BenF89

This is definitely one of my favorite logs to follow, both because of the subject, as well as the creativity in your materials and techniques. Really looking forward to seeing more!

Looking great, Patrick!

Well, I don't have a boat update yet :/ But, I figured I would make up for it with a cute picture of Big Sis and Little Brother. She was just patting his tummy, and he smiled at her. They are getting along really great, which is nice. That said, I did just read back through the last few posts to remember exactly what it was I was doing (in both a broad, philosophical sense as well as a specific, practical sense). I think the most motivating thing will be to dive back into the engine - apply the 50/50 glue/water wash, clean up the part, and paint it, then move onto the next part - again, probably the heat exchanger manifold.

You know, I agree with you about the canopy - it does look funny. That said, I think that is a really good thing! I think the canvas canopies that can be seen on sailboat cockpits of all sizes are jarring and really interrupt the flow of the lines (especially on a center cockpit boat). So that means that you've, in my mind, accurately captured the essence of the real thing! How's that for looking at things from a different angle? Looking really, really fantastic - watching your boat come together (especially the completed interior) is renewing the modeling itch to get rolling on my projects again, now that things appear to be settling down with the little one.

Glad to have you all on board! I hope I can live up to the expectation. As I mentioned, the Fitz is near and dear to me, even without growing up around the lakes. That said, it's easy to lose touch with the personal impact when (1) I didn't grow up in the region (though, my mother and her family did), (2) I am too young to have been around at the time, and (3) I have spent most of my time with the ship examining it from a technical point of view (which can admittedly make one detached from the humanity of the event). So, I can imagine how much more personal and impactful it must be to you folks, and I really do hope I can do it justice (not just constructing the model, but telling her story in the process.)

Looking really great, Patrick! It's all those little fiddly things that make the boat really pop and come to life.

Looking really good. The boat deck is certainly recognizable as the Titanic's now!

Exceptional.

SUB subminiature. Love it! Looks great, too!

Looks great! Re: funnel arrangement: the only thing I know is that the fourth funnel was shorter than the third. But I couldn't tell you how much. Probably only slightly. There was a progression in height from 1 - 3 and then 4 was smaller than 3. Keep up the good work!

Wow. The shots that show the whole boat - just, wow. It's looking amazing. I love seeing interiors, especially in three dimensions. It almost brings more life into the model, in a way. It's so fascinating to see spatially how it all relates, and you've done a masterful job representing it.

HA! Nils' idea had me immediately imagine taking some 'perspective shots' of the interior, as if one was inside, and then arranging them in a publisher like Adobe or something, and writing a mock article (like you'd find in a yachting magazine) about the newest luxury sailing yacht Symphony, complete with all the jaw dropping interior pictures. Seriously, though, the detail you've added is spectacular - the objects don't just look like a lounge, or a galley - the detail and materials make them feel like a lounger and a galley. Really great work - and I can't wait to see the rest.

Hi everyone! Well, you 'newcomers' haven't really missed anything. With recent home events (new baby boy) I haven't really done much, at least in the 'real world.' But, I have been re-reading (on and off) some of my books on the subject, refreshing my memory of the constructions and working years of the ship. I can tell you the final voyage by heart, but it has been some time since really digging into the early life. So, I have been doing that, and starting to plan the first log entry. I have all the photographs of the kit, and a mental list of the challenges I expect to face. I am trying to decide on the extent of the history narrative that will accompany the first posting, to ensure there is enough material to cover the build. I don't know how many log entries there will be, but I am trying to establish topical 'groupings' that will be opened with the next bit of narrative. Sometime in the near future, I'll start with the first bit of history, and the kit review. But I expect this log to be slow-steaming for a bit, between having the new baby, and trying to make progress on my other project, the Doll Boat, since that one has a deadline on it. Excited to have you all along for the ride!

