JSGerson

The kit provided photoetched hinges which were not suitable for my purposes: · The hinges on the actual ship extend the whole vertical length of the port door and over to the transom below the port opening. The kit’s photo-etched hinges are the same hinges to be used on the gun ports. Those are half of the hinge. The other half would be fastened to the inside the gun port opening. · I needed physical support for the doors. Because there is so little glueable surface area on the hinges, actual nails were required to secure the hinges to port doors and transom face. With a pair of small scissors, four 1/16 strips of 0.005” brass plate were cut to size; the vertical length of the door plus the extension to attach to the transom. Two pieces per door were required. Four holes were drilled into the hinges with a #69 bit to accept the small brass nails for each hinge. Two nails to go into the door and two nails to go into the transom. The brass nails for the port door had to be cut in half because their length was longer than the thickness of the doors. Getting the brass nails through the hinge and into the meat of the door was a little tricky. 1. Locate the position of the first nail and mark it with a pin indentation. 2. Drill the hole using the pin indentation to start the drill, to a sufficient depth to accept the nail. 3. CA glue the half nail in the first hole on the hinge. 4. Place the hinge with the half nail into the drilled hole in the door. This positions the second hole. 5. Drill the second hole in the port door through the hole in the hinge. 6. Insert the second half nail into the second hole. 7. CA glue the nails and hinges 8. Repeat for the remaining hinges Once all the brass nails were inserted into the port door, the hinges were painted black as well as any required painting re-touches. You may have noticed that the nail heads appear to out of scale with the hinges. This couldn’t be helped as I had no other smaller brass nails. No mater though, they won’t be seen in the final assembly.

The port openings were marked on the transom and chiseled out using fine chisels and a Dremel rotary tool to a depth approximately equal to the port door thickness. Next, a hole was drilled vertically towards the tiller room area. The round opening size was determined by my calibrated eyeballs. The openings were painted white.

I don’t know what the purpose of these ports is. I can only speculate that maybe they are used for the maintenance of the rudder assembly or even repair of the rudder at sea. Possibly, ropes could be lowered down to facilitate an ad hoc rigging of the rudder due to battle damage. Or it could be simply a way of venting air in the tiller room. If anyone knows what these ports are called or what their purpose is, please let me know. The kit plans for the port doors show they are to be fabricated and installed in the closed position on the model. The practicum goes one step further and just etches the port door seams into the hull with an X-acto knife. No fabrication at all except for the round porthole because as the practicum states: “These ports are barely visible close up so no need to go overboard with them.” Well, as most of you readers know by now, I like detail. So, not only will I fabricate them, but I will also attempt to install them in the open position. I just can’t help myself. My port doors were constructed like a sandwich. The outer layer was 1/32” boxwood to be painted black on the outside face, The middle layer is a piece of mica to be the porthole glass, and 1/16” basswood for the inside layer with its face to be painted white.

Rudder Post Ports For the time being, I’ve finished with the bow excluding the bowsprit and rigging. It’s time to work once again on the stern. First up, the two ports on either side of the top of the rudder post. The practicum calls them “chase ports” but chase ports are gun ports facing forward at the bow or aft at the stern. These are not gun ports on the USS Constitution. When the port is opened, you can see there is a round cross-section tunnel leading up to the tiller room area in the berth deck above. There is no room for a gun or even a man standing. Surprisingly, I could not identify where the tunnel opened in the tiller room.

A few more images I forgot to post

Your jib sails are very neat and clean. Well done. You have constructed your model a whole lot faster me. I started in 2017 and five years later, I have still not completed the hull. Of course, my Model Shipway kit is a larger scale at 1:76.8 (more detail) and I decided to add the gun deck to my model. So, I have not reached the point where I have to make the decision whether or not to rig the model with sails. The only boat I've ever added sails to was the Evergreen (my 1st wooden model) which you can see in the little image I use as my identifier to the left of my comments, so I don't have a lot experience making them That being said, the reason I haven't made that decision is scale. When you scale down the thickness of the sail material which isn't thick to begin with, it's almost gossamer thin and semi transparent and I've had difficulty finding modeling material to emulate that. Just about every model with sails has dealt with that by ignoring the scale and gone for the appearance. You are doing a fine job in that department. I look forward to your next post.

