HMS Warrior Owners' Workshop Manual: 1861 to Date (Haynes Manuals) (Haynes Owners' Workshop Manuals)

This is a really thorough run down of all of the systems in the HMS Warrior, the walk-on Victorian warship berthed down in Portsmouth as one of the exhibits of the Heritage Dockyard. Most Haynes Manuals are regarded as being really detailed and this is no exception, as its illustrated throughout with diagrams, hull drawings and photos, in fact details of everything from engines to wash tubs and the life of the crew aboard. A great companion to the publishers HMS Victory and Mary Rose editions. Recommended.

Up to the usual Haynes high standard with excellent diagrams and pictures, and a good insight to this first of the British ironclad ships to rival the French earlier types. A good reference after a visit to the ship at Portsmouth.

Bought as a gift for someone who is knowldgable about the ship and they were very impressed.

A brilliant book of one of my favourite ships. A great company to buy from. Really good prices and delivery times. Look forward to buying other books from you in the future.

The book is well written and illustrated. The book is well detailed on the technology and the history. It is fantastic value.

My engineer husband loves all the detail in this superb quirky book.

Interesting read. Well written and easy to read.

IDEAL BOOK

I have several of the Haynes series and have two other books on this historic ship, which I visited in 2014 on my first trip to the UK. The authors have done a good job of covering the key aspects of the ship, both in text and in the photographs.

The quality of Haynes' naval and maritime manuals has always been a crapshoot. Although some are fine works, others, like their recent Bismarck and Dreadnought manuals, are very "meh" and riddled with errors. I'm happy to say this one is pretty darned good, delivering a nice balance of historical and technical details, with plenty of excellent photographs and diagrams. The author was formerly a naval architect and is currently a volunteer guide aboard the ship, and is definitely intimately familiar with her. The book is roughly equally divided between technical and historical details, a tricky balance which it manages to pull off. the first chapter details the decision to build the ship, some of the problems the Thames Iron Works encountered, fitting out, and trials. The "anatomy" chapter is essentially a guided tour from upper deck down to the bilge, accompanied by dozens of the author's own excellent photographs of the interior and exterior of the restored ship. There's a chapter devoted to the ship's guns and small arms, which explains the troubles encountered with the Armstrong 110pdr, how the guns were loaded and fired, and the different types of ammunition they used. "Life on Warrior" explains the roles of the ship's officers, and goes into some detail about domestic life in the Victorian navy. Finally, there's a chapter devoted to Warrior's post-decommissioning life and her lengthy 1980s restoration. Visually, this is a solid work. Along with the author's photographs, there are plenty of period photos, illustrations and engravings. Gary Cook has provided a large number of excellent plans of the ship, including deck plans redrawn from the admiralty draughts, views of the mainmast and bowsprit rigging, perspective views of the hull structure, the propeller lifting gear, auxiliary machinery space, and so on. The only really glaring flaw is the poor quality of some of the photographs. Some of them suffer from terrible compression artifacts, like a poor-quality JPEG image blown up to 300% or so. It's unfortunate that it's only 172 pages page, instead of the 192 pages listed in the product description. Additional details on the horizontal trunk engine, masts and rigging, and handling the ship under steam and sail, would have added immensely. A ship as revolutionary as "Warrior" really deserves a seriously detailed technical reference, and while this book is far from definitive, it's still a pretty solid work. It's not a five star masterpiece, but I still enjoyed it more than Andrew Lambert's slick but rather shallow "Warrior: Victoria's Ironclad Deterrent."