Roger Pellett

Thanks, Valeriy. I have no experience using hot melt adhesive. I’ll have to give it a try. Roger

Make yourself a simple thread thickness gage. This is nothing more than two pieces of dowel of slightly different diameters. The smaller is glued into a hole in the end of the larger forming a shoulder. A known dimension is marked along the length of the smaller dowel. To use, wrap your thread around the smaller dowel along the marked off dimension. Count the number of turns. Divide the dimension by the number of turns to get the diameter. Roger

I have not found an adhesive that would bond brass, copper, etc. to a wooden hull with any confidence that the bond would not fail over time. Even Epoxy seems iffy. Some joints are secure, some can be easily peeled off. I tried 3M transfer tape recommended by the guys that build models for the Navy. The plates easily peeled away from the hull. I finally used add free paper saturated with shellac and glued to the hull with PVA glue. It worked! Roger

Wefalck and Bob Cleek both offer good advice. I also suggest that you build a hull using the bread and butter technique, but first I urge you to invest in some better plans. Good plans would include a complete “lines” drawing. This is a drawing that shows the contours of the hull in each of three views; top, side, and end. The end view combines views looking from the bow and stern. The drawing is sort of a topographic map of the hull. With a lines drawing reproduced to the full scale size of the model you can take patterns directly from the drawing and skip the lofting process. But, I am wondering if you are not putting the cart before the horse, or rather the hull before the power plant. With a live steam power plant model you need to be Naval Architect as well as Marine Engineer. Before you size the hull, you need to know the physical size and weight of the power plant. Do you have this information? If you do, does the hull that you are planning to build have the displacement to float it? Boilers, in particular can be heavy. Your engine will also put considerable stress on your hull. Will a planked hull with minimal internal structure be able to withstand loads from an operating steam engine? And finally, safety. Steam can scald and in the worst case kill you. Each of the 50 US States has laws dealing with boiler safety. In most cases they delegate this to the boiler codes published by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and ASME does publish a code for miniature boilers. You should check to see what requirements apply to your project. Roger

Lofting, just like the real thing. Well done! Roger

HKurt, Accessibility. For those of that need to fly to attend, we are stuck with the airlines’ hub and spoke System. IMHO the airlines do a pretty good job flying from hub to hub. Service to spoke destinations from hubs is often much poorer, especially as this is sometimes contracted out to a small regional carrier. A conference destination close to a major airline hub is therefore looking more desirable especially for older members like me who don’t tolerate the more frequently occurring airline chaos. This does not prevent selection of some otherwise unlikely locations. For example, National Great Lakes Maritime Museum. It’s located in Toledo, Ohio, hardly a major travel destination; BUT- Toledo is located within an hours drive from the Detroit Metropolitan Airport, a Major Delta Hub. For those of us that attend with our spouses the availability of safe, interesting destinations for them is important. IMHO this pretty much eliminates Baltimore. My my wife and I thought that Mystic, CT and New Bedford, MA were inspired choices. Each within easy drives from NYC LaGuardia and interesting for spouses. A final thought- During my lifetime I have noticed that the most successful events are often those organized around a predictable formula. This is true for the Lion’s Club Pancake Breakfast as well as Huge Trade Shows. SO- Maybe pick three destinations; East Coast, West Coast, Midwest that meet Criteria, and establish ongoing relationships for venue, lodging, catering, etc. How about Mystic, CT, San Diego, CA, Chicago. Rotate in successive years. Roger

Steve, Can you tell us about the bottom photo in your last post? Was the stern of Implacable salvaged before she was, sunk and then conserved or is this a replica? Where is it displayed? BC (before Covid), my wife and I made many trips to visit your beautiful country. A highlight of these trips was often the interactions with your fellow countrymen. These sometimes were related to my interests in maritime history. A particularly memorable one was a personal below decks tour of Steam Pinnace 199 while she was moored within the Gosport Submarine Base. Unfortunately, while we have remained safe from Covid we are each four years older and less inclined to leave home. Roger

Bill, If you read the posts on the forum by people who actually build these kits it is apparent that a chief complaint is the quality of the woods supplied, especially the substitution of species that don’t live up to marketing hype. Two principal culprits being mystery woods marketed as “Mahogany and walnut.” I am in no way endorsing or otherwise promoting them but the exception seems to be kits offered by vanguard and Syren. Both offer quality woods, sometimes as extra cost options. Roger

I don’t understand weathering of major warships. Manning guns and handling ammunition in battle required large crews that would be idle when the ship was not at General Quarters. This offered a large workforce for the First Lt. to use for spit and polish. These ships often embarked a flag officer and his staff. He could demand that the vessel be maintained to a level commensurate with his lofty standards. Small ships like convoy escorts were different story. These vessels took a beating from wind and water. In port time was minimal and smaller crews had less idle time for maintenance. Roger

