USS Silversides

[croesch]

I serve on the Board of Directors for the Great Lakes Naval Memorial and Museum, the submarine Silversides, SS236, in Muskegon, Michigan.  I also work as a volunteer on the boat doing various nuts and bolts maintenance and I maintain our audio/video systems on board.  However, I have no Navy experience and I am mostly self taught on Gato boats (with a lot of help from our engine room vets).  Currently we are collecting funds for both a dry docking and the building of the new museum building.  A recent hull ultrasound shows the hull, sitting in fresh water, to be in good condition.  The museum building construction is well under way as of March, 2008.  As of today, my current projects are to restore electrical power to the Christmas tree and repair the radio room door.  We have produced a 90 minute DVD virtual tour of the boat emphasizing the mechanical aspects, which I can provide free to other museums.  Our main diesels 3 and 4 remain operational for our Memorial Day ceremonies.  What we need most is a volunteer electrician.

Charley Roesch, Ph.D., M.D.

[Tom Bowser]

Charley
Good luck with the Christmas Tree. On the Drum some one had cut all the original wiring inside the panals and removed the socket boards. We found the board for the flood/vent panal and rewired the sockets in it and then we are hooking up one or more transformers to light the bulbs and I am putting it on three circuits. One to light full time, one for surface and one for submerged. Will do the same in the other panal except I have to build a new socket board or use LED's. We are slowly replacing the lighting sockets throughout the boat as they are all getting crispy as is the wiring to them.
Tom Bowser