A hundred tons of alloy steel resting on a thin film of oil is a building miracle. Spinning it sixty times every second without shaking the mountain to powder is an act of pure exact care.
Giles used twin sixty-ton high-pressure jacks. He had safely lowered the rotor journals out of the oak wedges and into the heavy cast-steel bearing saddles.
Each journal rested in a split babbitt shell lined with tin-antimony-copper alloy—eighty-nine percent high-purity tin, seven percent antimony, and four percent copper. Borin’s master armorers had hand-scraped the curved white-metal liners for three days using Prussian blue dye. He tested the fit until the steel shaft made uniform contact across ninety percent of the bearing surface.
High-pressure backup oil pumps, mounted in a dedicated vault beneath the dynamo floor, forced clean lubricating oil into the lower bearing shells at one hundred and fifty pounds of pressure.
Under that crushing pressure, the hundred-ton rotor lifted sixty thousandths of an inch, floating on a zero-drag water-flow wedge.
Giles stood beside the forward bearing stone stand, his hand resting lightly on the cast-iron bearing cap.
Behind his eyes, the test model screen was tracking every micro-inch of eccentricity across twenty-four feet of rotating steel.
