herask

Greetings to all.
My name is Tomek. For some time I have been working on my next card sail ship the British cutter HMS "Fly". I build my models only from paper and cardboard without painting (of course masts and rigging are made of wood and thread). I will honestly admit that "Fly" is my 20 cardboard model of a sailing ship so it looks much better than my first models from 15 years ago.
The "step by step" how I design and build card sailing ships...
1. Frames made of 1mm card. The model is really small (about 16 cm long)
2. The first layer to strengthen and stabilize the hull 
3. The second layer made of 0,5 mm card. The glue is applied only in places where the edges of the frame are located . Thanks to this the hull gets soft curves without visible "cow's ribs" ... 
4. Attaching the third final layer on a well-prepared hull is a pleasure. 
5. The deck equipment and artillery
 
6. The current stage - the mast and the bowsprit with standing rigging
 
Regards
Tomek

hey folks! it's been a while since we posted last progress update. in the meantime I have managed to finish the hull thus completing the first two volumes of TFFM series. yay! 
 
currently doing the standing rigging, and having a blast with it.... sort of... ropes are not fun in 3D. but the ship is looking more and more beautiful with each day. can't wait to set sails... anyway, Greg gave me green light to post a few renders. hope you like!
 




 

just two days?! 😯 take it easy with the coffee, will you? 😂 took me best part of three weeks... 

Phil, indeed, Blender is very different from Solidworks or similar CAD software. former is an artistic tool while latter is technical precision tool. and they both fulfill they intended role like they should. Blender is generally speaking easier (and capable) for modeling almost anything, has support for dimensions and snapping polygons, but that's it when CAD is concerned. for any professional and precise mechanical stuff CAD software is a must.
I have some basic knowledge in Solidworks and Fusion360 and, while I do like them, I still find it easier to work within Blender. I would really, really like to model my next ship in Solidworks but constraints and history based approach are driving me nuts! for me it feels like trying to model using my feet with both hands tied behind my back. maybe some day...
regarding making of videos, like you said, you could always export geometry into some other software and only learn how to make awesome materials and let it render overnight. Blender has support for GPU rendering which is A LOT faster than traditional CPU rendering and with a good GPU (or three) you practically don't need anything else.
 

I have decided to modify the position of fore mast and move it  bit forward, to achieve more realistic result according to real ships from this period. 
 
Here you can see previous position of fore mast:

After adjustment:

 
Kind regards,
Doris

Hello dear friends,
I do appreciate your comments and wishes, thank you all very much. I am pleased you like my work.
 
Every piece of decoration is handmade, there are not used any moulds, cause I prefer to create each one as an original. 
 
No problem, here are my secondary tools:

And here the  main ones 😊:

 

The Headlight :



 
The exhaust system. Some sections are glued together after fitting the first ones :





 
Finally, the seat :

 
Danny

Hi 😊

Very, very, nice work!
 

that is a lot of guns! congrats and good thinking with "the cheat". one can hardly tell the difference...

hi all!
 
now that cat's out of the bag I can make an appearance here . David and Greg have contacted me after seeing my work on Pandora and have given me the opportunity to create 3D build log of their swan class ship. it's been an awesome experience and I've learned a lot in these few months. also big thanks to both of them for having patience with my inexperience and oh-my-god-can't-believe-he-just-asked-that questions... 
 
Danny, a big thank you is in order for you too. I'm using your build log as one of the references when I get stuck.  so it's the other way around, haha!
 
 
Wayne, as with Pandora I'm using Blender, free modeling tool. unfortunately no drawing and BIM export option, as it's not a CAD program but a general purpose one.
my computer is (now ageing) Core i7 4770k paired with Nvidia GTX770. would really like to nail new GTX1080 though. rendering on GPU literally flies but I could use more powerful one now that the model is becoming more complex...
 
also big thx to all of you for nice comments. glad you like the pics ;-)
 

hey folks! it's been a while since we posted last progress update. in the meantime I have managed to finish the hull thus completing the first two volumes of TFFM series. yay! 
 
currently doing the standing rigging, and having a blast with it.... sort of... ropes are not fun in 3D. but the ship is looking more and more beautiful with each day. can't wait to set sails... anyway, Greg gave me green light to post a few renders. hope you like!
 




 

this is just great, Phil! love the model, love the story accompanying the pictures. keep 'em coming. now this makes me wanna learn CAD modeling.

this is just great, Phil! love the model, love the story accompanying the pictures. keep 'em coming. now this makes me wanna learn CAD modeling.

Thanks David, Jan and Nils . Jan, I've seen the Ferraris before but I can't remember the site they can be bought from. Do you know what it is?
 
This is the front suspension, steering and handlebars. The top bracket has not yet been glued in, as it needs to go through a tube at the front of the frame to enable the steering to turn. I actually made a mistake with the previous bike, gluing it in this stage, and had to cut it apart again. Lesson learned :





 
Danny

THE MAIN DECK
 
I consider the main deck to be part of the hull, but it was constructed separately in the CAD model.

