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To finish the model off, I decided I needed I needed a boat license. The current Wisconsin boat license stickers are dark blue, so they would have blended in too much with the color of the boat. (I live in Illinois but grew up in Wisconsin. I just can’t get it out of my system.) For no particular reason, I looked on eBay for a Wisconsin boat license and, sure enough, someone was selling a 1996 sticker. I snagged the image, scaled it to the proper size (3”) and, along with some random numbers and my initials, I applied them to the hull. This license complies with the Wisconsin DNR’s rules! The final details are the drain plugs. Everyone knows, after a long day on the lake, you’ve got the drain the water out of the boat. I used my small punch and die set to punch out some small diameter (1” in scale) disks that I glued together with CA and then tapped a little depression in to simulate the socket for the wrench to pull out the drain plug. I’ve very happy with how this model turned out. The kit itself went together wonderfully and it offers lots of opportunities to improve, scratchbuild and make unique. Just yesterday, we learned that we can take our masks off (with some caveats) which is a much better way to cure COVID fatigue, but, in a pinch, I’d recommend this kit. I’ve entered the model in the 2021 Wisconsin Maritime Museum Model Boat Show and Contest. The contest is virtual this year. Judging is, as I understand it, completed, but I won’t know until tomorrow night how I did. Here are some pictures of the finished model.

I struggled a little bit deciding how I was going to mount and display the model. I toyed with the idea of putting the boat on a beach like Steve Wheeler had done, but that would make for a bigger footprint than I wanted. I didn’t like the simple stand that came with the kit. I didn’t want a very formal mounting like brass pedestals. I finally decided on sawhorses. I needed something that would allow the rudder to hang down below the bottom of the boat and something that would allow me to display the oars. (I’d thought about just putting the oars in the boat, but I thought they obscured too much detail and looked like they didn’t belong there. I used my own sawhorses as models, taking measurements from them. I used basswood stock for construction and brass wire to simulate fasteners. I used some anodized brass wire to fashion some hooks upon which to display the oars. I painted the model using Artist Loft acrylic paints from Michael’s. As this model was a cure for COVID fatigue, I was looking for inexpensive, forgiving, simple materials everywhere possible. My son, who is still taking art lessons, had some of these paints, but he grew frustrated with me “borrowing” them to use on my model, so I needed to go buy my own!

You can see the assembled rig in the picture. Mounting it in the boat was simple. The only other things needed were a single block — thanks, again, Bluejacket! — and a rope coil for the sheet line on the deck. I also made sure that all the knots used were accurate. The sheet line is attached to the ring with a bowline run through a ring. The downhaul, sprit and boom halyards are all secured to the cleats properly. For the boom, sprit and mast, I scaled the measurements shown in the melonseed rig drawing. I obtained most of the various fittings from Bluejacket Shipcrafters. They didn’t have the loop shown on the lower mast, so I made that from brass stock and wire. All the fittings were painted with Model Master aluminum. The leather wraps were made from scrapbooking paper. For the rings on the end of the boom — for attaching the clew of the sail and the sheet line — I used brass wire soldered into rings. It took a little trial and error to get to the smallest diameter I could manage. In the end, I got down to about 2 mm.

I used embroidery stabilizer to stiffen the sail material. Then I used a water-soluble fabric marking pen to mark out the outline of the sail itself. To add realism to it, I decided to sew panel lines into the sail. Since the model is in 1:12 scale and panels were typically 1 foot wide, the seams would be 1 inch apart on the model sail. I used a ruler/straightedge, triangle and dividers to lay out those lines. I used a sewing machine set for the finest stitch it could produce. I also used the finest needle I had available and a fine thread a little darker than the sail material, just to give it some contrast. Sewing the sail was much easier than I thought it would be and went quite quickly. As I worked along, I decided the sail needed some additional details. The attachment points, I thought, needed some reinforcement, so I made some grommets from leftover sail material and used my punch and die set to see if I could punch some clean holes through the sail to simulate those attachment points. I also made some grommets for telltales and attached them to the sail. A lot of the reading I’ve done indicated that people don’t use telltales on a melonseed, but I’ve never sailed a boat that didn’t have them, so I decided to include them. They certainly make the sail more interesting to look at. Punching those holes in the sail required a very stiff sail. That was achieved by spraying the sail with clear gloss automotive lacquer. It gives the sail a lot of body and a great appearance.

