JSGerson

The hood slipped into place.

When I went to make the tent looking hood, I realized that BlueJacket’s stove didn’t match the stove on the actual ship, so I had to redesign the back plate.

The edge of the tray was formed using card stock. It was initially glued on with CA glue and then lightly covered with addition CA glue to solidify it. BTW, most of the gluing was with PVC glue as it gives me a chance to make final adjustments before it sets. I also added some posts as a gluing surface.

In addition, I found a computer-generated image of that stove based on those parts. I now had a simplified image from which I could work from.

Using my highly sophisticated CAD program, MS PowerPoint (that’s a joke), I worked out how I was going to construct my stove. At the core, would be a solid block with 1/64” plywood side panels. This would provide the basic shape. All the other parts would be added to it.

Ship’s Stove (Camboose)

This ship’s stove is totally scratch built without any solid plans to go by. The Camboose is more than likely a variant of a Brody Stove of which I have found some plans but none matched exactly what is on the ship today. As most of us do, I follow numerous other builders to see how they handled certain problems and challenges. In doing so, I discovered that BlueJacket’s model of the Constitution is supplied with photo etched parts to construct a stove albeit at 1:96 scale. Fortunately, I found a particularly good image online of these parts.

I scaled the image of the photo etched parts to match the US Navy arrangement plans of the gun deck at 76.8. Now I could measure the photo etched parts directly for my dimensions. I constructed the BlueJacket stove using card stock to get a feel of what I needed to do when I designed my stove out of wood. Stock and plywood.

It was at this point I realized something was wrong with the foremast ring. It didn’t fit completely over the hole on the gun deck. It seems I had made the grating next to the mast a bit too long. Knowing this error would be difficult to see, I chose to flatten on side of the ring. Unless you knew, you wouldn’t know.

Using the thickness of the rings supplied by the kit and the plan view of the rings from the Navy, templates were made, and rubber cemented to a piece of 3/32” basswood stock. They were then drilled cut, carved, and sanded into shape. Finally, they were painted green.

OK now I use this image

Oops I meant to post this image

Gun Deck Mast Rings

The first things to install on the gun deck were the mast rings. The kit provides mast rings for the spar deck, obviously none for the gun deck. Because I could not find a US Navy plan that showed mast ring details, all I had to go on were the Navy’s deck plans and a few photos of the main mast ring. Because the bilge pumps were photographed a lot, a few captured the main mast which was next to them. As many photos as there were, very few included the main mast with a clear view of the ring. I could not find any photos of the mizzen or foremast rings.

Those guns and carriages look great. I'm going to have to be creative on my gun deck armament. For some reason, if I use the carriages that came with the kit (I have extras as the kit does not provide any for the gun deck), they are a bit low in the gun ports. I know of someone else who had the same problem and remade their carriages a bit taller. I have a ways before I get there to figure out how I am going to do it. That really is a nice carriage jig. A word of caution, the kit cannonades for the spar deck are based on the 1926 renovation, which in turn are based on British cannonades, but they are the wrong period.  A couple of cannonades on the actual ship, are correct and they have a vertical screw for vertical barrel adjustment and a different design for the carriage than what the kit provides. Something to think about.

Ohhh, she's a beauty!! You wouldn't perhaps have a build log?

At this point I’m going to leave Robert Hunt’s practicum for a while leaving the hull planking unfinished. I need to install all the goodies in the gun deck before I close off the hull. If you may remember, I added hand ropes and stanchions to the ladders going below the gun deck. These have been effectively knocked off and must be repaired which requires access through the hull. And, before I can do that, I have to finish the gun deck. There is a lot of stuff to add, and most of it I don’t have any plans, I will be an adventure.

The blocks were initially carved to shape using a disk sander and custom fitted into position by dry fitting and adjusting the shape with sanding sticks and files. This took a while and I got as far as my skills would take me. They still needed filler to complete the job. Thankfully, all of this will be covered in black paint.

Continuing with the bottom quarter galley filler, I cut out the patterns from copies of the plans and rubber cement them onto the wood blocks. The plans show only the starboard side so of course you must make a mirror filler block for the port side. So far, so good. However, the starboard pattern also show the position of a hole that is supposed to be “under the officers’ head” in the quarter galley. I drilled an 1/8” hole in the starboard block as indicated by the plans. The question was, does the port side also have a head? According to the USS Constitution Museum’s documentation (January 18, 2014, Life at Sea Blog), “The captain had the cushiest arrangements. His private privy was located in one of the quarter galleries.” Since the captain had only one privy, I left the port side alone. No privy hole was drilled.

Well, I’m back, sort of. After 9 months, my left eye can almost see 20/20 with my new glasses. My right eye is starting to heal after about 2 months, so it has a way to go. Reading and close-up are still hit or miss, but with my close-up head gear magnifier, I should be OK…. considering we have a pandemic going on.

