JSGerson

I have a simple tabletop Micro-Mark wood lathe that I have hardly used and have not much skill with. With this I made my very first wooden barrel using a short length of ½” dia. dowel. The barrel was cut, shaped, and then sliced off the dowel with the Byrnes saw. Surprisingly, I did it right on the first try! That is not my usual experience. The square hole was cut and then the barrel was stained with Minwax Early American 230.

Scuttlebutt and Scuttlebutt Table I found the US Navy plans for the scuttlebutt, but surprisingly, there were two types. The first one is the one you see on the ship today. It’s the barrel on its side with a square opening. The other, is an upright cask, oval in cross section, almost identical to today’s harness cask. I’ll using that plan as a guide when I make harness cask. The US Navy plan below has my working dimensions (in red) for the fabrication of the scale barrel. (BTW usedtosail, the name's Gerson,... Jonathan Gerson, but I'll take the compliment anyways 8-) )

The shaped wood stock was then sliced like a loaf of bread into twenty 1/16” slices and stained with Minwax Golden Pecan. Due to the B&W photos, I didn’t know the color of the guides. I assumed they were of natural wood finish as paint would have just worn off from the sliding chain. The last two images below show the guides on the deck as a dry fit. These will be glued into place before I move on.

The set up worked fairly decently using what cutters and grinding bits that I had, the end result was close enough to what I wanted, but not anywhere near to the exactitude of my original plan. But then it didn’t need to be.

Then using my Dremel drill press accessory, a jig was constructed so I could slide a piece of wood under a cutting bit of the drill. A piece of 1/8” x ¼” x 2” boxwood was the material of choice to be shaped. To aid in the setups, I sketched a profile of the guide on the end of the wood stock.

Using the arrangement drawing, I measured as best I could the width and length of the guides and guesstimate the height from which I form a plan.

Gun Deck Anchor Chain Guides I was going to work on the scuttlebutt, grog tub, and harness cask, but in the process of doing my research to figure out what their dimensions were, I ran across an old B&W photo showing all three of those items, but it also showed something else that I could not identify earlier while working on the deck eyebolts and rings. Indicated on the 1931 US Navy arrangement plans (Note, they are not shown on the 1927 arrangement plans), was something that appeared to be under the anchor chain, but I didn’t know what they were (example in red circle). The B&W photo cleared that up They were, for lack of a proper technical term, chain guides. So, that is what I worked on. As I count, there are 11 pairs of them, but only 10 pairs will be potentially visible on my model. Presently, on the actual ship, they don’t exist. I suspect they were removed, like many of the eyebolt and rings, due to tripping hazards for the tourists. Also, the anchors and their chains and ropes are not present on the ship either.

Gun Deck Eye Bolts and Rings Eye bolts and rings for the gun train tackle (pulls the gun back from gun port) and the messenger and anchor lines were added to the gun deck.

They were relatively easy to make due to their simply construction. The hardest part were the baseboards and the handles due to their delicateness and tiny size. The handles consisted of a vertical arced shape piece of wood with a loop of rope passing through its center. Those pieces of wood worked out to be about 5/32” long, 1/32” wide at its widest point, and 3/64” thick. I could barely hold them, let alone shape them. I had two choices for materials to use as the handle rope, left-over twisted brass wire I used for the construction of the bilge pump handles or thread. The thread at these short lengths and scale, is very stiff and does not hang naturally. The twisted wire on the other hand looks like rope and can be shaped to drape properly with little effort. So, twisted wire it was. The completed sea chests:

Because the sea chests have a natural wood finish, they were made from boxwood. Below is an image of my starting materials.

My basic plan was as follows:

Gun Deck Sea Chests This next gun deck item I will call “Sea Chests” for lack of a more accurate term, I couldn’t find any plans or diagrams, so size and shape are my best guess; there are two of them as far as I know. One is near the stove and the other is near the capstan. They appear to be built as part of the ship because at least one of them appears to have vertical structure going through it.

I'm impressed by your workmanship and not to mention your shop. Very nice work so far. Your opening statement was "Building out of the box." Are you planning not to deviate from the kit or do you have any surprises in store for us?. BTW, welcome aboard to the Conny builders. Jon

The pots which made from discs I carved out of basswood and 1/32” plywood. One rope pot has a cap on it and the remaining pots were left open to receive either rope or chain. 3/16” holes were drilled very carefully into the discs and the gun deck.

Chain and Rope Pots (Pipes) There wasn’t much that I could find in the US Navy plans about these chain pots or pipes. This where the anchor chains and ropes are funneled through the gun deck to their storage areas. The arrangement plans call them “pots” but the labels on the actual item on the ship call them “pipes”. I did find a rudimentary drawing which I believe is for the forward chain pot (labeled Hawse Pipe on the ship). The scale dimensions were determined by actual dimensions on other parts of the drawing (not shown). They appear to be the same size as the aft pots which to be used for the anchor hemp rope, but don’t have the extra shoulder.

