mbp521

What an excellent start Keith. The tedium of stropping all those block will be well worth it in the end. I would have to break the monotony though by stropping a few then installing them on the yards; wash, rinse, repeat until they were all done. I also really don't think the hooks will be missed, from what I see everything looks great! -Brian

Keith, I actually bought these decorative toothpicks a few years ago when I was building my Chaperon. I used them to build the ships wheel, and thought later on they would make perfect oar handles. I had built a few for my Chaperon, but never used them, then I revived the idea with this build. Hopefully you will be able to use the idea some time. -Brian

Hi Bob, All I basically did was cut the tip of the toothpick off. Not too much, just enough to blunt it enough to get my Xacto saw on. Then all I did was saw a small slit down the toothpick to the desired length. After that I sanded the slot smooth and inserted strip into place and sanded to shape. It was fairly easy. Getting the saw started in the center of the toothpick was the toughest part. -Brian

George, It never gets old hearing that! Comments like this are what keep me going. As for the boats, it seems that all of the City Class Ironclads had work boats with black hulls (at least that is what I can interpret from the photos that I have been able to uncover on them). I am assuming that the hulls were painted to match the Ironclads paint schemes. The interiors on the other hand are a different story. As I told Keith Black above, from the pictures, it looks like the Cairo's boats had a white interior and black exterior. From the picture you show, it does look like the oars are a darker color on the handles with rope wrapped around them, but it hard to tell the color of the blades. The forward one looks like it almost has a white painted blade. I may have just opened up an oar wormhole with this one. -Brian

Thank you Pat! I mainly just painted the tips on a whim. I ran across several pictures of them that had the tips painted different colors and thought it looked neat. Not real sure of it's accuracy though. One other detail that I found was some had rope wrapped around them somewhere half way between the handles and the blades. I thought of doing this as well. I want to do a little more research on this to see what purpose it served first. -Brian

Mark, Thank you for the compliments. I have searched several different museum models of the City Class boats (Cairo, Carondelet and St. Louis) and they all seem to have the work boats covered with a tarp. I am beginning to think that there is a reason for this. Possibly that there just isn't any or enough information out there on what they truly looked like. -Brian

Keith, Thank you for the input and compliments. I'm right there with you. I was thinking the same thing, but if you look at the below picture of the Cairo boat, it looks like the interior is painted white or some sort of light color. I'm leaning to white since it was pretty much readily available at the time, and cheap. To me the white would stick out like a sore thumb if they were trying to be stealthy. This was the reason for experimenting with the white oars. And you are correct, it would be harder to see the darker ones. I still cannot make up my mind as to how I want to paint them up. I want them to be seen when looking at the model (since I am going through all the effort of researching them and building them, but I want them to be as accurate as possible. Oh the decisions we have to make. 🤪 -Brian

Hello everyone, I have been somewhat busy on the build and will have an update coming in the near future. It's been a lot of tedious work, especially with the ships boats. The have taken on a life of their own, and in reality I could have started a separate build log on these themselves. The research on them has been time consuming to say the least, and one thing that I discovered is that there was no consistency with any of the City Class Ironclads in what type of boats they carried. To be honest, I think they just used whatever they had on hand that would fit in the davits. What I settled on was to build a couple of cutters and a couple gigs and leave it at that since only one of the boats from Cairo is clearly visible in it's picture. More to come on these in my next updates. This time around I am seeking some advice and opinions. While working on the ships boats, I started constructing the oars for them. More research involved with this as well to get the right style. I finally determined that there are 100's of types out there that were used in the mid 19th century and none of the old pictures show what was used on the Ironclads boats, so I picked the style that I though fit best. This is when I ran into a problem. While I like the style that I chose, I am stuck on the paint scheme that they may have used. Again, none of the pictures of the City Class Ironclads have a clear shot of any paint schemes on them and of course, what is available is all black and white, so I wanted to ask advice and opinions. I have about 24 oars made up right now and painted up a few of them with different colors. Here are the steps I took to make up the oars: The handles are made with decorative toothpicks and the paddle faces are just thin strips of basswood. I cut a slit in the toothpick from the point and slid the strips into the slot. Glued the strips into place, then sanded everything to shape. Pretty straight forward. I scaled these out at between 11' and 12' long. This seemed to be the standard for 25' boats of the time according to my research. This calculated out to be about 2 3/4" at 1:48 scale. Then I painted up a few to get some sort of idea of how they would look. Even though these are the schemes that I came up with, it doesn't mean that I have to go with any of them. I want to get them as accurate a possible. Here they are in the still, yet to be finished work boat, to see what they look like with these colors. Even though they will all be lashed together, I don't want them getting lost in the colors of the boat. As always, I value any comments or opinions, so please feel free to let me know. Thanks for looking. -Brian

Keith, I find that the research is half the fun of the build. Given that I am only on my second build that I have done any research on, I am by no means an expert, but digging through tons of information on a particular ship or part of the ship sometimes uncovers a treasure trove of information. I also have to admit that if it weren’t for MSW I would have never attempted a scratch build or done any research on any build and just built straight from the kit. Unfortunately there are those ships that the information is just totally limited to one or two photos and you have to resort to similar (or sister) ships to get a general idea of how it looked. To me the in depth research gives me the satisfaction that I did what I could to make sure the outcome is as true to real thing as possible, and if it happens to be somewhat off, no one is none the wiser due to the limited information. I’m really looking forward to seeing your progress after all of your research. Thanks for teasing us. -Brian

