Cathead

The eyes on that piece are where they eventually suspend the anchor chains from (via some rope loops), but darned if I can tell why the wooden post has a hole in it. Can't be for a flagstaff, that would directly interfere with the rigging plan.

Those gaps seem fine for a first layer but I agree you'll want to use some filler.

If you want to see canoes on the river in Kansas City, check out the Missouri River 360, an annual canoe race from KC to St. Charles (outside St. Louis) that happens every summer. Hundreds of people launch from Kaw Point, just above Kansas City. As for recreational use in Sioux City vs. farther downstream, keep in mind that in the former you're a lot closer to the lowermost dam near Yankton, so the water levels are more controlled and it's easier to have recreational use. Down here in Missouri, especially below KC, river levels vary a lot more and there's also more water entering from various tributaries, so floods and changes in river level are more common, making it harder to maintain recreational infrastructure.

I just keep getting ahead of myself! You are all correct and I shouldn't be referring to "tar paper". I got sloppy and used that as a general name for a sealed roofing material, when what I was thinking of was something like the suggestions of sealed canvas. I remembered this topic coming up in my Arabia log but hadn't gone back to check the details yet. Which I've now done and @Bob Cleek wrote a long, very useful post on the subject that's worth reviewing for anyone interested. I can't check Bates at the moment as I'm away from home but I feel like the canvas approach makes a lot of sense. And yes, Keith, it was a great day out. We're hoping to find time to do a longer (4-5 day) canoe trip on the Missouri this summer, probably from Kansas City to somewhere in central Missouri.

So I had a sort of epiphany that might really change how I move forward on this model, and I want to get some feedback on it. From the very beginning I was assuming I'd plank the boiler deck. Why did I assume that? Because on every other steamboat I've built, the boiler deck was planked, so of course this one would be too. But. On all those other boats, the boiler deck wasn't the uppermost deck; it was partially or fully covered by the hurricane deck. See these two: The uppermost deck (in these cases, the hurricane deck) wasn't left openly planked but instead covered in some form of waterproofing because they functioned primarily as roofs over the lower decks. This was based on my general understanding of steamboat practice. But in the case of Peerless, the boiler deck fulfils that "roof" role. As previously argued for other reasons, I don't think passengers would have routinely been up there. So why not model the boiler deck covered with something like tarpaper, rather than a nicely planked deck? Not only does this make a fair amount of sense from a realism point of view, it also vastly simplifies the job of completing that deck. Instead of another painstaking planking job, I can use a single thin sheet of scrap wood and lay "tarpaper" over it. The other reason to plank the boiler deck was you can technically see it from below, through the open framing. At first I assumed that laying a thin sheet of wood on that would look silly, but I tested it and I don't think you can really tell. I could also scribe the bottom of the sheet or otherwise weather it to hide the "sheetness", but in practice there's almost no viewing angle where you're seeing the underside at more than a very shallow angle. So this feels really exciting because it saves a ton of work, while actually potentially making the model more realistic as it seems logical that this uppermost deck was covered rather than openly planked, or at least that that's one logical option. Thoughts?

Aligning holes between post and deck is definitely hard. What I do is drill into the post, insert a wire/pin just a fraction longer than the hole, then press the post in place to leave a tiny divot in the deck. That's why you leave the pin just a hint longer, so you can get the post where it's supposed to be. Then you drill into the deck using the divot you left, and install using a longer wire/pin. That way you're not trying to match up two different holes; the hole in the deck ends up wherever the hole in the post ended up.

One reason to advocate for models under 2' long is that they'll fit through standard 30" doorways without having to turn sideways, even allowing for a case. Any bigger than that and they get more awkward to move around. That also "feels" right for something that won't dominate any space it's put it.

I'll betray my regional bias and suggest a modern river towboat of the kind used on American inland waterways (such as the Mississippi River and its many navigable tributaries). BlueJacket has a nice collection of work boats and this would really expand that genre. Lots of modern prototypes available; here are a couple from the Missouri River (my photo): And another in the Chain of Rocks canal near St. Louis (also my photo): As for scale, if you made these in 1:87 there'd be a lot of crossover sales appeal for model railroaders, while you could also make them at a larger scale (1:64 or 1:48) to allow for detail and ease of building. These vessels are amazingly diverse in size and design; you can flip through a large gallery of images here: https://www.towboatgallery.com/The_Towboat_Gallery.php?pic=162&tnc=1&mnu=

You didn't by chance have a career in the medical field, did you? Always love watching your carving evolve.

