![]() He pressed the jack into the point where the stanchion met the bracket. The hydraulic jack is an auto body tool used to fix dents. Paden said most of the tools used in restoring the various components of the Monitor brought up from the ocean’s floor were improvised. Several other workers came in closer to watch, including Dave Krop, manager of the Monitor conservation project. “So far it’s been the most difficult one.” “I spent seven hours on it yesterday,” Paden said. Last week Paden strived to remove one of those stanchions from its bracket using a hydraulic jack. The stanchions needed to be removed so they could be separately treated for conservation. The stanchions rimmed the roof of the Monitor and held up a canvas awning to shelter the crew from the broiling sun. He was gently nudging, hour after painstaking hour, a wrought-iron stanchion from the 9-foot-tall revolving gun turret that once sat atop the Civil War ironclad. Paden is an objects handler working in the USS Monitor Center at The Mariners’ Museum. Even with the tank drained, it’s slow, painstaking work: After a thorough cleaning, the turret will be flooded again, to to continue desalinization, a lengthy process that may take up to 15 more years. ![]() Via Michael Lynch at Past in the Present, there are about three weeks left to see the 120-ton turret of the Union ironclad Monitor, currently undergoing restoration at the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News.The turret, recovered from the sea floor off Cape Hatteras in 2002, has been kept in a flooded tank of fresh water almost the entire time since then, allowing the salts that have penetrated the iron to gradually leach out.
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