Hi Russ, thanks for sharing the photos. 

The only noteworthy story of my service on the Union (1951) is interesting mostly only to the guys who operated SCR radios in the LCVPs or depended on them (most right-arm rates were never interested in what we twidgets did because they never faltered in their belief that we were feather-merchants in uniform (thinking on it, they were probably right, but maybe not always <grin>).

We did a lot of work in pretty heavy weather along the Korean east coast, and the sea water and salty atmosphere played hell with the radios.  I was ET1 and responsible for keeping them operational, but pretty soon was in deep trouble because I just couldn't trouble-shoot them as fast as they failed. 

Finally I got an idea, in Wantuck at Wonsan in '51 one of my radios had fallen into about a foot of sea water and I had tried fixing it by sloshing it around in hot water.  After drying out, it worked perfectly.  So, on Union I finally got two GI cans, one half-filled with hot soapy water and the other with hot clear water. 

I took out and labeled the position of the vacuum tubes in each unit and rinsed them, and then sloshed the chassis in both GI cans, and then dried them in the engine room and returned the tubes to their exact old sockets.  I never tried actually trouble-shooting them at all. 

Lo and behold, they almost always worked.  The problem was just salt on the contacts and tube sockets, and the  KISS solution came through again. 

Life can be beautiful <smile>

Bert

Bert Kortegaard