Roger Pellett

Showed your model to my wife who correctly identified it as Paddle to the Sea.  She used this book in teaching 5th grade in Southeastern Ohio many years ago.

Up here on Lake Superior there has been at least one classroom attempt to duplicate Paddle’s voyage with the students each launching their home built model in the Lake.  A couple were found on local beaches.  No messages yet from the St Lawrence River!
 

Roger

Just stumbled on to this.  A beautiful example of an interesting subject.

Roger

Great work up to your usual standards, Gary!  
 

My son, his family, and a close friend all live directly in the Eclipse’s path in Indiana.  All had reactions similar to yours..

Roger

Great Lakes vessels in bulk cargo trades  are long, narrow, and shallow draft. Designers, therefore, are hard pressed to provide adequate structure to stiffen the hulls.  Even so some ships flex uncomfortably in rough water.

The model that John wants to build will exhibit the same problems without internal structure.  A light plastic shell without such reinforcement will behave like a wet noodle.

The simplest approach is a wooden hull.  Since these Seaway sized vessels are 90% parallel mid body this can be a hollow open topped box with deck beams and deck added to the carved hull later.  The bow and stern can be laminated and designed to fit the ends of the box.  The bilge radius is easily shaped with a router and the bow and stern shaped by conventional carving techniques.

These ships are built with all butt welded seams.  Plating is flush with perhaps 1/8” external reinforcement of welded seams (about .01” at 1:96 scale).  Lapped plates or heavy weld lines are therefore incorrect on a model.  Proper finishing to eliminate wood grain will produce a true to scale model.

Roger

Steven,

1150 borders on prehistory, a long, long, time ago.  Short of digging up a well preserved vessel no one can really say how these vessels were built and sailed.  Likewise, no one can really say if details known to exist on much later lateen rigged vessels were used in 1150.  The best anyone can do is to make use of contemporary information available, which you are doing.  Keep up the good work, while realizing that this is a difficult subject.

Roger

There is an old expression about a boat being a hole in the water into which you throw money.  Unfortunately, United States is just a bigger hole to fill.

IMHO there are engineering, business, and legal reasons preventing her from sailing again:

Business:  The passenger ship business seems to be aimed at two different demographics; at one end those that want to join 4999 others aboard a floating theme park/ 24-7 floating casino and at the other end those wanting a quiet experience aboard a small ship.  United States would seem to appeal to neither of these groups.  The United States, while a big ship carried 1000-2000 passengers. Fares would, therefore, be high, so she would have to tap into the small cruise ship market.  Would ongoing demand be high enough to allow her to book profitable passenger loads?
 

Engineering:  She is a steam ship!  Nobody, operates steamships any more.  She has a 900psi US Navy plant.  The only steam plants operated today in US Navy vessels are in nuclear powered vessels; different animals.  Her boilers, if they can even be brought back to life are equipped to burn bunker c oil, a nasty pollutant that the rest of the world is trying to eliminate from their merchant marine fleets. The state of the art today in marine engineering for passenger carrying vessels seems to be an integrated system where electricity from one source is distributed to both the propulsion system and the system supplying on board hotel services. This also allows use of electric driven trainable pods to improve maneuvering.  Even if it could be brought back to life, United States’ machinery is 70 years out of date.

Legal:  She is an American Flagged ship.  The Jones act would require her to be manned with an expensive American crew.  She could be reflagged under a flag of convenience; Liberia, Panama, Bahamas, etc. but would she then be the United States?
 

Better for whoever owns her to admit defeat and as Bob Cleek says turn her into razor blades.

Roger
 

A wonderful model!  Eric, I believe that you have a set of drawings for a similar railroad ferry in your stash.  Perhaps a future project?

Railroad car ferries also sailed on the Great Lakes, particularly on lakes Erie and Michigan.  On Eastern Lake Erie they transferred cars filled with Ohio mined coal across to Canada.
 

 Lake Michigan was a different problem as its axis is North South.  This means that it blocked railroads moving freight from Michigan to Wisconsin, Minnesota and points west.  Going around the south end of the lake meant that trains had to negotiate the crowded Chicago rail yards, an unacceptable solution.  Two railroads, therefore, operated very large purpose built car ferries across the lake.  These ferries operated year round, breaking winter ice.  As least two were lost in winter storms.  The last two, SS Badger and SS Spartan were built in the early 1950’s.  Both still exist although only Badger sails.  Today, she hauls passengers and their vehicles across the lake; no railroad cars.  Badger is the last coal fired reciprocating engine steamship sailing on the lakes.