Most of the equipment and fittings on the fo'c'sle were original 1940s Cleveland class parts. The two 20mm gun tubs had been removed and a large discone antenna took their place. Originally the OK City had the antenna mounted on a short open lattice tower, just like the configuration of the USS Little Rock CG-4 museum ship in Buffalo. But the tower was enclosed later in a cylindrical compartment that was used to stow anchor handling gear. The sailors called this cylindrical structure the "beer can." The original 1960 CLG discone antenna was replaced a few years later with a larger version with more elements.
 
The two "wildcats" were large sprockets that fed the anchor chain into and out of the chain pipes to the chain lockers below. These and the brake controls, plus the capstans and their controls, were original equipment. The blueprints showed all of the anchor equipment, above and below deck, in great detail, and even told how to operate it. Some ships painted the chain pipes red on the port side and green on the starboard, but they were deck gray on the Okieboat. The Captain said he didn't want his ship to look like a circus boat!
 
The blueprints gave only a rough outline of the changes to the wooden decks for the CLG conversion. I had to depend upon a dozen or so high resolution photos to see how it was done. But the original CL blueprints told how the planks were fitted together, and the CLG photos showed that the new deck was assembled in the same way.
 
The deck planks were 2"x4" and 18 feet long originally. Most were cut to 16 foot or shorter lengths when they were installed. Plank ends aligned with the ship's frames at 4 foot intervals. The planks were a laminate of 1" of teak on top over 1" of Douglas fir on bottom. They were bolted down to threaded studs welded to the deck plates, with the nuts fitting into recessed cavities that were filled with white lead and then sealed with a teak plug. I didn't try to model the plugs!
 
On the original Clevelands the wood deck extended forward to just in front of the #1 turret. Perhaps this was to minimize flash burns from the firing of the 6" guns. On CLG-5 the wood deck was extended forward to just behind the wildcats and capstans. Some of the other CLGs also had some sort of wood deck extension, but not all were like the OK City's. On the CLGs the wood deck extended aft only to about midway down the side of the missile house. The Talos missile boosters produced a 60-70 foot flame that could flash up the side of the missile house if the shot was fired almost directly aft. This would have burned the wood deck. As it was we had to repaint a large portion of the metal deck after each shot.
 
Margin boards 9" wide were fitted around the deck edges, around the superstructure, and around hatches, vents and other deck fittings. The margin boards were 2 1/2" thick along edges next to deck house and hatch sides, and were trimmed to 2" where the deck planks joined - this caused water to flow away from the house sides. If the deck planks joined the margin boards with an angle between 45 degrees and 90 degrees the planks were trimmed to fit the margin boards. But if the join angle on the plank was less than 45 degrees the deck planks were notched into the margin boards so the planks didn't have sharp pointed ends that might break off easily. The nibs were cut perpendicular to the length of the planks, and were half the plank width. The minimum width of the margin board at the notches could not be less than 6". There were lots of planks and joins. It took a month or two to create the wooden deck. I'm not sure I look forward to repeating this on the real 1:96 model!
 

The stanchions along the edge of the main deck were articulated affairs that could be folded down to lower the life lines during underway replenishment. In practice during UNREPS the stanchions and lifelines were just removed to get them out of the way.
 
The ship had a 15" wide waterway between the wood deck and the hull side. The stanchion base was welded to the top of the  hull plating and to a 3/8" flat bar that bordered the wood deck. But the height of the hull plating above the main deck and the angle of the hull plating varied along the length of the ship. Consequently, no two stanchion bases were the same and I had to fit each one separately. At the bow and stern, where there was no wooden deck, some stanchion pipes fitted into cylindrical pipe sleeves welded to the deck. There were 20 different stanchion configurations. The stanchions were mostly the same type on opposite sides of the ship, but there were a few differences.
 
The bitts and chocks on the CLG were mostly in the same positions as for the original CL hull, but there was one interesting difference on the Okie Boat. The bitts were standard 14" bitts that were used on cruisers. But the USS Oklahoma City CLG-5 had two 10" bitts on the fo'c'sle outboard of the capstans. The wood deck was trimmed around them. The OK City was the only Cleveland class ship, CL or CLG, that had these smaller bitts.

Almost everything on the fantail was new after the CLG modification. The airplane hanger, aircraft crane and catapults were removed, as were the two aft 6"/47 turrets and 40mm gun tubs at the stern. These were replaced by the Talos missile launcher, a helo deck and several ventilators at the stern. The helo deck had fold down life nets at the deck edges - these were very tedious to model! The tall whip antennas also folded down for flight operations. They were originally on top of the large "D" shaped ventilators, but were later lowered and moved outboard.
 

