psp----Marston mat

perforated steel planking---Marston mat
10 ft x 15 in x 1/4 in thickness-- 66 lbs

two million tons produced in WWII---enough steel for manufacture
of 650 Liberty ships

Marston mat design origin---Carnegie steel

1941 Corp of Engineers video

Transportable Runway - YouTube

The US built many air bases in Australia during WW2.

One of my interests is the study and recording of old and historic woolsheds (sheep-shearing sheds); I see a lot of this mat used as fencing;



When I see this I know that there was a WW2 USAF base within 50-100 miles. There must have been miles upon miles of the stuff left-over after the war.

The "concave" side must be on the inside of the yard or race where the sheep are; the "convex" side snags on the fleece.

Now that I know the correct name of this material, thanks to JHOLLAND1, I searched for more information and found this very interesting article;

http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Documents/1989/April 1989/0489marston.pdf

Anybody claiming that miserable S#!* can be assembled with a sledge only will be leaving fingers behind in the matting.

Coleman in Pa is sold out of both steel and aluminum, but there are thousands of pieces available in California.

Well, now I know the proper name for it..........If I don't forget the name of it, CRS has hit me. I have a few small pieces of it here.

On what I believe to be a similar note, a neighbor called me about a new acquisition, he bought a Galion MG grader. I looked around on the internet for information on it, but any info is scarce. I was wondering if it was put together for the army, MG= military grader, maybe? It looks to be built like most WWII equipment, pretty basic with kind of a Rube Goldberg powerplant/drivetrain, which consist of an IH industrial tractor setup, reconfigured to drive it.

MG = either Morris Garages or Motor Grader.

If you're looking at a beam sticking out the front of an IH tractor with a grader blade there were several manufacturers of those machines for IH, Allis, and Massey Harris tractors. In their time they were a nice machine for an operator with low budget. Blade visibility left some to be desired, but they beat a sharp stick.

Is the machine hydraulic or a collection of Acme screws and drive shafts?

Antique Historical Construction Equipment site probably has a few and some guys who know the machine 8 ways to Sunday.

Jholland -

Yep, the boon and curse of combat engineers as well as the Seabees. Of course the other 'fun' one was the bridge designed by the wonderful man by the name of Bailey. PSP had many uses including retaining walls as a sort of sheet piling. My main experience was the later aluminum variety, intended more for what got termed RRR - rapid runway repair. Not perforated.

Dale

duckfarmer27 said:

Jholland -

Yep, the boon and curse of combat engineers as well as the Seabees. Of course the other 'fun' one was the bridge designed by the wonderful man by the name of Bailey. PSP had many uses including retaining walls as a sort of sheet piling. My main experience was the later aluminum variety, intended more for what got termed RRR -
rapid runway repair. Not perforated.

Dale

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Curse you Dale for bringing up the long forgotten AM-2 (think it was called)matting. As a former Air Force, Red Horse combat engineer we had a lot of experience with that stuff. It was always a pain in the ass to deal with it. Although it did make nice loading ramps and trench shoring in a pinch.

plannerpower said:

...There must have been miles upon miles of the stuff left-over after the war...

Click to expand...

The 3012 ft. 150 ft. runway mentioned in the video would have required 36144 panels (about 68.5 miles if laid out end to end).
You can build a lot of fence with that much material...

Warren said:

Curse you Dale for bringing up the long forgotten AM-2 (think it was called)matting. As a former Air Force, Red Horse combat engineer we had a lot of experience with that stuff. It was always a pain in the ass to deal with it. Although it did make nice loading ramps and trench shoring in a pinch.

Click to expand...

Warren -

AM-2 that's it. I forgot the nomenclature. Back in the 80s I was in an Army Combat Engineer unit that had the war time mission of trying to keep an AF base functioning during the 'big one'. So we did some training with the stuff. As my wife told me I was a slow learner back in the 60s getting hooked up with the Army for 33 years. Red Horse units seemed to have a rank structure one grade higher than the Army for the same job. And lived much, much better.

At least you did not have to slug Bailey Bridge panels - Sir Donald Bailey had a great design, but it was a bitch to man handle.

Dale

AM-2 also makes a real nice trailer deck, heheh. I liberated several pieces when we scored about 600 pieces at the museum. I have my 6000lb trailer decked with it, as well as a few spare sections around to use as ramps. You can load a 3500lb car by just laying it on the trailer and driving up it. For unloading machinery, I block up halfway and have had about 8000lbs on it with no sag at all.

Correction, my matting is M8A1, not the honeycomb structure, but welded corrugated steel.

Nice article on matting here... The History of Airfield Matting Design

Dad was a notorious scrounger, we needed a trailer 45 years ago, so he scrounged the materials for it and one of the things he came up with was some pieces of Marston mat. It covered the dovetail portion.

Mike C. said:

AM-2 also makes a real nice trailer deck, heheh. I liberated several pieces when we scored about 600 pieces at the museum. I have my 6000lb trailer decked with it, as well as a few spare sections around to use as ramps. You can load a 3500lb car by just laying it on the trailer and driving up it. For unloading machinery, I block up halfway and have had about 8000lbs on it with no sag at all.

Correction, my matting is M8A1, not the honeycomb structure, but welded corrugated steel.

Nice article on matting here... The History of Airfield Matting Design

Click to expand...