Certainly the crew was unprepared, and several important ice warnings were either ignored, or not received. For example, around 11:00pm on Sunday the 14th, there was a radio message attempted to be sent from the liner Californian, probably 20-30 miles away to the northwest, saying she was stopped in ice (i.e. they were surrounded by bergs, and the master didn't feel safe to proceed in the dark). The Marconi radio employees on Titanic were just that - employees of Marconi, not the ship. Their fiscal responsibility was to passenger messages first, and ship-to-ship messages second. The wireless telegraph on Titanic had been out of commision for 24 hours because of some malfunction, so the operators had a backlog of passenger messages, and they had just got in range of the Marconi station at Cape Race. They were working with that station trying to clear all the passenger messages when the (very, very loud) signal from the Californian came blasting in. Before the message could be completed, the radio operator on Titanic replied "Shut up, Shut Up, I'm working Cape Race." The operator on the Californian ceased his message, listened to the passenger mail from Titanic for a bit, then shut down and went to bed at 11:30 pm. (Ships weren't required to have 24-7 radio operations at the time). Titanic hit the iceberg ten minutes later, at 11:40. The Californian would be criticized for being so close yet not hearing or having any indication of the Titanic's situation. It really goes to show that human error can override a lot of good design. To reinforce that point, the sister ship of Titanic, the Britannic, was redesigned with a complete double skin, higher bulkheads (she could have the first 6 compartments flooded, vs the first 4), and many (many) more lifeboats. She hit a mine in the Mediterranean working as a hospital ship during World War 1. The combination of blast and shock damage resulted in the first 6 watertight compartments being compromised - the limit at which she should have been able to stay afloat and limp back to port. She sank in less than half the time Titanic did. Why? The nursing staff on board had opened all the portholes in the hull to air out the ship in preparation of taking on wounded soldiers from Gallipoli. As the bow settled, water rushed into the portholes along the ship, and compromised the rest of the compartmentation. You can't fix stupid (even well intended stupid), and you can't really design it away either.

Well, there is still some debate over the rivet quality. It is generally acknowledged that there were impurities in the wrought iron rivets used at the fore and aft ends, roughly the forward 25-30% of the length and the aft 25-30% of the length. The middle 30-50% used better quality steel rivets (vs wrought iron). The theory is that the slag in the wrought iron rivets resulted in stress concentrations that meant just the act of hammering the rivets to shape stressed the material to near its ultimate tensile strength. Then, when the pressure exerted on the hull by the iceberg was taken up by the rivets, a bad rivet would fail, transmitting the load it was carrying to the ones around it, which were then overloaded and failed, dumping their load, and so on until a good rivet stopped the 'unzipping' of the seam. Meanwhile, another seam would unzip, and so forth until the contact with the iceberg stopped OR the iceberg got to the better steel rivets, which didn't start to unzip at all. That's the theory, and the mechanics of the unzipping seem to be mostly right. The question is how much of the initial failure can be attributed to poor material quality, and how much should be attributed to running into an essentially solid object at 23 miles an hour. As for the vessel course issue - Titanic was running a lengthier, southern course. Normally the Transatlantic liners ran a bit more north, along the 'golden circle.' But during iceberg season they adjusted course slightly south to avoid most of the pack ice coming from the waters around Greenland/northern Canada. It is even recorded the Titanic adjusted course even more south when the warnings came in (although she didn't reduce speed- but that was common among all the cruise liners of the time). And the plating was what was required by the board of trade. You're right - it wasn't designed for high speed ice impacts. But that type of side-swipe impact wasn't considered a major risk. The more common 'ship sinkers' were collisions with other vessels, hence the two compartment standard for flotation - two compartments could typically contain a T-bone type impact from another ship. And, in most cases of iceberg impacts, they were head on, but there was also more ability to take damage forward (due to hull form) - Titanic could have the first four consecutive compartments flooded and still stay afloat. A side-swipe impact is still not generally a damage condition that is given a lot of consideration, and that much damage will take out modern ships - look at the Costa Concordia. To put it bluntly, Titanic had 1/3 of the hull ripped open. A modern warship would have some difficulty compensating for that much damage (not saying they couldn't). It's remarkable the ship stayed AFLOAT as long as it did.