There were also a number of paddle driven railroad car ferries that shuttled cars across the Detroit River.  The paddle wheels were driven by massive horizontal steam engines.  I remember seeing them in the 1960’s.

Roger

There is actually an example of a British built warship from this same era, carefully restored:  HMS Warrior.  She is on display at the Portsmouth Royal Navy Museum.  Pictures of her should be easy to find on the internet.  Look her up.  What color are her blocks.

Roger

Cost:  Ordinary lumberyard pine is an overlooked but perfectly suitable wood for “carved hull models.  Sort through the 1” stock and pick out what you need.  You don’t need top grade quality as you will not be using the whole board as one piece.  You can discard areas with knots.  
 

Weight:  For my current project, the lake freighter Benjamin Noble, the long middle body is an open topped box with a U cross section.  Deck is brass plated craft plywood, but you could plate with paper. Bow and stern sections are solid “plugs”that fit into the ends of the box.  All carved to shape.  Material: 1in lumberyard pine.

Roger

Unlike steam railroad locomotives, marine engineering practice required use of condensing engines for two reasons.  First, high pressure boilers did not tolerate salt water.  Scaling from salt deposits impeded heat transfer causing failure of  the boiler tubes.  Second, the development of the triple expansion engine, increasing thermal efficiency, required steam in the low pressure to be exhausted well below atmospheric pressure.

New York City harbor craft, however appear to be an exception to this rule.  In his excellent book, Tug Boats of New York City, (Photo caption page 85) author George Matteson writes:

"The white vapor emanating from the tug is exhaust steam, which indicates that it is equipped with a noncondensing engine.......  Most small harbor tugs were equipped with noncondensing engines to save expense and because clean fresh water was always available from city hydrants."

Railroad locomotives are subject to height restrictions from tunnels, bridges, etc.   These harbor craft were not.  the easiest way to increase boiler draft was to increase the height of the smoke stack with steam vented separately.  As with railroad locomotives, as steam technology matured, marine engineers worked to utilize every last BTU from fuel bought and paid for.  For sophisticated steam ship designs this lead to all sorts of waste heat recovery devices often located in the smoke stacks.  These harbor craft traveling very short distances did not require these complicated steam plants.

Really nice work Melissa!  The deck structures can be tricky on these small craft as they often slope.  This means that a conventional three view (orthographic) drawing provides a distorted view of the shapes.  While there are manual drafting techniques and of course CAD that can provide a "true view,"  modeling in cardboard will work too and of course then you wind up with patterns.

Roger

I don"t know what an English Wheel roller is.   Possibly a Three Roll Bender in American Idiom?  MicroMark used to sell a light duty of one of these for about $100. I have one and it works well.

Roger

There are two types of commonly used small drills; High Speed Steel (HSS) and  Carbide.  You don"t tell us which kind you are trying to use.  Carbide drills are extremely fragile and are intended to be used in some sort of mechanical drilling device.  Any side force will cause them to shatter.  HSS drills are old fashioned but forgiving.  Good quality ones will drill any of materials that we encounter. 

Roger

I have been an amateur woodworker for over 60 years.  I have built farm building, gunstocks, several boats and about a dozen scratch built models with their glass cases. I love buying and cutting into a fresh piece of lumber.  On the other hand it is sad to see novice model builders attempting to assemble kits from inappropriate wood species promoted as "deluxe materials; the above "Boxwood Deal" being a prime example.  Model Expo should be embarrassed enough to just refund the buyer's money.  Pay to send it back?  Nuts!

Some thoughts about buying wood:

Basswood- Provided in kits, often considered substandard.  I wonder if basswood is actually what"s supplied as there are basswood look alikes that are softer and perhaps cheaper.  Cottonwood, and "popular."  There are two types of poplar. That found in the Southern Midwest is a great model building wood.  It is cut from the "Tulip Poplar" tree.  These get to be very large producing a wood great for carving hulls.  The other poplar is cut fom the Aspen tree, a fast growing tree that often takes over clear cut areas.  Trees usually do not become large.  Wood is quite soft, almost white, and when cut from small trees grain structure can be poor.  Here in Minnesota this type of poplar, locally called "popple" grows like aq weed. A plank of real basswood in my lumber pile actually looks like a nice modeling wood.

