Here is a new video from The National Museum of the Royal Navy describing the 20 year-long project to secure HMS Victory in her dock at Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard.
As we posted back in August 2020, when HMS Victory went into drydock in the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard in 1922, she was supported by 22 steel cradles. In the almost 100 years that she has remained on the dock, the historic ship’s 3,500-tonne hull had been to slowly collapse in on itself. To save the ship, the cradles have been replaced by an innovative system of 134 “props” to distribute the load across the hull.
The installation of the new high-tech props has also allowed The National Museum of the Royal Navy to install a walkway underneath the ship giving visitors a more intimate experience of this iconic ship.
Thanks to David Rye for contributing to this post.
Funny to think that all of those props are an approximation of the gentle, perfectly distributed support of water (which of course offers its own problems over the long term).
Each prop the mechanical equivalent of a hydrostatic column. 🙂
Isn’t the term “hogged” used for a boat that has been dry docked for too long and the keel and frames sag at the bow and stern?
So Cal had some hogged wooden schooners that I saw back in the 70s. That’s the term they used and how they explained it. I had not heard of the term before then.
Hogging and sagging refers to the effect of an unequal distribution of weight pressing down and buoyancy pushing upward on a ship or boat. Hogging is when there is more weight in the ends causing the bow and stern to droop. Sagging is more weight in the middle causing the bow and stern to go up and the middle of the ship to bend down. Wooden ships have a tendency to hog over time.