Dan, No problem! Titanic had some degree of tumblehome, but it doesn't show up on the deck plans. That said, it was pretty slight - only 1' over 70'. So, the AD's tumblehome might be just as slight. Either way, you're probably right about the scale masking it anyway. Can't wait to see the hull you built!

Dennis, I think I know the program you're referencing - they compared the expansion joints on Olympic and Titanic to the expansion joints on the Britannic, to see if/how the designers/builder changed the termination details. I don't recall the exact conclusions from the program, other than there was a notable detail change at the bottom of the expansion joints. The Britannic had a round 'bulb' shaped detail at the bottom, where the first two ships of the class had a 'sharp' termination. That said, I can tell you with a high degree of certainty that the expansion joints were not causal players in the breakup; the separation of the expansion joints during the break up was a symptom of the ship coming apart deep in the hull, not a starting point for the failure. I happen to be connected to the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers (SNAME) Marine Forensics Committee. Several members have done extensive work on the breakup of Titanic, and I've had the opportunity to discuss it at some length with one of the members, a guy named Rich Woytowich. He's not a naval architect, per se, but he is a structural engineer, and he's really studied the different failure mechanisms that would have to have occurred to generate the damage we see on the ship, and on several major pieces of debris (notably the two large sections of the bottom of the ship that were found far away from the main sections of the ship, and the 'big piece' section of plating from the starboard side that was recovered a while back). Rich has written several great papers on the breakup of the ship, and even has a guest blog post on the Scientific American website. Even the comments on the article are informative, since the objections raised are generally well thought out, AND the author responded to each one individually with well reasoned response to the objections raised. And like I said, I actually know the guy, and I think what he has to say is really well thought out. Here is a link to the Scientific American blog post he wrote: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/how-did-titanic-really-break-up/

I echo the preceding comments - you've really gone above and beyond on this one - the micro boat in your mini boat. Pretty soon we're going to have to break out the nano- prefix! Seeing the pics of this boat really are inspirational - I doubt I will even approach the crisp quality of your interior while putting mine together - if I ever even get that far!

Dan, Take a look at the attached. A presentation based on this paper shows a cross section that looks similar to the one you posted; I don't know what the source of that image is since it isn't in the actual technical paper, but it may indicate a bit of tumblehome like the drawings you have suggest. And, I can see the tumblehome a little bit in the pictures of the ship's launch. I don't know if the model kit plans you found are exaggerating the form, but it does seem the ship is not straight sided. The presentation file is too large to attach here, but it doesn't really contain more information, just some more graphics. garzke.Loss_of_Andria_D.2012.SYMP.pdf

Yay, another liner to add to my watch list! This is a ship that my grandmother told me about - she remembered when it sank - and as a young kid interested in shipwrecks, it captured my interest. There is a very good, thorough analysis of the sinking - how, precisely, she progressively flooded - published by the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers (SNAME). I'll see if I can get a copy of it, if you're interested. Looking forward to following along!

Absolutely stunning. If you got a small enough camera in there at the right angle, you'd think the picture was straight out of a magazine article detailing the interiors of fine yachts. Really great work!

She's really looking like a lean, mean, fighting machine now! Once it's done, you'll have to take a good picture that can be copied a bunch of times, and photoshop the battle of Salamis or something

Again, spot on! It's neat to have a large enough model to get those kind of perspective shots, and your attention to detail really shines in them. It really looks as if you've built that boat - not an emulation or something that has the essence, but the boat itself, down to the gaps between the boards! Really great work. And, displaying it in some type of cradle (with or without the diorama effect Patrick suggested) is, I think, the way to go. It keeps you from drilling into the hull for mounting pegs, it fits the style of boat better, and it would allow you to pick it up out of the cradle to (carefully) handle it and show off the bottom detailing, etc.

Doll boat... Just sayin'

Looking really great - it is a very nice hull form. It's too bad it seems most modern sailboats are following in the footsteps of the old ocean liners - grace and form and seaworthy arrangements giving way to chunky people crammers that don't fare well too far from port.