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PT Boats of WWII
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PT Boats - General
Post a reply to: ELCO Exhaust System
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[StartQuote] The butterflies were manually controlled in the engine room. On our boat, the helmsman (me) was supposed to sound a long blast on the engineroom horn to signal to open or cdlose the mufflers. It was easy to forget during emergency actions. The throttles controlled from the bridge the signals for the MotorMac to shift gears just like large ships. Once in forward gear, the throttles controlled the forward speed. Sometimes, the helmsman would signal for forward gear and then immediately shove the throttles forward, racing the engine in neutral. This required the MotorMac to yank back the throttle and get the engine into gear. Neat trick but very dangrerous. MotorMacs were important during fast actions. They were responsible for the gears and watching the temperatures and other meters. Each engine had an overspeed cutout that prevented the engine from running away and they carefully monitored that (even occasionally held their finger on it to prevent cutout in real escape scenarios.). When maneuvering or docking, they had their hands full attending to the bridge signals to shift rapidly. Interesting note: Since you could only operate the speed of the boat with the throttles in the forward position, the speed in reverse was restricted to engine idle speed and power. Several times we needed horsepower in reverse, like trying to back off a sandbar. Altho we were advised that it would damage the gearbox, we had to manually arrange with the MotorMac to ignore our bridge signals and to leave the engines in reverse. Then we could move the throttles into forward acceleration and apply power to the props turning in reverse. At first, we only useed this method in emergency but later did it occasionally just to come roarig to our buoy or doch and slam it into powered reverse to make a spectacular stop. We were pretty good at this altho it raised the skipper's hair a bit. [EndQuote]
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