Part 3: Replicating the mighty turret


When you've got history's most famous gun turret, you've got a sure-fire museum attraction. But what do you do when your internationally known artifact has to spend most of the next 20 years underwater?

At the new USS Monitor Center - where conservators must treat the giant iron drum in a protective water bath for at least two decades - the answer lies in not one but three different replicas based on the brightest naval star of the Civil War. But only one of these reproductions demonstrates why the revolutionary weapon figured so prominently on the world stage as well as at a crucial moment in the history of the United States.

Constructed almost entirely by the exhibit fabrication shop at The Mariners' Museum, the full-size replica ranks among the most accurate 3-dimensional renderings of the turret ever constructed, says Monitor National Marine Sanctuary historian Jeff Johnston. So detailed and evocative is this segmented, cut-away view of the fabled guns and pioneering armored walls that - though originally conceived as a placeholder for the actual turret - it may now be promoted to a permanent attraction in the Mariners' new $30-million Monitor addition.

"It doesn't have the dents in the armor after the battle with the Virginia. But this is what the world's first rotating gun turret looked like," says Johnston, a leading authority on the ironclad's construction.

"Is it 100 percent perfect? No. It can't be. We still don't know everything about it. But is it more than 90 percent? Yes. It has a level of detail and accuracy that you won't find in any other museum exhibit anywhere. It's a real reproduction - and a real piece of art to me."

Mounted on the sturdy steel ring that will be used to support the actual turret after conservation is completed, the replica serves as the centerpiece of the Monitor Center's great artifact hall. At 9 feet tall and 21 feet in diameter, it has all the girth and presence of the real thing - plus the ability to show off the robust construction of its massive below-decks bulkhead and driving gear as well as its 8-inch-thick laminated armor.

Inventor John Ericsson's original working drawings provided the initial blueprint for the replica, which exhibit production manager Chris Voll plotted with the aid of a computer design program. Then the plan was refined - and refined again - through a series of measuring sessions that took place inside the actual turret.

Documentary photographs contributed to the design, too. But even with all this information at hand, the final details weren't settled until Voll and his colleagues Ralph Ryan and Dave Merrill began constructing the replica in the Mariner's shop.

"You'd be surprised at how many details you don't think about until you start building it - and running into the physical reality of what you're trying to recreate," Voll says. "We'd always assumed that the turret floor would run one way. But now we know that it can't - and we're still trying to figure out how it was supported."

Interpretive features played an equally important role in the reconstruction, which incorporates two replica cannon and gun carriages made by Zibits Studios in Florida.

Johnston and Monitor Center Curator Anna Holloway wanted to show visitors not only the turret's size, shape and overall layout but also how its complex armor walls were created. So Voll and his team helped devise a plan that broke the wall into three segments, with each one illustrating different views of how the original collection of 292 iron plates was laminated in a overlapping pattern, then both riveted and bolted together to form a single immensely strong unit.

The same sort of attention to detail helped transform wall units made of Masonite and plywood into eye-fooling facsimiles of Civil War iron. Using actual nuts and bolts from the Monitor artifact collection, Voll and his team cast dozens of replicas from a lightweight synthetic resin. Then they coated them with the same kind of deceptively tactile paint job that made the surfaces of the walls look so much like curving plates of metal.

"We really enjoy making it accurate - getting it right," Voll says. "But we wanted to make it look interesting, too."

More details and features will come in the months after Friday's opening, making the replica - like the conservation treatment of the actual turret - a lengthy work in progress. But when they finally finish the job, Voll and the other exhibit fabricators also will add at least one small element not found in the Civil War original.

"This is a piece of a historically accurate sculpture. It's very useful for interpretation but it's interesting to look at, too," Voll says. "So even though nobody will ever see it, we're going to sign it. It's one of the best things we've done here at the museum."

Copyright © 2017, Sun Sentinel