for a "0-60 farm repair primer"?

I feel one of the great holes in my education is as a mechanic, and while I've picked up a bit along the way, I still stumble across things (like making gaskets) that are well-known, just not by me.

Ideally, I'm looking for breadth-not-depth, with an emphasis on practical applications and tips / tricks.

You might submit this as an "Ask HN". Though subreddits such as /r/homesteading or /r/permaculture might be more appropriate.

Maybe try field repair or emergency fix bibles. I always find I’m learning interesting, slick new techniques to solve mechanical problems by survival methods.

ChuckE2009 on YouTube is a great place to start. https://www.youtube.com/user/ChuckE2009

Fair warning: he does veer into politics from time to time, but while I don’t agree with his political viewpoints, this guy knows his way around a welder.

I got blisters and skinned knuckles just reading that. Need a tetnus booster now too.

Ok, so it's like any other decades old piece of machinery. That doesn't mean it's impossible to run. I get that it's no 5-star hotel but it seems perfectly serviceable to me. The entire world is mostly like this. New and simple parts that go together easily are luxuries of trades school and high margin industries.

Busted mower in your suburban backyard 15 minutes from the big box and a failed main prop seal or incinerator fire 13,000 miles from home port in heavy pack ice are not directly comparable.

Some endeavours warrant high capitalisation and well-within-service-life equipment.

I'm talking industrial machinery, like stuff in paper mills and manufacturing facilities where downtime is highly uneconomical.

A lot of times that stuff gets run long beyond its useful life because new machinery cannot be rationalized for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this comment. You can do it and still have an overall reliable operation. You just can't make assumptions about your equipment running perfectly all the time when you plan out the policies and procedures for the rest of your operation. Sure, you'll have people like the author, the person I'm replying to and you who will be complaining their butts off about clapped out equipment every step of the way but if your operation is designed to roll with the punches then at the end of the day you'll be 99% as capable as the people with new equipment who rely on that instead of being able to roll with it and fix things fast.

Take your assumptions and gate-keeping and shove them somewhere unpleasant.

Again: the middle, or extreme edge, of an ocean is a desolately lonely place. Lives, not merely money, hang in the balance.

>Sure, you'll have people like the author, the person I'm replying to and you who will be complaining their butts off about clapped out equipment every step of the way but if your operation is designed to roll with the punches then at the end of the day you'll be 99% as capable as the people with new equipment who rely on that instead of being able to roll with it and fix things fast.

Must like in software, the people doing the work and the people who choose what work is done and with what budget are almost separate circles on a Venn diagram.

Please, as a wise man once said, take your assumptions and gate-keeping and shove them somewhere unpleasant.

I have been told that Ice Breakers make for uncomfortable ocean voyages because of the design compromises need to break ice.

They don't so much smash ice with the bow of the vessel but instead use their powerful engines to push the ship onto the ice, which then breaks under the weight of the ship.

This means they require a relatively flat bottomed hull, which doesn't make for a nice ride in blue water with swell.

Newer designs travel through the ice in reverse so that more suitable bows for oceans voyages can be used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_acting_ship

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