OT Amazing salvage project.

[harry]

[GB]

Any idea how the cutting wires work?

[Andrew Mawson]

Same method was used raising the Kursk (Russian nuclear sub that sank). The steel wire has many bobbins of steel threaded onto it that have carbide fused into the surface. The wire is used like a giant band saw, the seawater acting as an effective coolant.

Andrew

[GB]

Thanks. I don't think I'd want to be within a few hundred metres of that arrangement!

They have to thread it under the wreck somehow?

[Bob Minchin]

Interesting video but why the music?????

[Jones]

To make farts like you choke on your coffee.

[newshound]

Amazing, thanks for posting.

[T i m]

They used a similar system to cut the exit door (for H&S reasons) in the bottom of the Secret Nuclear Bunker at Kelvedon Hatch.

In this case of this 10' thick reinforced concrete bunker wall, they drilled holes through the wall at the top and bottom of where they wanted one side of the cut to be and threaded a coated wire though and back and around a driving wheel of one sort (there may have been an idler pulley on the other side to start with). The wire was then circulated till it cut though (or something like that).

The cut finish feels is very smooth (but not flat) and it's interesting to see how accurately arranged the reinforcing rods were and how consistent the concrete mix was. I understand it was also 'poured' in a continuous process so there were no 'joints' that could possibly weaken the structure:

You can see the 'Exit door' at 9:10 here and the pattern on the walls where the wire 'cutter' ran. [1]

Cheers, T i m

[1] I think he said the Company cutting the hole quoted for some 2 weeks of work and it took more like 8! ;-)

[Chris Hogg]

Dimension stone is cut in much the same way. Although large diamond saws are now widely used, for the largest pieces they use a long wire. In times past, the wire was passed through a bath of sand that acted as the abrasive, but these days the wires have silicon carbide or diamond-impregnated ferrules along their length. See

and scroll down, and

[T i m]

It's funny they look just like big bench bandsaws. ;-)

and scroll down,

Interesting.

Gnarly. ;-)

Yeah, the right hand diagram is what I believe they did on the SNB exit.

If you were cutting a plane through a rectangular block using a 'loop' driven from one side, I wondered how the cutting wire would cope with the initial 'corners' opposite the driven side of the loop? Like, I wondered if you might initially use an idler pulley (or two) on the undriven side to initially get the wire to 'round' the corners and then the idler could be removed and the loop drawn trough?

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

How about this close?

I think he has at least got his PPC waistcoat on. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Bob Minchin escribió:

+1. Really annoying and completely unnecessary.

Fascinating video, thanks for posting the link harry. I've sent it on to a mate of mine who used to work as a sparky on those ships.