I really deviated from the kit with the rig. The kit-supplied rig is pure simplicity. It’s just a mast, a sprit and a plastic sail. I wanted to do a little more with that. One of the prettiest rigs I’ve seen is the one on a melonseed skiff. It’s got several names, but it’s got a sprit — like the kit-supplied rig — and a boom. The sheet line runs through a block attached to the tiller head. As far as sailboat rigs go, it’s very simple, but I thought it would look great on this model. I haven’t put sails on a model since I was a kid. I’ve found they obscure detail and often look out of scale. But a modeler I respect a great deal, Steve Wheeler, built boat models in this scale and routinely put great-looking sails on them. I decided to give it a try with the skiff and used Steve’s April 2004 article “Making Sails” in Ships in Scale magazine as a guide. I obtained almost everything I needed from Hobby Lobby. I started with some 270 thread count white bedsheet material. Steve recommended washing, drying and starching it before working with it. Then I made a paper pattern to ensure the final product would fit on the model.

After turning the oars, I finished the blades, putting the proper bevel on them. They were finished with polyurethane. Any good oar has oar wraps, so I used some black rigging thread of an appropriate-looking diameter and wrapped them. I used some back scrapbooking paper to simulate the rubber “button” that keeps the oars from sliding out of the oarlocks. The wrapping was secured with a little thinned white glue.

To make the oars, I used a technique I learned from my friend Bob Filipowski. He turns oars and other cylindrical parts like masts and yards in a drill press. I started out turning these parts in a lathe, but I found that, because of the small diameter of these parts and their tendency to flex in the lathe when worked, they became oval in cross section. That doesn’t happen in a drill press. I used Bob’s technique exclusively now. I chucked the blanks in the drill press and held the other end in a block of scrap wood with a hole of the proper diameter drilled in it. This keeps the “loose” end of the oar from flying away and breaking.

Stepping the mast came next. To align the mast, I used a tool I made for that purpose many years ago. It’s simple enough: two small dowels of equal length with a pin driven through both. Place the two “legs” against the bulwarks and the pin should be in the center of the mast. (This is another reason to make sure the chines are equidistant from the centerline.) When the pin is in the center of the mast, it’s aligned laterally. To ensure it’s vertical, I used a small machinists square.

The rudder, as the instructions explain, is a model in itself. It’s made from nine parts. As with the daggerboard, I wanted a natural finish, so I sanded the parts, stained them and varnished them with the polyurethane. I found I needed to knock some of the gloss off this assembly to make it look more realistic.

Also at this time, I made some seat cushions. There are no seat cushions in the kit, so using the frames from which the parts were removed, I created some from basswood. I decided there would be two cushions on each seat. I beveled the edges all around and used some appropriately-sized and colored thread to simulate the binding common on all these kinds of cushions. I painted them and sealed them with polyurethane. I then used scrapbooking paper — heavy bond paper that comes in many different textures and colors — to simulate the straps that would hold these kinds of cushions in place on a real boat.

The oarlock blocks are simple enough to install. They’re just blocks of wood with holes in them, but I wanted to dress up the oarlocks themselves. After dressing them up with a file, I painted them with Model Master acrylic aluminum paint (1781) and wrapped them with a manila-colored thread. These wraps reduce the wear on the oars in a real boat. I didn’t take pictures of these features at the time, so I’m going to jump around a little. You might notice the floorboards I installed. On a real boat, when these aren’t installed, your feet always get wet, along with anything else thrown in the bottom of the boat! I used some mahogany strips I had in my model wood pile. I cut them out, beveled the edges and rounded the end. I stained them with MINWAX stain. I laid them out in what looked to me to be a logical pattern on the bottom of the boat. I drilled small holes in the floorboards and used light gauge brass wire to simulate the screws used to hold them in place.

The daggerboard trunk is a four-piece box that needs to be aligned in the hole in the bottom of the boat. I used some small squares and a clamp to ensure proper alignment. The daggerboard is a simple assembly. I sanded it into the proper shape with a sharper edge on the trailing edge and rounded the leading edge. I intended to paint the boat, but to leave some of the fittings in a natural wood finish. I stained the daggerboard with MINWAX cherry stain and a light coat of MINWAX satin polyurethane. You can see in the photo at the right the daggerboard trunk with the trim pieces installed.