Lumberyard Pine- IMHO, real Pine, not Spruce or Fir is an excellent modeling wood.  As Jaager posts above it can commonly be found in American lumberyards.  I do not buy 2"x4"S or for that matter any  of the 2" construction sizes as these can be cut from small immature trees yielding undesirable core grain structure.  I prefer 1" lumber as wide as possible.  This yields nice straight outer grain pieces.

Bargin Bin-  Lumberyards will sumetimes receive damaged high grade pieces of lumber.  Lumber is sold in lengths of 2" increments.  So, they can sometimes salvage a damaged board by sawing off a 2ft damaged end end and selling the shortened piece as prime grade.  The 2ft damaged end is sold in the bargin bin.  A 1"x10" piece of pine 2ft long can provide a lot of ship modeling wood at a very reasonable cost.  The wider sizes, 1x10 and 1x12 will often crack at the ends.  The crack is easily removed by the table saw providing a pair of clear, straight grained pieces of pine, ideal for our needs.  

Roger

What a great project!

 I too grew up reading Paddle to the Sea.  I loved the book.  35 years ago I was fortunate to be given the opportunity to move from the Ohio Valley to accept a new job in the Great Lakes region and I accepted it in a heartbeat.  I can just barely see a tiny sliver of Lake Superior from a window on the second story of my house.  I also made sure that my children grew up with the book too.

Did you know that there is a Paddle to the Sea movie too?  Here in Duluth the Army Corps of Engineers runs a nice museum dealing with Lake Superior.  During the summer tourist season they show movies about the lakes in a conference room.  Visiting with my two kids and my granddaughters the announcement came over the speaker that there had been a special request from a family visiting to show Paddle to the Sea.  My daughter had made the request.  The movie while beautifully filmed cannot reproduce the 1940's picture of the industrial lakes that Holling does with his book.

Roger 

Old computer woes have made an appearance here on MSW.  While I can read content on each of our two IPADS, I cannot post.  I can only respond with the "like button;" no WOW.  I also cannot sign either IPAD out.

Roger

During my working career, I saw a number of these Jarmac saws in use at model ships operated by large engineering firms (Bechtel, Fluor, etc.) to build models of industrial installations.  The saws were used to cut plastic scale pipe and structural shapes to length.  Ripping would not have been required.  In the case of piping, the fittings all had sockets cast into the ends.  The cut length was slipped into the socket and glued so the length of the assembly could be adjusted slightly before gluing.  End play of the blade was therefore not a problem.

Roger

Paul,  Have you looked at the build log for Ed Tosti’s Young America.  If not, I recommend it.  If you’re not familiar with it is a meticulous build of a Clipper of the same era.  See how he handled this.

Roger

As Welfack points out these lights like much else aboard ship required maintenance.  They also had to be refilled with fuel (whale oil and later kerosene), and the wicks had to be trimmed.  Ships were therefore equipped with Lamp Rooms, an enclosed space where lamps could be worked on and stored out of the weather when not in use.

Roger

Great work bring this old kit back to life John!.

Basswood strips are often stocked by craft stores like Michaels, Hobby Lobby, etc.  Basswood lumber is carried by some Big Box Home Improvement stores.

Roger

Unless you live on the East Coast or highly populated areas of the West Coast everything that Ian posted about totally Electric vehicles also applies to the USA.  I don’t foresee that these cars will ever be practical for the long distance driving and weather that we encounter in the Northern Midwest.

Roger

Archi,  There are instructions here on MSW written by Jim Byrnes for aligning the fence on one of his saws.  It’s a “pinned” topic here on this machinery category.

Bob,  I don’t have one, so can’t comment on its performance but the late Jim Byrnes used to offer a draw plate specifically for wood.  Hopefully his company will get back on its feet

Roger

This is supposed to be an activity that’s enjoyable so if planking is a problem, choose a project that doesn’t involve it.  If you are limited to kits check out solid hulls.  Bluejacket offers some, as does A.J. Fisher.  A well made solid hull model is no less authentic than a planked POB one.  The important thing is correctly reproducing the hull shape.  OR. Find a POB model that is easy to plank.  How about a Skipjack?  There is at least one Skipjack kit on the market and their relatively small size allows modeling at a scale that allows detailing.

Roger