Have you considered drilling a small hole in each post and inserting a small pin that helps anchor it to the deck? This can really help with accidental swipes.

Nice job & display spot, thanks for bringing us along!

Building wooden kits takes a LOT of attention to detail; it always amazes me what I forgot, overlook, or screw up no matter how much I think I've been paying attention! Just keep your head on straight and plug away. If you're not satisfied with your doors, you could try making new ones from thin pieces of scrap wood. These might be easier to paint cleanly than a single brass piece. You could even consider using a single piece of wood and using a thin pen or pencil to draw in the framing. Beagle is a neat ship and I look forward to seeing how you make this model your own!

Brian, freezing rain here, too, I almost wiped out this morning dumping the overnight ash from my wood stove even though I knew perfectly well there was ice. John, depending on how young you are, ice on that stretch of the Mississippi (I assume from distance you mean around the Rock Island area) probably behaved very differently. Once the Mississippi was lock-and-dammed in that area were relatively few stretches of free-flowing water, whereas the Missouri is entirely free flowing in its lower reaches (from South Dakota down). So it would be hard to get this kind of flowing ice field on that part of the Mississippi because the regularly spaced dams slow the current and intercept the ice, whereas here we're getting a straight flow of ice from however far away it manages to travel on the open current.

Steamboats, like another nautical venues, had a lot of terminology that wasn't logical but just...was. The main deck is the main deck, which is logical. The second one is the boiler deck, although the boilers were never there (always on the main deck). The third deck is the hurricane deck. The fourth, if there is one, is the Texas deck. There is no clear answer for any of these, though theories abound, but they were universally known and used. One argument for "hurricane" is that it's high enough up on the vessel to really start catching the wind. But none of these were assigned, they just developed organically into a universal idiom, and language doesn't always make sense. For a loose comparison, think of the orlop deck on a sailing vessel. That word universally tells mariners you mean the lowest deck of however many there are, even though the word itself sounds nonsensical in English. Supposedly it comes from a Dutch word meaning "overlap", and there's probably some organic language development going on there that made perfect sense at one time (I don't know the detailed etymology). But, like lots of jargon, "orlop" or "hurricane" deck let us refer to a specific idea very concisely and clearly as long as we all understand the definition, regardless of how convoluted the origin story is.

Somewhat off-topic but still relevant, we went out to the Missouri River today in our part of central Missouri, along a stretch Peerless would have navigated many, many times. The river is extremely low right now, not just because we're in a significant drought, but also there's likely an ice jam somewhere in the area. Gage data downstream of us show a major drop in river level that is typical of an ice jam upstream holding back water, and also some localized sudden fluctuations in river level that signify adjustments in the jam as sudden bursts of water are released as the pack adjusts itself. Here's an initial view of fractured ice floes moving downriver (to the left); the current is still pretty swift here, telling us that the jam is somewhere downstream. It's a mesmerizing scene as these all rotate, collide, and scrape along with an unmistakable hissing complexity. We hiked about 1.5 miles upriver to a place that's normally an isolated island in the river, but at these low levels creates a massive sandbar connecting to the bank. In all but the lowest river conditions (like now), the foreground here would be underwater with only the highest point in the middle back remaining above "normal" river level and certainly going entirely under in floods. These conditions give a rare chance to reach islands like these by foot, so we took advantage and explored. The exposed bar itself is about a mile long under these conditions, so by the time we'd explored it all and hiked back to our access point, it was about a 5 mile round trip. Lots of fantastic ice formations along the river itself, with many levels of ice recording former higher water levels that have since dropped, leaving isolated and collapsed ledges. There's some great rock-picking along these bars, too, as the Missouri carries sediment all the way from Montana as well as lots of originally glacially transported material, so the diversity can be spectacular. The temperature hovered below freezing with a biting wind funneling up the valley, but it was a great time to be out! Days like these make it easy to understand how freeze-ups along the Missouri, Ohio, and upper Mississippi could destroy fragile wooden steamboats. The wrecked photo of Peerless I've been showing above relates to ice that crushed her hull on the Missouri River near St. Louis on December 30, 1903. Ice wrecked a lot of boats on these rivers. Today's conditions relate to a few weeks of bitterly cold weather here, but the ice will soon be gone. Toward the end of the day, a shelf of cloud raced northeast, presaging a major warmup that will bring freezing rain on Monday and then relatively warm (above freezing day and night) conditions the rest of the week, so we'll start to lose the ice. Hence why we made a point of getting out there when we could. Here's one more shot from later in the day, after the clouds had moved in, from another point about 7 miles downriver but still above the ice jam because conditions are the same. We never did find the jam, we had to head for home eventually. Hope that little diversion was of interest!