The next steps are to glue in the transom seat, sand the outer edges of the transom and the transom seat to match each other and then line up the aft edge of the hull sides with the aft edge of the assembled transom and glue everything together. This is probably a good place to note that I sanded every piece before I install it, just to make sure I don’t get into a position where I can’t reach something later in the construction. I used 120, 180 and 600 grits. Next, the stem piece is installed (a triangular piece that provides a gluing surface for the sides). The midships and forward seats are glued to one side and then the two sides of the hull are brought together and glued. Then the chines are fitted inside the hull. This is the first slightly challenging operation. The chines are made from relatively thick stock and do not bend easily. I recommend wetting the chines, fitting them inside the hull and clamping them as shown in the photo. Wetting the chines makes them more flexible and will put less stress on the hull structure when installed. Installing the hull bottom is simple enough, but a little time needs to be spent ensuring proper alignment. The bottom is large enough to have overhang all the way around the hull, but the chines can distort the hull shape, so spend some time ensuring the hull is straight and true. Use the centerboard trunk as a reference and make sure the distance from the centerboard trunk to the chines are equal on both sides. One other thing: once the bottom is installed, painting the bottom of the seats or the area aft under the aft seat will be impossible. I painted those areas before installing the bottom. The model, of course, doesn’t fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. There will be gaps between the parts, in the slots where the tabs are fitted and around the edges of the after seat and transom. I used Elmer’s Wood Filler, thinned with a little water, to fill all those gaps.

The pieces are removed from the basswood sheet with a hobby knife. I used white glue for everything in this project. It’s inexpensive, easy to obtain, cleans up with water and dries quickly. I usually use a little piece of plate glass to mix paints, adhesives and as a stable, flat surface on which to align things. I always apply glue with a small paint brush to control how much I apply. I use small plastic clamps from Harbor Freight Tools for a lot of tasks like this. They’re very inexpensive, come in packs of six and don’t create a lot of pressure that can distort delicate parts. The transom seat knee is the first part that requires a little modification. The slot is wider than the knee, so it needs to be shimmed. I used a business card for this, but any piece of paper will work, just enough so the part fits in the slot and can be oriented perpendicular to the transom. Without an inspection mirror, it’s impossible to see that transom seat knee on the finished model, so some people might wonder why anyone would even bother shimming it and making it exactly perpendicular. It’s just me. I build for myself. If I didn’t do the job properly, every time I looked at the model, I’d see those defects.

The skiff is the simplest of Bluejacket’s kits. It’s a typical flat-bottomed boat in 1:12 scale (1” = 1’). I visited Bluejacket Shipcrafters on vacation several years ago and Nic said about the kit, “you can build that in about three hours.” I suppose you could slap it together in that amount of time; it took me a little longer. His point was correct, though. This kit was designed for the first-time builder, regardless of age. It requires simple tools and basic construction techniques. The instructions and plans are clear and complete. If that was your goal, you really could assemble the model in three hours. Still thinking the kids might want to build this model someday — I still have two more in my stash! — I took a lot of pictures of the early construction details and made notes of things that might not be obvious to them. Some of those photos and notes helped me with this build log. First, glue together the outer and inner transom and then glue the transom seat knee into the vertical slot in the inner transom.

In 2018, I bought three Bluejacket Skiff kits. The kids’ art teacher had suggested I might teach a model boat building class for her students. Nothing ever came of that and the kits went into my stash. I was feeling some COVID fatigue a few months ago and, wanting to work on something that wasn’t going to take a great deal of mental energy the skiff came out of the stash and onto the workbench. Here’s the finished model.