Mike -

Good article, but I will argue a bit with the author - admittedly I am a fossil as it had to be 78 or so when I took my Roads and Airfields course as part of the Engineer Officer Advanced Course. I am a mechanical engineer by degree so a good thing the Army engineering was pretty much cook book for this kind of thing - but materials are materials and CBR and compaction are not that much different than machine parts in some ways. One thing I do remember - when it came to airfield design there were two volumes to the Technical Manual. Volume 1 covered every airplane in the USAF inventory except 1. As mentioned in the article you had to worry about hitting a patch with matting at speed as most aircraft could not take it. As I remember the design criteria from that book had the F-4 as the worst in the inventory for wheel loading and was usually the limiting aircraft from a design requirement. Once you learned all that you moved to Volume 2. It only covered pavement requirements for B-52 aircraft - and told you at the start to NEVER use Volume 1 if a B-52 was involved. The double bicycle design landing gear that Boeing designed is a bear from a concentrated loading standpoint. The article is correct - my one brother in law who was a B-52 driver and he and I have talked about it before. The models he flew over Nam had a takeoff weight of about 500K pounds - beer math of 100K ordnance, 200K airframe and 200K fuel. After takeoff they could tanker up to something above that in total weight. Those were the D/E/F models.

I would not mind getting my hands on some of the aluminum mat for my trailer deck. That would do nicely!

Dale

I have talked to guys that flew in Nam and dealt with it. From what I gathered, the only place they used the mat was in ramp areas and taxiways. The runways had to be solid enough to use, as is without the mat. As I understood, trying to take off or land on it would cause a pressure wave, like wiping your hand across a bed spread, that would roll in front of the wheels and physically move the entire mat assembly across the ground like a caterpillar. Only small light aircraft like 0-2s and such could take off and land on it.

Mike C. said:

I have talked to guys that flew in Nam and dealt with it. From what I gathered, the only place they used the mat was in ramp areas and taxiways. The runways had to be solid enough to use, as is without the mat. As I understood, trying to take off or land on it would cause a pressure wave, like wiping your hand across a bed spread, that would roll in front of the wheels and physically move the entire mat assembly across the ground like a caterpillar. Only small light aircraft like 0-2s and such could take off and land on it.

Click to expand...

You ever hear of a place called Khe Sahn?

Franz© said:

You ever hear of a place called Khe Sahn?

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Franz -

Think I can see where you are going, was never there and can't remember what the runway surface was. But this gets back to my previous comments. Again, going from memory - and not sure if I still have the airfield design TM here somewhere to look up - all has to do with design of the landing gear. Transports like C-123/C-130 had/have lightest wheel loading due to design. Which makes them able to use different runway surfaces than 'fast movers'. Depending upon soil conditions an assault strip can be made fully functional and usable on compacted soil as long as it is suitable. I recall being involved in building an assault strip used by C-130s with the native sandy soil - don't recall the CBR (California Bearing Ration) required but it worked. Mike C is right that you can get a rolling wave type of condition. For the same reason, when we were doing the training on runway repair and trying to use AM2 matting the 'bump' of going from the undisturbed runway to the 'mat patch' was allowable, depending upon aircraft type, at some places on the runway but not others. Speed of aircraft (ie where it was in takeoff or landing roll) at that point on the runway.

Now sounding totally parochial - as a non rated person who in another life ran a flight facility - demands of pilots always, to me, seemed to vary quite a bit depending upon the culture of their background. Try getting a Naval aviator to land their helicopter in a field - many don't like it at all - whereas to an Army or Marine pilot it is the norm. Now here I'm talking about training/stateside scenarios, not operationally. Kind of like the argument I once witnessed over which pilot set (Navy vs AF) rated how many square feet of room space with what amenities. Being a grunt with my two ponchos and liners it seemed pretty ridiculous.

Dale

I have landed a C-123K on PSP many, many times during the unpleasantness in Vietnam. The only problem it ever presented was the "bow wave" that improperly installed runways were prone to. We were told that it was caused by the lack of stretching the PSP after installation. The bow wave was not too noticeable on takeoff, but could amount to a six foot lump just in front of the cockpit on landing. This phenomenon was not only visually shocking, but the sound was somewhat disconcerting. Those steel runways did not last long after the communists took over. A quick survey on google earth reveals none of them remain. Regards, Clark

After reading LKeithR's post about the 36144 panels in the runway, I had a crazy vision of the 3,144,528 round disks punched out of the mats back at the factory....

Installation video at Transportable Runway - YouTube

Some fun old construction equipment, too.

Almost enough for your runway for sale for $35 each at http://aviationwarehouse.net/novelties-for-sale.html

"You ever hear of a place called Khe Sahn? "

The director of our aviation museum flew off about every base in the conflict at some point. His main ride was F-4s but he flew a lot of other varied stuff, too. He was already an "old guy" by the time Nam rolled around, having graduated flight school in 46. He was one of the many who told me of the rolling wave generated by high speed operations on the mats. And yes the C-123 and 130 could use it, too. For any of the fighters and such, it was as I said, taxiways and ramp areas, only.

I think we got like 42 bundles of it. Can't remember the exact number of pieces, but it was WAY more than we needed.

wheels17 said:

After reading LKeithR's post about the 36144 panels in the runway, I had a crazy vision of the 3,144,528 round disks punched out of the mats back at the factory....

Installation video at Transportable Runway - YouTube

Some fun old construction equipment, too.

Almost enough for your runway for sale for $35 each at FOR SALE Items

Click to expand...

I used to see (pre internet) adverts from companies offering "pour able weight"
that was composed of slugs from a stamping operation.

Local garage had an old 15 ton unit shovel, they said the counterweight
was a box (welded or cast I'm not sure) that was filled with these things.