In my last post I mentioned that I made some brass discs to represent the gun ammo scuttle. Here is what I based that on. Below is the US Navy plan for the scuttle with my scale dimensions in red as well as the actual scuttle images. In the end I did glue them into place.

Finally, the bilge pump pieces are glued together without any more major mishaps! Before I even added the touch-up paint, I had to see what they looked like on the deck, I also fabricated and placed some brass discs on the deck to represent the ammo scuttles. Nothing however is glued down to the deck and I don’t plan to until I finish creating all the deck furnishings including the guns and gun rigging.

After re-drilling the holes in the spheres, a bit wider and deeper, shortening the pump rods to their proper lengths, and with some trial and error, I think I got it. Here is an early dry fit test. The pieces must now be glued together, and paint added to worn areas during the adjustment and constant re-assembly process.

Remaking the A-frames to make them about ¼” taller was much easier this time as I knew what had to be done. The results were successful.

Thanks jgilchrist800, If all goes well, I should have the finished pumps soon with pics

I started to assemble the pumps, but when I got to the spheres and pump rods, thing went awry. The pump rods where way too long. I deliberately made them a bit longer so I could make fine adjustments when installing the pumps onto the deck, but this was way off. I checked the dimensions of the spheres, the and the A-frames. On there own they appeared correct. When I designed the parts, I used US Navy plan No. 50976, “Fittings, Pump & Pipe Fittings Over Galley, Sketches of Fire Pump-Berth Dk Water Pump-Berth Dk.” which shows the dimension of the spheres among other things and plan No. 24423, “Gun Deck General Arrangement Taken From Work Navy Yard – Boston”. I couldn’t find a drawings of the A-frame nor the pump rods, so they were designed from photos. Upon re-examining plan No. 50976, I discovered there was a partial sketch of the A-frame. I was pretty close to the actual dimensions for the A-frame but the upshot of this was, I made my A-frame about 1/8” too short in height. That’s about 9 5/8” in actual height. The cap size I bought for the spheres were close enough, but the tube slices I used to build the sphere assemblies had cumulative tolerance errors making the assembly a bit too tall. The Navy plan has the assembly as 13/64” scale vs ¼” as built. All in all, I lost up to ¼” space for the rods. That’s 40%. At 76.8:1 scale, the tolerances are very tight. As a result, I will remake the A-fames to gain some height. The spheres assemblies are locked tight with CA glue so those will remain. Below is a photo of the miss-matched pump rod, the pump plan revised again (red dimensions), plus the applicable sections of the US Navy plan No, 50976.

On top of the brass spheres there are what appears to be white discs. They are in fact protective canvas coverings over the top openings. These were made from 1/32” plywood. The top surface was beveled slightly inward with a Dremel tool. They were painted white with a small brown center. The pump rods will pass through the openings into the spheres. The remainder of the pieces that needed to be painted were painted gloss black. (Note the paint job may look a bit splotchy, but that’s just the weird reflections in the photo.) I just did not realize how many parts there were to the bilge pump when I started. As it turned out, the fabrication required 67 separate pieces of wood and brass rods, bars, tubes, and sheet. . This does not include all the rejected parts during the course of fabrication. Assembly is next.

The last two pump rods attached to the short rocker arm in between the two longer rocker arms on the quad pump go directly through an elongated brass guided opening in the deck. These guides were fabricated by squeezing a brass tube flat to the proper shape and slicing them off. They were capped off on one end by a piece of the brass sheet. Of course, in reality, the opening is not blocked like the model.

Starting the fabrication of the brass sphere assemblies, not having a punch of the right size, brass discs were hand cut from a 005” thick brass sheet, the same sheet I used to make the bulwark “boltheads.” Next, 1/32” thick slices of 3/64” dia. brass tube for the quad pumps and 1/64” slices for the double pump, were then CA glued onto the brass discs. I bought some 5 mm “memory wire end caps” (don’t know exactly what their original intended purpose was) in the DIY jewelry section of Hobby Lobby. I would have been just as happy with plain spherical beads but couldn’t find any of the right size and surface smoothness. These “caps” had one opening which did not pass through to the other side. I stuck them on the ends of toothpicks and painted them with copper enamel. The spheres were then CA glued onto 1/32” slices of brass 3/64” dia. brass tube for the quad pumps and 1/64” slices for the double pump. The discharge tubes were added angled slightly down for the quad pumps and horizontal for the double pumps. Why the pumps were designed this way, I don’t know.

All the pump rods pass through the copper spheres which have a discharge pipe except for two which are mounted on the short rocker arm. They passed through the deck directly. The pump rods were made from two short pieces of 1/32” bar and one longer piece of 1/32” rod. These were solder together.