You are currently browsing the daily archive for October 16, 2009.
A steam engine seems like the perfect antidote to dark dreary mid-October; last night leaving work I scrapped ICE off my back window. Besides their heat, I love how steamboats look, perform, and sound; the power they generate while panting makes anthropomorphizing easy. I could fall in love with that sound, a sound after all of love. Hestia, a liberty launch, on this mid-September morning was stunningly beautiful.
The wood-clad boiler protects a careless finger or hand from burn. The starboard-mounted wheel affords the steersman clear view of stand-on traffic.
Hestia‘s engine was built in Portsmouth (NH) Navy Yard in 1898; that’s on the Piscataqua. Its oil dripping system
photogenic as vials in a long-gone apothecary.
Tech specs: 18.5 hp. USN G2 type compound. Bores are 4″ and 8″; stroke is 6″ and it can dance while turning a 26″ four-bladed prop.
Starboard side of the boiler.
Tools and ancillaries on Hestia themselves please the eye, especially when juxtaposed with the equally-leasing aesthetics of its hull, built in Bass Harbor, Maine in 1972, design by Peter Culler.
Hestia . . . a thing of beauty. See her play in the Rondout here.
All fotos by Will Van Dorp. Thanks to Gary Matthews for info.
Advertisements
Recent Comments