Steven, A wonderful job resurrecting and finishing this project from many years ago. Relative to “scratch built” models that I built in my teenage years and long since “binned” it is remarkable that you had something with such good bones to restore. Carving individual blocks at 1:200 scale is an accomplishment all by itself. The scholarship involved in untangling (pun intended) Sixteenth Century rigging practices is impressive. I hope that you will protect your workmanship with a case. Well done! Roger

Also, the Greek’s use of tenons between adjacent strakes of planking would have resisted shear stresses and hogging. Roger

If her deck is leaking, they better fix it soon or she won’t last long. Fresh water leaking from the deck down into hull timbers will cause major damage from dry rot. Roger

Where will the replacement timbers come from? Here in the USA Live Oak that grows in the Southern tier of states has long (since Colonial Times) been prized as a shipbuilding timber. Old trees can grow to huge dimensions. Heavy timbers for wooden ship repair can sometimes show up in unlikely places. Several years ago a stash of Live Oak timbers were found buried near the waterfront at the Boston Navy Yard. They were used in the repair of the USS Constitution. More recently, Mystic Seaport learned that Live Oak tree trunks damaged by Southern Hurricanes were being dumped in landfills by tree removal companies. They now have the connections to salvage these. Visitors to Mystic will see a large pile of big logs at the edge of the parking lot waiting to be used for wooden ship repair projects. Roger

Johnny, You’re in good hands with the forum’s two Ancient ship experts, but I’ll add my two cents worth. First, I believe that the vessel’s shown on the Anthony Roll are caricatures- The features are correct but the proportions are distorted as are the projections. Still it may be as close to a “technical drawing” that we are going to find. I believe that your (not so) crude sketch exactly captures what the Anthony Roll is trying to show. I would be more concerned whether the old kit reasonably reflects the underwater shape of the hull. This might be a case where due to underwater Archeology we know more about the hull shapes of these old vessels than we do about the upper works. Roger

At the small scale that you are working to I suggest, carving a plug and vacuum forming them.

Johnny, There are two ships built in the 1500’s that have been studied by archeologists for which enough wreckage exists to construct a meaningful lines drawing; Mary Rose and the “Red Bay Galleon” San Juan. The more recently discovered and earlier “Newport Ship” might be another addition. These ships built at different times by different nationalities all share the same characteristic- the boat like shape of their hull leading back to a much earlier time when hull shape was determined by plank bending. These do not have the bluff Apple cheeked bows usually assumed to exist at this time period. One gets the impression that the fore and stern castles were appendages not integral parts of the hull. I am therefore suggesting that the forecastle structure does overhang the sides of the hull as you believe. Roger

Bill, The American Steel Barge Company, the subject of my book, built Great Lakes Steamships and barges that they towed. The vessels were built in the 1890’s to a unique patented “whaleback” design. It is a fascinating story involving East Coast financiers forming a shipbuilding company in the wilds of Northeast Minnesota, but has no connection to the American Commercial Barge Lines company (ACBL) that you are familiar with. Coincidently, I personally have a connection with ACBL. In 1969 I was hired by Dravo Corporation. Dravo was a large Engineering and construction company headquartered in Pittsburgh PA. Among other things they owned and operated a large shipyard on the Ohio River near Pittsburgh as well as Union Barge Lines. Both were direct competitors to ACBL. I never worked for either of these Dravo units. Instead I was assigned to a division that built piping systems for nuclear and fossil fueled power plants. In the late 1980’s Dravo closed their shipyard and sold their Barge Line to ACBL. They sold the Pipe Fabrication Division that I worked for to an investment group but ACBL wound up with Dravo’s Pension obligations including mine. I was sad that it was necessary to close their shipyard. In 2002 my son graduated from Purdue University’s Engineering program and was immediately hired by Toyota for their Princeton Indiana plant. They live in Evansville. We usually visit them in the fall; summer is too hot. One of these times I intend to go over to visit the Steamboat Museum near Jeffersonville. Roger

Great job! Yup, command car up front. The officers don’t want to eat all of that dust. Roger

Beam engines were used to power side wheel passenger steamers here in the USA on the East Coast rivers and on the Great Lakes. At least on the Lakes, I believe that these were often low pressure engines that relied more on the vacuum from the condensed steam than high pressure expansion. This meant huge engines with cylinder diameter and stroke measured in feet instead of inches. Roger