Technically that'd be called the hurricane deck, though this kit plays pretty fast and loose with reality so you can call it whatever you like!

It sounds logical; all I can say is I've never run across any reference to such an arrangement. It's definitely too intrusive for me to add without some evidence. That's what I'm envisioning logically, but like my answer to Brian above, I'm reluctant to add such a prominent detail of something I have no real evidence for. More great insights, thanks for this. The details of propulsion engineering are the weakest part of my steamboat knowledge, I'm just not a natural engineer. It's cracking me up that the detail I knew about and intentionally left out (expansion loop) might not even have been there, while the detail I didn't know about (insulation) probably should be there but won't at this point. I think I can justify some stacks of coal sacks parallel to the boiler (obviously with some separation) even if I leave out details on exactly how it made it into the firebox. But I'm also going to be patient this time and see if anyone else chimes in with ideas. I learned my lesson on not running my steam line plans by the community before plunging ahead; I don't have to solve this detail right away.

Thanks for the input, John, which reinforces my assumption that the fuel storage needs to be in front of, or very close to, the firebox. But I still need to figure out how to achieve that on Peerless, which being so small has very little room for that. R.E.L. is something like three times the size of Peerless. If you look at the photo of the wrecked boat from the bow, you can see there's no physical structure in front of the boilers; you can see right past the capstan to the firebox doors. And there's not enough boiler deck overhang to protect any fuel storage there from rain. I'm wondering if there were sacks of coal stacked along the posts parallel to the boiler, and maybe they just hauled out a sack at a time to the front of the firebox and dumped it on deck for shoveling into the firebox, or even tried to shovel out of the sack? She's a small vessel and maybe there didn't need to be anything more formal than that? Maybe I make a very small, low, three-sided structure that would loosely corral a sack's worth of coal but wouldn't be high enough to be seen in photos? I might mock that up so people can judge what I'm saying. But I'm reluctant to add completely made-up details. I agree that firewood stacks are quite attractive on a steamboat model, but by ~1900 she would have been burning coal under most circumstances. Wood would seem anachronistic even if they occasionally did so if their coal stock ran out.

On to this weekend's work so far. I decided not to tackle anything controversial for once and focused on some simpler tasks. I decided to partially enclose the stairs, as was often done on these boats. This was pretty straightforward and I only took photos of the final product. I added a simple door at the back, figuring that the space under the stairs would make a pretty good storage area for something. A close look in the above photos (and those to come) will also show that I did a little deck weathering with brushed-on pastels to make dirtier tracks along likely walking routes for the crew (from doors, around the boilers and pumps, etc.). I also finished installing all the support posts, which really helps bring out her "steamboatness". This is where she starts looking like a proper river vessel and not some awkward barge. Here are two shots with the model held up at similar angles to prototype photos. I think it's bringing out the essence of the original. The glue joints between the posts and the overlying beams are pretty small and a couple have broken free already under handling. So I decided to reinforce them by carefully drilling a very small hole through each beam, down into each post, and running a thin wire down through. I then clipped off each wire. This should add some extra stability; if nothing else a future failed glue joint now won't result in a post tipping over. And now on to the community question. We previously discussed how coal would have been stored, and the general assumption seems to be that there should be some kind of small open bunkers near the firebox, as on Chaperon. But looking at the layout of the model (and prototype) I'm really struggling with how to do this. Here's the area these would have to fit in: If they go inside the posts they're really close to the hot boiler and breeching. But if they go outside the posts they wouldn't be entirely protected by the overlying deck, and indeed one prototype photo implies they weren't there because there's a stack of cargo sacks there: It can't be forward of the firebox, not only because the overlying deck doesn't carry that far, but because another photo shows there's nothing there None of my photos show the area more clearly than these two. So where was the coal storage? I can't figure out how to do it. Thoughts?