While I was dealing with my eyes, I got a full-blown hacker attack who tried to steal my credit. It involved all my credit cards (email and postal address change attempts, additional cards in different names, attempts to add on accounts), my savings bank account, the financial institution accounts where my financial advisor is, attempted online purchases through Google and ebay and they even tried changing my US Mail address. All within a 5 day period. Luckily, I was able to thwart it in time by changing account numbers, login IDs and passwords, acquiring all new credit cards and numbers, professionally having my computer checked for viruses (there were none) and notifying the all three of the credit bureaus and the IRS. A real pain in the butt. I hope that’s the end of it

So, hopefully I won’t have any more interruptions and have started working on the model again. Looking forward to posting new stuff soon.

Me too.

Within an hour of my last posting things changed. It had been almost a year since my left eye cataract surgery. I had seen the eye doctor for a scheduled appointment the previous week for the right and told him that I was feeling occasional pain. He said it was time we did the right since the right cataract had gotten bigger and was swelling the lens. The following week I got the required EKG and Covid-19 test. BTY, the Covid-19 test is the longest 15 seconds you will ever endure – painful. OK that brings it up to my last post. I get a pain like someone pokes me in the eye which lasts from Saturday evening to Monday morning and my right vision is completely fogged over. My left vision still hasn’t fully recovered. I still can’t read with it

The original planned 20-minute surgery took an hour and a half which the doctor described as the most difficult surgery he had performed in his 35-year career. So right now, my right eye is still fogged up with four stitches and my left eye has no close-up vision. Corrective lens are about two months away, awaiting stitches removal and healing. Model building will have to wait some more.

Typing this message was a pain even with the zoom in and spell check capabilities of a word processor. I keep hitting the wrong keys.

I don’t feel too bad as Mr. Hunt stated in his practicum that he had to use a bunch of wood filler as well. Once I finish the basic structure of the quarter galleries, I will fill in any remaining gaps with wood filler.

The patches were made by taking a piece of scrap basswood and cutting it into the basic triangle shapes to match the areas of repair. The through repeated trial and error, I carved the necessary contours on the bottom of the patch so they would snug. The patches were then glued into position and then filed to their final shape.

Luckily, this area of the model probably will not be seen very well by the casual observer. Following my sketch line, I continued to trim the transom and filed down the corner of the wale. Instead of ripping out chunks of the wale to make the repair (and probably my hair as well), I opted for a wooden filler patch. The whole thing will eventually be painted black and will be on the underside of the model in the shadows so hopefully it won’t attract any attention.

The wales were tapered with a sanding stick and lots of elbow grease, so it took a while. Now came the part I was not too sure of. As I mentioned earlier. I did not trim the lower transom because I was quite unsure where or what the cut was supposed to line up with. Well I found out. It was only after I trimmed the excess transom planking that I realized that the wale was supposed to bend around the stern and mate up with the transom. Mine didn’t. Had I trimmed the transom first, as instructed by the practicum, I might have realized what should have been done.

Tape was fragile because there isn’t much surface area on the bulkheads for it to stick to, so I marked the bulkhead where the bottom the lowest plank edge had to follow as indicated by the tape. The pictures above were taken before I painted the bulkhead edges so I could see the tick marks and had to lay out the tape a second time after I paint them. I measured the distance from the bottom of the lowest plank from the gun port band of planking to the tape at each bulkhead from bulkhead N aft and divide by seven, the number of planks that had to fit in that space. That became the individual plank width corresponding to that bulkhead. This took some time

Finally, I got all the wale planks installed. But I still have one more thing to do before the wale construction is completed. I must taper the wale to the stem rabbet as well as to the hull planking below the wale as indicated in the instruction booklet.

In order to determine the various plank widths, I initially tried laying a planking strip down on the bulkheads and letting it naturally curve up into the transom. To do this I tried using some plank clamps I bought from Model Expo many years ago when I was building the Rattlesnake to hold the plank in position. They were useless then and they were useless now. They are just too clumsy. So, I went to tape.

I've seen demonstrations both live and on YouTube and they make seem so easy. That comes with practice, lots of practice and this is only my second planked model!

I opted for a third method, a variation of the tick strip. Instead of marking ticks on the bulkhead edges, I marked the planks with the bulkhead position lines and the corresponding width at those locations. Then I sanded down the widths and verified the width dimensions with a digital micrometer at each bulkhead location. Finally, the whole plank was smoothed to make a nice clean transitioned as the plank narrowed.

In lieu of this failure, I tried to use the tick strip method but that too had problems. The variations of the plank widths is 3/32" wide to 3/64" at the narrowest width. The pencil tick marks themselves are relatively thick in comparison to variation in plank widths and I better be damn accurate in the tick spacing on the bulkhead edges. I even tried painting the edges white so I could see the tick marks better.