Using a 1” nail with a flat head, I ground off two opposing side flush to the shaft. Then with a Dremel rotary tool and needle files, the remaining portion of the nail head was fashioned to look like a cleat. Next, the shaft of the nail was placed into the Dremel rotatory tool so it acted like a mini lathe. A file was clamped with a vise and the nail shaft was ground such that the shaft was narrowed down to a very small diameter while leaving a small section at the top, thick. When satisfied, the part was cut off resulting in two tiny cleats with a pin at their base which was inserted into drilled holes (#44 bit) on the fourth posts port and starboard.

One last check of my photos revealed one more detail, a cleat had to be installed. I was going to check my supply of cleats I previously purchased building the Rattlesnake but for the life of me, I couldn’t find them. They were not where I thought I stored them. This gave me a chance to brush up on making them with a method I taught myself some years back.

1/32” x 3/32” basswood was used as the planking material in lieu of the plan called 1/64” x 3/32” stock because that was not supplied in the kit as noted in the practicum. I believe that the 1/16” was a typo in the plans. Each plank had to be custom sized and shaped before installation. I painted the top and bottom planks black before installing them to make painting near the rails easier later on. Bothe sides of the planking were painted black.

Using a 3/8” spacer, seven 1/16” x 1/16” vertical posts were spaced and glued into place from the second rail up to the first. The plans appear to show an eighth post right next to the hull, but since that rail would be buried behind the forthcoming planking, it wasn’t worth the effort to install it.

The final major part of the bow is the bow top rail and the planking below it. Finally, a simple rail to construct. It is a straight piece of 1/16” x 3/32” stock basswood, cut to length, painted black with 1/64” white pinstripes added.

There is a slight swoop up towards the stem tip that required some fine tweaking, but I eventually got the seat of eases installed on top of the rail support bracing beams. This image shows the seats installed with the unfinished bowsprit dowel dry fitted in place for show. The top rail will complete the bow.

The top pieces with the seat holes had to be 1/64” thick because the seat openings exposed the thickness of the material. I chose to use 1/64” plywood for the top “L” shape pieces, for the required width of stock and its strength. The seat holes were drilled out before the parts were cut from the stock sheet to prevent breakage. A line was drawn both on the top and on one side of each of the components to represent a separation line that the actual ship has. It appears that the real seats were made in two sections each. Finally, solid wood triangular pieces were fabricated to complete the flooring. The final image shows the dry fit. Just as a note, Mr. Hunt brought up a point that the grid pattern showing the openings beneath the seats contradicts the pattern used to construct the seats. Specifically, the grid opening shape against the hull, is a parallelogram whose end forms an acute angle to the hull. The seat end, on the other hand, is at right angles to the hull. Mr. Hunt chose to make his seats follow the grid pattern. I chose the right angle based on a US plan (showing six seats per side) as well as some modern photos. BTW, finding any images of the bow showing the seats of ease area, are exceedingly rare because the public is not allowed in that area. No public, no pictures.

Grating and Seats of Ease The kit plans called for pairs of 1/32” x 1/16” rail support beams on either side of the rail supports. Accordioning to the plans both the kit and the US Navy, these cross beams are flush with the top of the rail supports. They support the gratings upon which the seat of ease rest. However, either I or Mr. Hunt misinterpreted the plans because at the end of Chapter 8.1 he states: “I chose not to model these as it's nearly impossible to see them.” See them or not, they are important as I interpret the plans. As result, his construct of the gratings and seats of ease, are lower than the cross beams had he installed them, while mine are resting top of cross beams. Be that as it may, here is what I did. Following the practicum, I cut the seat of ease side pieces from 1/16” basswood stock and assembled them using the kit’s plan as my template. The kit actually called for 1/64” thick pieces to be used, but since their thickness would not be seen by the viewer, the thicker pieces were more stable and easier to handle. The kit provided three laser-cut pieces of the grating for each side, which I temporarily taped together for dry fit purposes.

I assume the boomkins on the actual ship had some sort of fasteners to hold the beams in place to the hull, but I could not find any information on that. Therefore, they were just glued into place. The boomkins did have two metal rod hull braces each. The kit called for 0.023” wire for these braces. I needed something stiff, so brass and copper wire were not suitable, but I did have “0.020” and 0.026” music wire. I chose to use 0.026” wire in lieu of 0.023”, which I did not have. Holes were drilled into the hull and boomkins in the appropriate places following the kit plan with a #72 drill bit. After a little trial and error, the wire s were sized for length and the wire ends bent for the appropriate holes.