Thanks, everyone! I'll try these methods out and see what happens! Dan

Someone, I know, has a good answer to this one... I'm building a small boat model. (It's the Bluejacket Skiff.) I'm making the sail for it now and would like to add a number to it, as every small boat used for dinghy racing has. What's the best way to do that? I'm using a high thread count cotton, as recommended by Steve Wheeler in an article he wrote in the April 2004 Ships in Scale. His model didn't have a number on the sail, though. Iron-on transfers? Dry transfers? Some other technique? Just wondering what others have done. Dan

I know it's been a while since I posted any updates. I have made progress! You can see here the second planking belt completed and the first layer of the wale installed. It took me a couple of tries to get this right, but I was pretty happy with how it turned out. Notice anything weird? All that black staining? The instructions recommend using an archival marker to stain the edges of the wale, so went over to Hobby Lobby and bought one. I was really happy with how that went. It looks like paint and is a lot less hassle. I'd fitted the two pieces of the wale by wetting them, clamping them in place and letting them dry. I removed them, used the marker and then let them dry for a day before reinstalling as you can see here. Every time I touched the model, some of that black ink would come off on my hands. I tried cleaning it off with a cottom swab and you can see the result below. What a mess. I'm so close to finishing this project off and the last thing I wanted was to ruin everything by bleeding black ink everywhere. I decided to remove the wale and make a new one. I used the old one as the template. Even though I've removed the wale, there is still a little of that black ink on the frames. I've been carefully removing it, but that looks to be a project that's going to take a while. Anyone got any thoughts on where I went wrong? Dan

Not a lot of thought given to crew comfort in those ironclads, Brian. You'd made a point earlier about armor plating and I swear I'd read that armor was added to the forward casemate and pilothouse in light of battle experience. As I recall, after actions up the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers -- Forts Henry and Donaldson and Fort Pillow -- the need for that armor was clear. The boats would form up in line abreast, with only their forward guns bearing on the enemy batteries. They took a lot of punishment from directly ahead because of that and needed to beef up that armor. I believe Cairo's pilothouse was modified like that and I seem to remember seeing that extra armor on the pilothouse when visiting, but I looked around last night to try to find the reference for that and couldn't. Drove me nuts. I can usually lay my hands on a reference like that without any trouble, but not this time. I do know the forward casemate armor was beefed up over the original plans and that was done prior to any of the boats going into action. I even found a reference to proofing trials of that armor and it was found to be completely acceptable. Those trials were done at Cairo, IL. Dan

Spectacular! Maybe someday I can take on a project like this, but in the meantime, I'm just going to enjoy the work vicariously. Your construction of the boiler system reminds me of an incident aboard USS Mound City, a sister ship to Cairo, during an expedition up the White River in Arkansas. The goal was to knock out a river battery at St. Charles, AR. Here's how that went. "As the Mound City moved forward...she fired several shells, but the Confederates stayed quiet, well hidden in the trees and brush. AT 8:45 AM [June 17, 1862], Colonel Graham Fitch and his 46th Indiana were landed and proceeded up the left bank toward the bluff. Soon his skirmishers encountered Williams' men, and with the first Confederate positions pinpointed, the gunboarts opens with a heavy fire of grape and canister that forced Williams and his men to fall back. Fry's light guns now joined the fight and at 10 AM, Dunnington opened up with his battery. Kilty soon silenced Fry's lower battery and moved the Mound City to within two hundred yards of Dunnington's battery. By this time Fitch's men were in position to storm the meager defenses, but Kilty told him not to risk his men; the Mound City would silence the guns. As the Mound City passed the lower battery, Kilty ordered his men below to avoid the small arms fire from Confederate sharpshooters. Suddenly "there was a crack,' a rushing sound, and an awful crash." Commander KIlty had just opened the trapdoor to the gun deck and was shouting orders when a blast of live steam came rushing into the pilothouse. Kilty was thrown back and the pilot, blinded by the steam, fell through the opening to the steam-filled gun deck. One of Dunnington's shots from the rifled 32-pounder had penetrated the port casemate, tearing through four men; passed through the steam drum and heater; then lodged in the seerage cupboard. As steam enveloped the Mound City, men frantically tried to escape by jumping overboard. Rebel sharpshooters on the banks began firing at the scalded men desperately trying to save themselves. ... The Mound City's plight brought a quick repsones from Colonel Fitch and the other gunboats. Fitch ordered the gunboats to cease fire, then charged the enemy positions. Lt. George M. Blodgett, in the meantime, brought the Conestoga alongside and secured a line to the Mound City's stern, then began to tow her downriver. As Fitch's men overran the Southerners, cutters from the other boats were lowered to rescue as many survivors as possible. The Mound City was towed downriver about a mile and secured to the bank, after which the Conestoga's bluejackets entered the casemate. They were shocked at what they found. The scene was described by the correspondent from the Cincinnati Commercial: Here lay the bodies of some 20 men scalded to death, others with their mangled bodies severed asunder by the fatal shot. The gun deck was literally strewn with from 75 to 80 others, who, being badly scalded and horribly disfigured, were tearing off their clothing and long strings of bleeding flesh hangling from their finger ends, hands, arms, and lacerated bodies, and with eyes burnt out and closed, crying out for "Help, help -- water, give me water, water -- save me. Oh God, save me, save me. Oh! kill me, shoot me. Oh, do end my misery. Doctor will I live? Tell my wife how I died," and numerous pitiful exclamations and pathetic appeals of this character. The features of all were wonderfully distorted. Many could not be recognized by their most intimate friends." Every time I've visited USS Cairo and looked at that steam drum and the single steam outlet in the center of it, which branches to the two engines, I think of USS Mound City and the living hell aboard her when that shot penetrated the steam drum and let loose 140 psig (9.7 bar, 361°F, 183°C) steam into that confined space, with nowhere to run. It's just horrifying. That's what combat was like in these western river gunboats and they saw a lot of it. Mound City wasn't taken out of action by this. She was back in action at Vicksburg, Grand Gulf and the Red River Expedition in May 1864. She was sold in November 1865 and broken up in 1866. That account, by the way, is in another really great book, Ironclad Captain: Seth Ledyard Phelps and the U.S. Navy, 1841 - 1864 by Jay Slagle (Kent State University Press, 1996). And if you're ever in St. Charles, AR, you can see a monument to the action. According to the all-knowing Wikipedia, "its inscriptions commemorate the 148 Union soldiers who died in the explosion of the USS Mound City, caused by what is sometimes described as the single deadliest shot fired in the entire Civil War. Inscriptions on another side memorialize the smaller number of Confederate dead in the engagement. The monument was placed in 1919 through the efforts of a relative of William Hickman Harte, the master on board the Mound City who died in the explosion, and is one of the few memorials placed in a Confederate state by a northerner in commemoration of both Union and Confederate war dead." Dan

