Quoted:
I'd like to see it myself.  

Quoted:


I was on both of those ships for a good amount, and I've never heard of this.

Quoted:
The skinny on this is Geraldo opened up the machine shop and found a bunch of stuff from Al Capone.

Quoted:
Sounds like something Mulder and Scully would stumble across..

I want to believe.

Quoted:


Scully would be in there doing chicks.

Quoted:



Two guys died in an enclosed space not too long before I got to the Enterprise. We lost 7 my first deployment due to various mishaps.

I was on it for part of that yard period and I don't recall hearing anything about finding a machine shop. We weren't ship's company for the most part though, we were working out of a warehouse rehabbing electronics. It could have happened but I doubt that it's true.

Shipyard duty sucks.


 

Quoted:


Allegedly, that was at UT, running a particle accelerator.  They had to torch the (very thick) door.

Many years ago, I was part of a very large corporate merger and as one of the more pleasant mainframers was tasked with dealing with talking to folks from the company being devoured by us to find all of their systems and to move them someplace that we controlled.  There were some problems doing this, ranging from terrible turnover at the other company for the last few years to frankly uncooperative folks who were angry about the merger.  Anyhow, there was an RS6000 server somewhere in Denver that we had to find.  There had been three sysadmins there.  One did a dry dive rock climbing and the other had quit after the merger and was somewhere up around Leadville smoking weed.  The other one was in the UK, and very angry –– apparently his deportation was as a result of the company that we were acquiring screwing up his paperwork so badly that his time ran out, and back in those pre-GW Bush days people were actually deported.  So, I had a dead guy and a guy who was a lot more stoned than usual, and the person who had been there before them who had been deported had moved this RS6000 someplace to a Mountain Bell facility and had paid out a few years, then he got deported, the fat one went splat, and the last of the three quit and went up into the hills with his girlfriend to pursue agricultural interests.  I could ping the box but I had no idea where it was other than "somewhere in Denver" –– but I had a BRI line (new at that time) so I should be able to find it, right?  We were paying the bill, we had the SPID, and, like I said, this was back when ISDN was kind of special ... ha!  I spent about a month on and off on the phone with Mountain Bell up there before I said "screw it" and went up to Leadville in an asthmatic 172 to find the hippy.  I got a clue from him, Budda-like, and followed it back to a building in downtown Denver (which was seriously ratty back then) and spent three weeks trying to convince Mountain Bell to let me into the room.  I really expected that the next person I was going to meet was Lilly Tomlin in sensible shoes by the time it was all over.  I liked SW Bell –– a little "thank you for flying Aeroflot" for me, but they got the job done.  I wanted to strangle, literally injure about half of the people I was forced to deal with at Mountain Bell.  Of course, the box was still running like a top.  AIX does that.  But I was happier than I have ever been to have been heading back to Houston with the Addtran TA, the RS6000, and a pile of cables in the passenger seat with that special brownie from my new buddy in Leadville.

Quoted:
What color is the machine shop on the Enterprise?

Quoted:
Urban legend.

And most anyone who ever worked in the Pentagon heard similar stories about sealed offices found during the Pentagon Renovation..... supposedly because it was built in such a rush.

One story had a construction worker found mummified.... sealed in the space.  
 

Quoted:


I haven't read through the entire thread yet, but it's not an urban legend. I saw the documentary.

It wasn't an overhaul. It was a documentary about the building of an aircraft carrier and was very interesting. They showed how the ship was built in 900 ton sections because that's all the crane could lift. Driveshafts were ginormous. Bolts holding driveshafts together were pretty cool. They had a cut in the head that, when the hydraulic wrench twisted the topmost section of the head off at the undercut, the correct torque was achieved.

The steam piston was improperly shimmed and I forget how many hundreds of (looked like) 1" SHCS the dude was having to take out to re-shim it. I don't remember if they got it done during the sea trial or not.

They put the ship through manuvers. Brought it up to 50 knots but wouldn't say how much faster it would go. Took a tight turn (for a carrier) and the deck looked to be on about a 15 degree angle...

They were touring the ship with engineers and a schematic, looking for the machine shop and finally came to a spot on the wall where the engineer says," It should be right here". They cut a hole in the wall and damned if there wasn't a shop there. I forget exactly how the door was forgotten.

