Canister!
Posts have been spare ’round these parts lately, in large part because I’ve been distracted by other things over the last few months. In addition to wrapping up the blockade running book, I’ve got some other projects going on that I’ve been focused on. One of the minor ones is reconstructing the sidewheel from the British paddle steamer Cornubia (above), that was a notable blockade runner on the Atlantic coast before being taken into the U.S. Navy and used as a gunboat on the blockade off Galveston. Cornubia was part of what Commodore Sands called “the closing act of the great rebellion.” More images of the wheel here. Hopefully this will end up with a digital model of the entire ship sometime down the road. Past projects include the runners Denbigh and Will o’ the Wisp, and the blockader Hatteras. More items that don’t warrant a full post:
- Cops in Cary, North Carolina are hot on the trail of a tagger who’s been writing “booger” all over town. Unnamed police sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, say Dr. Johnny Fever “is not a suspect at this time.”
- The white nationalist League of the South’s new “SECEDE!” billboard in Montgomery, Alabama was taken down by the billboard company after receiving complaints. League President Michael Hill, who recently called on “Mr. & Mrs. White Southerner” to take a stand against “blacks, Hispanics, Jews, etc.“, demands to know if Montgomery has become “Stalin’s Russia.” It fact, it’s quite the opposite — it’s the invisible hand of the free market, dumbass.
- Speaking of Southern nationalism, I see that Michael Cushman of the Southern Nationalist Network recently took the surname O’Neil. Congrats on the nuptials, Michael!
- NPR had a story the other day on why it’s so hard to cut the Pentagon budget. As it turns out, it’s not always the generals that are the problem.
- A candidate for governor in Illinois is taking heat because he shook hands with a man wearing a jacket with a Confederate flag patch on the sleeve. That’s about as dumb as the time someone from Buzzfeed tweeted that Mitt Romney’s motorcade drove past a Confederate flag. Get some perspective, folks.
- Over at Defending the Heritage, Robert Mestas calls on Lexington to “bring back the flags” with an historic “then and now” image of the town that includes no Confederate flags. Do’oh!
Got anything else? Put it in the comments below.
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Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog 
This is almost totally off topic, but I thought I’d ask: as far as engineering, how did 19th century shipbuilders in your part of the world decide between side-wheelers or stern-wheelers? In other words, did they make the decision to build one or the other based on local conditions?
I ask because here in Oregon, they started with side-wheelers, but quickly switched to building stern-wheelers exclusively because the Columbia (and to a lesser extent the Willamette) was such a rough river, with plenty of fierce rapids, that it demanded power near the rudder, not amidships. (BTW, I am aware that the Mississippi was a “wicked river”, so I’m not trying to one-up with Columbia.) I’m no engineer, but local environmental conditions and the dictates they make on builders has always fascinated me.
Let me address this in a post in more detail.
Nice reconstruction. I’m guessing that pivot and connecting rod arrangement was to automatically alter the angle at which the blade met the water?
As for the A-10 controversy, I’m pretty skeptical about the whole “Flying Swiss Army Knife” approach, even if the Warthog is getting obsolete. (Of course, I think the era of manned aircraft is fast coming to an end, too.)
Yes, the feathering ring turned freely on a hub affixed to the outboard frame around the wheel. The ring was rotated by the paddlewheel itself, by means of a fixed, “driving arm” attached on one of the floats. The rest of the feathering rods were jointed. The end result is that each float (paddle) enters and exits the water a little more efficiently as the wheel goes round. Improves overall efficiency by about 15% IIRC, although that’s at the cost of fitting and maintaining a fairly complex wheel. It was never much used in the United States.
More detailed explanation here:
http://nautarch.tamu.edu/PROJECTS/denbigh/WHEEL.HTM
Thanks for the link. These little details of construction are always fascinating. (Well, to me, anyway.) That’s a very clever arrangement, letting gravity and geometry do the work of keeping the float perpendicular when it’s in the water. I have to admit, even with the help of that article, I’m such a dunce at engineering that it took me a while to figure out how the fixed arm works in relation to the others. Very cool, though I see what you mean about initial costs and maintenance. Plus, I imagine this would have been major fun to try to repair in a heavy sea.
An animated model would help a lot in showing how the whole thing worked, but I need to figure out how to do one of those with linked motion.
To quote Ron White….”You can’t fix stupid !”
Lots of it around, really.