Looking at my efforts, I realized I needed to do this all over again but with a harder wood because the square edges of the boomkins were already beginning to wear down during the fabrication process. Using 1/8” x 1/8” stock pear wood that I had left over from when I constructed my Rattlesnake, the results were much better. They were then painted black. The brass bands held three eyebolts. Two eyebolts, one on the aft side and the other on the bottom of the boomkin, were aligned lengthwise following the line of the boomkin. The third eyebolt located on the top of the boomkin was installed perpendicular to the boomkin as was shown in the various photographs of the actual ship. To do this, a pin was used to make the initial dent in the brass for the #77 drill bit. The holes were drilled through the brass into the wood. After each hole was drilled, a full-size eyebolt was inserted so the brass band would not move while the next hole was being drilled. Then the eyebolts were removed, cut to size, and permanently installed with CA glue. This secured the brass bands as well.

Bow Boomkins I was about to install the grating and fabricate the seats of ease in the bow when I realized that the pair of bow boomkins needed to be fabricated and installed first because they were physically below the grating. Surprisingly, the practicum did not address these components. Initially, utilizing the kit’s 1/8” x 1/8” stock basswood, the boomkin were fabricated by tapering the pieces of wood to 3/32” x 3/32” at one end. Then, with a square cross-section needle file, the triangular indents on the tapered ends were formed. Using 0.005” brass metal sheet, two strips of the metal were cut to size, wrapped around the boomkins to form the brass bands, and then blackened.

I've collected and cataloged about 1,000 images of the ship over the years, so if you need an image of a particular item, just let me know. The chances are good that I will have a number of photos from different angles of it. Jon

Welcome back. I've been working on this kit slowly but steadily for about 5 years now, and maybe half way through. Of course that may be because I've added a gun deck which Mr. Hunt did not do. I look forward to your build log restarting. Jon

From your images, the green looks good to me. Like all painted surfaces, how it looks depends among other things, on the light source. Go online and find an image of the bulwarks in the full sun and compare that with your model under the same type of lighting. Then decide if you need to adjust. Jon

I noticed the fine detail work on the trailboard and was wondering how you got such nice results. I had a devil of a time making mine at 1:76.8 scale and your model is even smaller at 1:100 scale. The paint work is fabulous. That must of taken a very fine brush and a very steady hand. Well done!

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, the MS plan drawings of the rail supports do not fit properly on my model. Whether I’m at fault or the plans are, is immaterial. These have to be custom made now., By trial and error measuring using card stock, a first try template was drawn and cut out of the cardstock. Once I got the card stock to fit, it was traced onto 1/8” thick stock wood. Once I got the wooden piece to fit, I realized that it had to be refined a bit more. A second wood rail support was fabricated. This was able to fit properly onto the rails. The support was removed, painted and pin striped. Finally, it was installed. This was repeated the same manner (with or without an extra preliminary wood support as needed) for the remaining nine supports.

This is when I discover a new problem. According to the MS plans, the precut gammoning holes in the stem are supposed to be between supports Nos. 2 and 3. Per the marks I just made with the gratings, the gammoning holes straddle rail support No. 3. The gammoning holes are where the gammoning chains pass through. Looking at the US Navy 1927 -31 Restoration plan No. 24779, the gammoning holes have been replaced with eye bolts embedded into the stem. The gammoning chains are then connected to the eye bolts. The chains are fastened to the bowsprit in the same manner as shown in the MS plans. These stem bolts are positioned half the distances apart as the pre-cut holes are and appear to be straddling rail support No. 3 from the numerous photos that I’ve looked at. Based on the all the ambiguities, just about nobody will even know about or bother to look inside the rails supports to see if there is even any gammoning there, let alone whether it is correct or not. Therefore, I am going to use the existing gammoning holes as they exist on my model in lieu of the embedded bolts shown on the US Navy plans, just because as builder of the model, I like the way they look.

Now it’s time to install the rail supports. These are positioned such that the joints of the floor grating in the seats of ease area, rest on the horizontal structural beams attached to the rail supports. In other words. Where the gratings meet, that is where the rail support is supposed to be. Using the grating parts supplied in the MS kit, I taped the three pieces together that make up most of the flooring, to mark off where the joints are with the architect tape on the stem.

I don't know how much "easier" building a cross section is than the full ship. The cross section has a lot more detail below decks. You might want to look at Tom Culp's build of the Model Shipway' Cross Section of the Constitution. In the mean time, I've attached a number of US Navy plans showing the cross section. You can find more plans with other details at the US Constitution Museum website. 130241 - Midship Section sh1.pdf 34535001.pdf