Brian: I've with everyone else on this. Thanks for the history lesson and your passion for the subject will keep you interested through a long build. One of these days, I'm going to try my hand at Cairo or a similar vessel myself. The naval side of the Civil War is overshadowed by the land war, but there's plenty there for the modeler, lots of technical innovation and experimentation, some of which worked out and some of which didn't. Dan

My pleasure. The Vicksburg Campaign is endlessly fascinating. I also recommend Vicksburg is the Key by Terry Winchell. It’s a good read by a terrific historian. I’ve heard him speak a couple of times and, before reading this book, thought his Triumph and Defeat was one of the best overviews of the campaign. I’m also a fan of the U.S Army War College Guide to the Vicksburg campaign, but you’ve really got to be interested in this stuff to get through that one! Dan

Grant Wins the War is a great, and underrated, book about the Vicksburg campaign. It's one of my favorites ... and I've read a lot of them. Another one that I highly recommend is Occupied Vicksburg by Bradley R. Clampitt. I could not put this book down. I'd often wondered what it was like for the civilians of Vicksburg. Before the war, Warren County, MS, was the wealthiest county in the country. Think of that! The country was, if not unionist, anti-secession. They knew which side their bread was buttered on. By the end of the war, the slave economy was gone. Their town was destroyed. The cotton economy had collapsed. The railroads had taken a huge bite out of the steamboat trade. The river would change course soon, leaving them landlocked. A quarter of their male, military age population was dead and they got what for their efforts? Nothing. And they were petitioning the Grant administration to get the Army Corps of Engineers to reroute the Yazoo River to give them a riverfront again. If I'd been a citizen of Vicksburg back then, I would have been furious at the people who brought all this about, the firebrands that got everybody worked up about secession! But that's not what happened. The people of Vicksburg were staunchly Confederate and worked for the Confederate cause during the war. During the occupation, they worked against the Union troops constantly, even though it was in their best interest not to. After the war, they still clung to their pro-Confederate positions. This book details all of that, along with the impact on former slaves and how they reacted to the defeat of Pemberton's army, the occupation of Vicksburg and their new-found freedom. It's absolutely fascinating. Dan