Kyle gave me a tour of the engine room today. This is the thruster room. The Knorr has a diesel-electic setup. The diesel motors generate elecricity, which in turn powers the electric motors that drive the thrusters. The shaft behind the grating is turning a little over 100 rpm. Gears direct the power down to the thrusters. The thrusters can rotate to face any direction. Three hydraulic motors rotate each thruster. We can see one of the motors. Kyle has spent the cruise painting the thruster room the bright blue color of the grating. The second picture is of one of the electric motors. It's big. The clear panel is used by the oilers to inspect the brushes; we could see lots of little arcs.
Here we're clambering down to the engine room level. To the right of the stairway is the workshop and to the left is the engine room. The workshop has a lathe, milling machine, drill press, all sorts of welding and cutting torches, and spare fittings for nearly everyything. Kyle says he's never been on a ship with more spare parts, and figures that they could make pretty much anything they might need. In the third picture we're walking into the engine room. It's hot and noisy in there. Everything is pretty spotless and covered in insulation . Immediately inside and to the right are a bunch of valves for controlling fuel tanks. A "day tank" feeds the engines, so they move fuel into that tank from the various other tanks scattered about the ship. They have two fuel filters that get cleaned every other day, one of which is in the foreground.
Here are the engines. The Knorr has three big ones and one small. The bigs are 16 cylinders, the small is 8. The bank of three in the fourth picture are the bigs. At the time they were running two bigs and a small. Throughout the cruise they tried to run a big and a small to conserve fuel, though at times they used two bigs.
This is the control room where the engineers hang out. Pete made a special point to say that here they have ultimate control over the engines and thrusters. They can override the bridge if the bridge abuses the power that they are given by the engineers. They monitor the rpms of the thrusters and engines. We've burned over 100,000 gallons of fuel so far. It will cost over 500,000 dollars to refuel in Valparaiso. When I walked into the control room Pete, the second engineer, was sitting in a corner. Kyle said that I could take a picture of "the engineer." Pete said that I could not take a picture of "the engineer." Jack, the first engineer, asked if Kyle was giving me the 5 or the 25 cent tour. Kyle pointed out that they're using one of my pictures as a background on their computer.