I'll try to find the documentary. It was on PBS.

Quoted:
I first heard the story in the late 60s and it was the Kitty Hawk.  Next time I heard it it was the Constellation.  I served on all of those ships and I can tell you for a fact that, as big as they are, it could not happen.  Someone in the DC Gang would figure it out on their first cruise.

Quoted:



would love to see this

Quoted:
I've heard the same story, but the carrier was different, either Kitty Hawk or Indy don't remember which.

Quoted:


Adventure nerd

Quoted:


You and me both, my friend. I'm still pissed off at the friggin' BATF from a deal I lost out on due to their stupidity. Buddy of mine had married into a family over there where the father-in-law was an independent gunsmith. Old guy wanted to retire, and he was selling out his stock and store. One of the things he had was a lot of five pre-WWII DWM Luger pistols, complete with accessories, consecutively serial-numbered. For some reason, he couldn't sell them on the German market (something to do with the way they'd been sold or marked), which had left him stuck with the pistols for most of 20 years. My buddy wasn't into guns, but he knew I was, so he hooked me up with his father-in-law. The old guy was cool as hell, and was willing to do a deal with me for all five pistols or whatever I could afford, at $300.00 a pop. All I needed to do was figure out what to do with them. So, I wrote myself a letter off to the BATF, and got back a reply that since they'd once been German Army property, I couldn't import them as an individual. Back in those days (mid-1980s), I couldn't find anyone to import them, so I sorrowfully had to turn down the old guy's offer. Those pistols were gorgeous, too––Made sometime in the 1930s, perfect finishes, all the serial numbers matched, everything. Where they'd been, I have no idea, and the father-in-law didn't either. He'd picked them up as a lot at an auction, or something, and then the German government got their noses into the deal and told him they couldn't be sold to anyone. So, they'd been in his shop for long damn time. I don't know what happened to them, either––He was afraid he'd have to turn them in for destruction, so I imagine that's what he did.

Now, here's the f-ed up part: Six or so years later, I got to know a BATF agent locally. I related this story to him, and he starts frothing at the mouth: The actual rule was, back then, that the pistols had to be out of government control for 5 years, and then they would have been importable by me. The idiot who'd answered my letter had been wrong, wrong, wrong. Main reason this guy was so pissed off? He was a huge Luger fanatic...

I've never been so retroactively pissed off in my life, after I found that out. Those pistols, conservatively, would have been worth a huge chunk of money to collectors. I asked one of this BATF guy's acquaintances at a  gun show what they might have been worth––He was a Luger collector. His eyes just glazed over, his throat moved like he was swallowing something, and when he came back out of his happy place, he told me that if he'd seen those at an auction, he'd have happily paid $175,000.00 for the lot of them together.

There are reasons why I don't have good things to say about the BATF, most days.

Quoted:
There's a similar urban legend about a VAX that got sealed in a server room during a facilities renovation and was forgotten about for years. Still had power and a network cable. It could be pinged, but no one could find it.

Quoted:
Screw the machine shops. I want to spend some quality time walking all the bunkers and storehouses on all the old bases, just to see what I could find in them. In Europe, I know there's some good stuff...

We got tasked to go pick up some stuff for practicing with prechambers, so we could train on putting the cheese charges into them, priming them, and doing the rest of the tasks that we could without blowing up a real site. So, I got sent out to some remote Bundeswehr ammo site somewhere in the mountains around Fulda. When I got there, the Germans manning the place couldn't speak English, and my German sucked. The paperwork was also pretty messed up, so we wound up going on a wild goose chase looking for this crap that we were supposed to pick up. We opened bunkers and warehouses that I'm pretty sure hadn't been looked at since shortly after the war, and there were some treasures within, let me tell you. Couple of times, we had to cut locks and use tanker's bars just to open the doors up. Once inside the bunkers or storage areas? It was like going to someone else's house at Christmas––All these intriguing boxes and crates you weren't allowed to open up, but which had the most alluring labels. Lots and lots of stuff with the old Wehrmacht eagles on it...  One or two times, I was morally certain nobody had been inside those sites since the war, since there were a couple of spots where it looked like stuff had been laid out for issue––Stuff like Teller mines, ammo cans, and one big pile of rusted hardware that I'm pretty sure represented a platoon's worth of small arms. Couldn't touch any of it, since the old Wachtmeister I was with was sure it was all booby-trapped, but I have to tell you, that was the most vivid memory I have of that entire exercise––Wandering down rows and rows of old storage sites. Supposedly, all that got cleaned up in the 1990s, but I'd still love to go back and look at it.