Thanks for the further detail from Roger, Ken, Kurt, and others; I appreciate all the insights. Always more to learn. And welcome, John! I've made the executive decision not to alter anything about the steam lines. I accept the real and potential errors, and that I got ahead of myself there, but I think it would be too disruptive to the model to attempt to repaint or otherwise alter them. To answer my initial trivia question about "one detail that's not quite right, and one I intentionally left out": The detail that's not quite right is the angle of the stairs. I used pre-made stairs from my scrapbox, but their natural angle would have extended out too far and blocked too much of the engineroom doors, so I just installed them at a steeper angle more like a ship's ladder. You can technically see that the treads aren't flat if you look closely at the photo below, but it's pretty subtle, and I decided it was well worth not trying to scratchbuild stairs that would probably look worse! The detail I left out was an expansion loop in the main steam lines. You can see this in the background of the photo from Kurt's Chaperon below: In this case my brass rods on hand weren't long enough to include this and still run the whole length in one piece, and I thought it was too subtle a detail buried up there in the rafters. I'm a little surprised no one else caught this. Leaving this out ends up fitting the level of accuracy for the rest of the steam lines, for better and for worse. Next post will share updates and a new question for the community to help me with.

Can't help with details as I haven't built this, but that's a frustrating problem.

Great photos, Ian! That machinery looks MUCH more modern than anything Peerless would have had in 1893, and it looks like that version of Klondike operated 1937-1955, so I'm not sure there's much direct comparison to be made. Side note, I think Peerless would have fit within Klondike's boiler deck cabin! Thanks for the input, Kurt. Do you have thoughts on the previous suggestions that insulation would have related to condensing in the steam lines?

Useful feedback, thank you. I clearly haven't gotten my head around all the engineering questions even after multiple steamboat models. I've been loosely using Kurt's model as a visual resource, and as he left his steam lines black, that was my assumption as well. I just re-checked Alan Bates, because I thought I'd read him saying that post-1900 boiler insulation was a grey asbestos-plaster mix but black before then, but I mis-read and he actually says boiler tops pre-1900 should be more of a muddy color (due to homemade insulation). Too late to fix that, but again Kurt left his boiler black and I hadn't recognized the insulation question in my previous models, so I didn't really think about it. Not trying to throw shade on Kurt here! Photo below you can see Kurt's black boilers and steam line. I'll be honest, I'm tempted to leave this alone. Leaving the lines black makes them more visible and thus of more viewer interest, and repainting them now that they're installed would be delicate and risk unwanted spotting elsewhere. I'm also realizing that my two parallel steam lines may be a mistake. Arabia definitely had two, but that may be because she was a sidewheeler with a short run between boiler and engines; sternwheelers like Kurt's Chaperon and my Bertrand seem to have had one single main line. I need to think over whether I want to redo this; it would be quite a bit of delicate work, I technically can't prove it isn't correct, and it's a small visual detail hidden under the boiler deck. Looks like I definitely got ahead of myself, enthusiasm-wise, when working over the weekend and made too many assumptions without double-checking them against references.

Useful answers, thanks, I hadn't considered sacks although that makes a lot of sense and would be practical to model. Any sense of the volume that should be on board? She could refuel regularly at port stops but I don't have a good feel for what volume of coal would carry her what distance.

At this late stage I'm assuming coal is the fuel, especially as it was widely available along the lower Missouri River (there's a major coal field in north-central Missouri), but I haven't figured out what I'm going to do about showing that. It's on my list to ask the community about, so we'll just go ahead and address it here. None of my photos show any detail in this regard, and I'm not very familiar with coal-burning boats (everything else I've researched and built has been wood-burning, and that you just stack on the deck). My most immediate reference is @kurtvd19's manuscript on building the Chaperon, another late-era coal burner. Even he doesn't specifically mention coal storage, but I assume the two walled-off pockets on either side of the main staircase in front of the boiler are meant for coal? Kurt? Image from his document, which is well worth buying as a reference if you're interested in these vessels (Kurt, tell me if you'd rather I take this down): Right now I don't have better ideas than to build some kind of storage locker like these, maybe one on each side of the boiler? I can tell from photography that they weren't in front. I don't think they'd be behind, as that's a long way to carry coal around to the firebox doors in front. I would love thoughts on this as.