It depends on what the ship was designed to carry or in other words the trade in which she was intended to sail. As I posted above, Endeavor was built as a Collier. Coal is a bulky cargo of not particularly high value. Voyages were short and freight rates were priced as a commodity. In this trade, economics dictated full lined (bluff bowed) vessels of modest dimensions that could be sailed by small crews. These ships could carry maximum cargo while minimizing tonnage based charges that were assessed each time they entered a port. Cutty Sark on the other hand was built to haul tea, an expensive cargo but not especially bulky cargo, long distances from China to the markets in London. There was a major price premium for early deliveries. I believe that this trade involved just one round trip per year. Tonnage assessed charges would, therefore be much lower in relation to the value of the cargo. Unlike those for coal, freight rates for hauling tea could vary depending on the reputation of the ship. If the shipper of the tea believed that the vessel could get it to market quicker he would pay more. All of this required a ship that could travel at high speed over the length of a long voyage. This dictated several factors: First a long hull as maximum speed is limited by the length of the vessel's Waterline. Second, fine lines (your sharp v shaped bow) to minimize resistance, and third, a hull that would permit carrying sail in strong winds. Roger

The wood furnished for planking the hull is also important. When wood is bent the outside fibers are pulled in tension and the inside fibers are compressed. If the fibers, aka the grain, run parallel to the longitudinal axis of the plane chances are the wood will bend if properly softened by heat. If however, the grain runs diagonally to the axis of the plank it is much more likely to separate (fail). Roger

Bluff bows- Blame them on Henry VIII. During his reign, a principal import into the UK was wine. It was imported from Spain in large standardized barrels called Tuns. To finance his reign, Henry imposed a tax on each Tun of wine imported. The easiest way to do this was to rate each ship by the number of Tuns that it could carry. Note: This is a measure of VOLUME not Weight. As the years passed, Governments wrestled with the way to “count the tuns” that a given vessel could carry. The concept was so important that many shipbuilding contacts specified that the vessel to be built must measure xxx tons. (Spelling change intentional). The concept was also important enough that many operating expenses such a dock fees, port fees, pilotage fees, were based on tonnage. By the 1700’s British law specified that tonnage would be determined by Length x Beam x Depth with the product divided by 100. While measurement of each of these dimensions was defined legally, the actual shape of the vessel was not part of the calculation. As the determination of tonnage did not depend on the actual amount of cargo carried, ship designers (Naval Architects) ever since have tried to “beat the system” by designing ships that could carry far more cargo that their rated tonnage. By the 1700’s the principal cargo by volume landed into the Port of London was coal. Coal is a relatively bulky cargo. It fills a ship up more than it weights it down. It was shipped in specialized sailing vessels that brought coal down from the Northern coal fields, returning in ballast. Since many operating expenses were based on tonnage, ships built for this trade were intended to carry maximum volume of cargo on a hull built to minimum overall dimensions. This required a full lined hull- bluff bow and short run aft. James Cook’s early sailing experience was in the coal trade. He was not a gentleman RN Officer. He was, therefore, familiar with the sturdy vessels used, so in purchasing a vessel for his expedition he selected a Collier. The concept of tonnage is still used today. Generally speaking when merchant ships are mentioned as “The 1500ton MV Rust Bucket arrived in port today.” The 1500tons refers to volumetric tons of 100cu ft not weight, and international shipping rates are quoted in “weight or measured tons” with the measured ton being the metric equivalent of 100 cu ft. Roger

Wookie, Your model looks nice, keep up the good work. Come random thoughts: Stains- The common store brand eg. Minwax stains are pigments suspended in linseed oil, or some sort of water based chemical. The linseed oil type are often thinned with mineral spirits. To work, the pigment must penetrate the pores in the wood. If for any reason, it can do this it leaves splotches. The surface must therefore be “open” to the stain. I personally find these stains difficult to get consistent results. On the other hand, they are not particularly toxic. A more reliable choice would be wood dyes. These are water thin and more easily penetrate hard to stain woods. Look for them at specialty woodworking stores. Depending on where you live in Ohio a WoodCraft store should carry them. Dradeyes- The Sharpie hull form was used for everything from yachts to Lake Erie fishing boats. In most cases these were outfitted by small local builders. Rigging hardware might be whatever was available locally and affordable. That would include the local hardware store. Standing rigging could well have been secured with galvanized turnbuckles. Roger

Gary, You mention “shucking stations” in your post above. Are the scallops shucked as soon as they are caught or like other shellfish; clams, oysters, etc. are they kept alive as long as possible. If they are shucked when caught it would seem that the vessels would have to have some sort of refrigeration plant aboard. Roger

Maybe a few years late to your period but I recommend a used copy of “To Build a Whaleboat” by Eric Ronnberg. This book was developed from the building manual for a Model Shipways Kit. In addition to being a master model maker Eric is a serious historian of the New England whaling and fishing industries. As editor of the Nautical Research Journal in the 1990’s he produced a number of excellent issues. The boat described in the book is a back engineered version of the whaleboats on the half scale model of the Whaleship Lagoda at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. It represents a mid-Nineteenth Century whaleboat. The book includes a lines drawing, onboard and inboard profile drawings, plus detailed drawings as needed. Also included is a detailed historical commentary and a chapter describing Eric’s development of drawings from the examples aboard Lagoda. Roger