Beautiful work! Nothing like having the right tools for the job. -Brian

Looking good Eric. I admire your perseverance on this, especially with milling your own lumber. That is a task that I have never even given a thought to. It’s just too easy to purchase it already done. Not to mention the limited availability of quality lumber on my property. I’m sure that the coloring in juniper would make for an interesting look, but mesquite, bois d’arc and honey locust just aren’t that appealing. Out of curiosity, and you may have mentioned this already, but did you mill the planks a little thicker than normal to allow for variances and to give you the opportunity to be able to sand the planks all even without sanding through? Only reason I ask is that my ships boats have been giving me fits getting the hull contouring correct and I have resorted to using thicker planks after sanding through several of the thinner provided planks. -Brian

Simply amazing detail. It’s such a pleasure to follow your work. -Brian

Just found your build and what a great job you have done so far. I will be following along on this journey with great interest. -Brian

Vaddoc, Glad to see you back. Beautiful work on the planking so far. Can’t wait to see more. -Brian

Daniel, Beautiful and meticulous work as always! -Brian

Ken, Thanks for the link, it was indeed helpful. I just read though Rob Manley's techniques section of this site and it confirmed what I was thinking. For the best results you need to apply a flat finish prior to weathering. -Brian

So here was another stab I took at weathering the pilot house. I used a basic brown pastel to get into the seams of the armor plating with orange for the rivet accents and portal cover hinges. I then went with a very light coat of white pastel to accent the portal openings. The colors seem a bit subtle and the pictures don’t do much justice for it but they did knock a bit of the satin sheen off. I’m thinking that I may go ahead and put a matte finish on my mock-up and try again on that. I am definitely open to any thoughts or opinions. -Brian

Thank you Keith. That is a great question. From my research and reading, Cairo saw a lot of action in her one year of existence, but she also had a good bit of downtime. From the time Cdr. Selfridge took command of her though, she was on constant patrol until her sinking, so there is not much telling how much time they had to really square her away. Since the only known photo of her is the one that was taken shortly after she was launched, it would be next to impossible to tell what she looked like right before she went down. My best guess is that since the build of these boats was rushed, not a lot of time was given to her paint. Touchups could have been done during the couple of refits Cairo went through (additional railroad irons added to the forward casemates and the upgrades to the pilot house) but would she have had a fresh coat of paint added? No telling. I want to try and add a bit of weathering to her without looking like she just slid down the ways, but not so much as for her to look like she's been on patrol for several years. I figured that she would have a bit of river grime on her from cannon ball splashes during her skirmishes and possibly a few battle scars, but not too much more. Some of the details of the weathering shown previously will be muted a bit, once I "fix" the pastels. I am still experimenting, so we'll see what comes out. -Brian

Wefalck, I hadn’t even thought about using different sheens for different materials. Up to this point I have just been using a satin varnish for everything. Now I am going to have to go back and rethink my paint scheme. This is not a bad thing though. After doing some experimenting with the pastels, I am finding that the satin finish is not the greatest to get the pastels to adhere to. I have to say at least the cleanup is easy, but I have to watch my hand placement or I’ll smudge my work. Here are my first attempts. -Brian

Thanks for the additional info Roger. These boats are proving to be a tiny build in themselves. So many little details to show. I have however made the decision to go ahead and leave them all uncovered and add the interior details to each one. The main reason for this is that I just couldn’t figure out a good way to simulate the tarps in a way that would look realistic and the lack of photos that show them covered at all. Might as well give myself another good challenge. -Brian

Beautiful paint job! Very clean lines. I’m with Keith on this one, you must have excellent eyesight to see any imperfections. -Brian

George, It has been about eight years ago since I built this part of my Flying Fish, but if memory serves me correctly, I used 24ga brass wire for my vent pipes and they don't look too far out of scale. What I do remember is how much of a pain they were to install since I didn't put them in until after I built the toprail. At least I put them in before the pinrails. Here are a couple of old pictures from the build that may help. -Brian

Wefalck, I have been studying up on how to do this, and there are numerous helpful videos on YouTube with all sorts of methods. I see where a lot of people use weathering powders while others save (lots of) money and pulverize pastels to achieve the same effect. The one thing that surprised me most was that several of the videos suggest that you use ordinary hair spray to "fix" the weathering to your model. It has the same affect as varnish but it doesn't change the appearance of the coloring as much as varnish does. I just purchased a cheap set of pastels and will give that a try first. Fingers crossed that it works out. -Brian

Thank you Eric. I reused my mockup for rigging my cannons as a test bed for weathering using pastels. I added planking and armor to it and just got it painted this past weekend. I will wait on the clearcoat to cure for a few days before testing it out. I am anxious to see if I can add a little "age" to my build, and tone down the "pristine" look a bit. We'll see how it goes. More to come.... -Brian

Wefalck, There is an art to firing the big guns, especially at moving targets. These gunners were definitely quite good at their jobs, and I'm sure there were many hours of practice under their belts to get that good. Although it is not American Civil War related, but a good example of an experienced mortarman is Master Gunnery Sergeant Leland Diamond, he has a pretty interesting history over his career. Part of his story is during WWII he single handedly drove off a Japanese cruiser at Guadalcanal with his mortar. -Brian