Quoted:
Those stories can be told over most of Germany... There's stuff that's been sealed since the war, and nobody but nobody wants to go looking at it, for good reason. Go up to Wildflecken, and every barracks building has a sealed steel door, which leads into the old tunnel system there. The doors are all welded shut, because of the accidents people had trying to explore, and the fear they'd find boobytraps.
According to one of the Wallmeister guys (who were responsible for maintaining all the prechambers and other fortifications on the border), several cities in Germany are potentially sitting on top of time bombs––Literally. Nobody wanted to deal with the issues, so they stuck their fingers in their ears and went "La, la, la, la, la, la... And, again, la...." at the end of the war, and rebuilt over the remains of all these tunnel systems. They don't even know what's down there, in some cases, since they shut the pumps off and the tunnels flooded. Supposedly, they've found archived plans showing something like seven or eight floors under Tempelhof Airfield in Berlin, but when the Allies finally figured out what was what, they'd lost all but the top two or three floors to the water. Divers were sent down at one point, in an attempt to assess things, but after someone set off an underwater explosion, they said to hell with it, and sealed all of the flooded areas off.
Hell, the main parking area in downtown Darmstadt? Huge, cavernous underground area. You'd think it was built as a car park, but it wasn't: Wartime bunkers and air-raid shelters. Supposedly, only about a third of the available space was turned into parking.
Some of what I heard over there would best be classed as "tall tales", but there's more than enough truth for it to be fascinating. Here are some links:
http://www.forgottenhistory.co.uk/index.html
http://www.munlager.de/
http://www.7grad.org/index.html
http://www.geschichtsspuren.de/
http://www.thirdreichruins.com/
http://forum.hidden-places.de
If that doesn't keep you busy looking for stuff, nothing will. The Nazis may have been utter bastards, but they did have a knack for building underground with concrete. Amazing stuff, and it's surprising how much has survived.

Quoted:








Yep, there is a u-boat penn with river access that still contains 3 u-boats!  We bombed it & roof collapsed on one of them & seraled the entrance.  Then the land owner got sick of sovenir hunters & filled it with gravel - but the boats are still down there.





In former East Germany, there is an airport with a sealed underground hanger - and there are several German planes that were left fueled and loaded for missions at the end of the war.





Near Munich, there were off-shoots of the horrifying Dachau extermination camp.  One of these is in Kaufering.  There, slave laborers were worked to death building jet fighters at the end of the war.  





The underground concrete factorie buildings are still there and the military may be exploring use of them for other purposes.  





Lots of weird stuff still there that most would prefer to forget about.

Quoted:


I haven't read through the entire thread yet, but it's not an urban legend. I saw the documentary.

It wasn't an overhaul. It was a documentary about the building of an aircraft carrier and was very interesting. They showed how the ship was built in 900 ton sections because that's all the crane could lift. Driveshafts were ginormous. Bolts holding driveshafts together were pretty cool. They had a cut in the head that, when the hydraulic wrench twisted the topmost section of the head off at the undercut, the correct torque was achieved.

The steam piston was improperly shimmed and I forget how many hundreds of (looked like) 1" SHCS the dude was having to take out to re-shim it. I don't remember if they got it done during the sea trial or not.

They put the ship through manuvers. Brought it up to 50 knots but wouldn't say how much faster it would go. Took a tight turn (for a carrier) and the deck looked to be on about a 15 degree angle...

They were touring the ship with engineers and a schematic, looking for the machine shop and finally came to a spot on the wall where the engineer says," It should be right here". They cut a hole in the wall and damned if there wasn't a shop there. I forget exactly how the door was forgotten.

I'll try to find the documentary. It was on PBS.