The flagstaff on the stern was one of the most difficult parts to model. It was raised in port - except when we were conducting flight operations - and folded down and clamped in a fixture on one of the chocks when we were at sea. The ship had at least four different flagstaffs! The CL and CLG blueprints showed two configurations and early CLG photos showed a third. But I could see from photos that the flagstaff of 1971 was different, but the photos were too grainy to tell just how it was constructed.
 
One day I was looking through the cruise book and noticed a photo of a sailor standing stern lookout right beside the life ring that was attached to the electrical cabinet. The flagstaff was lowered and I could see details of the fixture on the chock and how the staff was fastened down. Then someone sent me a nice high resolution photo of a ship docked at a pier in the distance, with the stern of the OK City at the edge of the photo. There I could see the base of the flagstaff! That allowed me to finish the model of the flagstaff, and I think this configuration was still there at decommissioning in 1979. The staff itself was easy to model - the original USS Oklahoma City CG-5 flagstaff is outside the American Legion Center at Newport, Oregon, about a hour from my home.
 
There were a number of winches and smaller fittings on the main deck but I will discuss them in a post about the ship's boats and boat handling gear. The last large feature of the main deck was the triple 6"/47 turret.

 
The Clevelands had four of these turrets. Only the forward turret #1 remained after the CLG flagship conversions. The blueprints showed the construction of the turret gun house, barbette, and projectile and powder handling gear. But I have never found drawings of the 6" Mark 16 47 caliber guns. The early Clevelands had range finders on the #1 turret, but these were removed on later ships to reduce topside weight. The OK City never had the rangefinders on this turret. The Cleveland's #1 and #4 turrets had access doors on the rear. The superelevated turrets #2 and #3 had access doors on the bottom rear.
 
A tripod was stowed on the turret top. It could be assembled for highline transfers on either side of the ship. We normally took on ammunition on the starboard side. The highline cable passed over the top of the tripod and fastened to the main deck on the side opposite the transfer ship.
 
Phil
 

THE HULL, PART 5
 
The hull had a lot of details. Here are a few pictures.

I had blueprints for the rudder, propellers, prop shafts and struts, propeller guards and boat booms, so they were pretty easy to model. Well, the propellers tested my ability to model complex curved shapes. My goal is to use the 3D file to drive a NC milling machine to make the 1:96 scale props. There are four different propellers, two right hand rotation and two left hand. In addition, the blades of the outboard props are slightly wider than the inboard props because they were positioned higher (not as deep in the water) where water density and pressure were a bit less, so the wider blades gave them the same thrust at the same RPM as the inboard props.
 
The blueprints revealed something you don't see in photos - the propeller shafts entered the hull in recessed shaft alleys that had "portable" (removable) covers. The propeller struts were very interesting. The struts and hubs were single cast steel pieces. The after struts were about 12 feet long and the hubs were about 7 feet long and 2 1/2 feet diameter. After the struts and hubs were attached to the hull they were machined in place to be aligned with the propeller shafts! That would have been something to see. The inner diameter was about 2 feet and was machined to accommodate six cylindrical bearings that the shaft turned in.


Along the side of the hull were many split pipe drain covers, with curved steel pipe bumpers to protect them. These covered overboard discharges from showers, toilets, etc. They were absent on the original 1944 hull, and were added during the CLG conversion. They caused quite a bit of consternation because no two photos of the ship show the same configuration! There were from 14 to 24 on the starboard side, and more on the port side. Some photos clearly show weld marks on the hull where a pipe and bumpers had been. Apparently they were occasionally ripped off, perhaps by heavy seas or contact with piers. In any case, I had to make a best guess about how many were on the ship in the July 1971 period I was modelling.
 
The ship carried two accommodation ladders, one fore (officers) and the other aft (crew). They could be installed on either side of the ship. During the ship's career the ladders were changed at least twice. The blueprints showed the original CL ladders and the CLG ladders, but photos showed the 1971 ladders to be different from both. I had to piece together what they looked like from a combination of blueprints and photos.
 
I don't intend to show them rigged, but I had to construct them in order to get all the pieces to fit together correctly. Then I placed the disassembled parts in the stowed positions on the superstructure.
 

 
The hawse pipe and doughnut-shaped bolster were a challenge. The 2D blueprints tried to show the contours of the bolster but I had to scratch my head a while to figure out the 3D shape. Fortunately I had photos to work from, but it was still a challenge. I drew this in 2007 and learned a lot about drawing free form shapes! The surface is a single grid that wraps around into the hawse pipe.
 
The anchor was another tricky job, with lots of intersecting curves that were interesting to model. The anchor stock was drawn up into the hawse pipe when stowed. When the anchor was let go the anchor chain payed out through the hawse pipe. The ship actually had two slightly different US Navy 13,000 pound anchors. One of the original anchors was lost on the 1945 shakedown cruise and had to be replaced.
 
The first two Cleveland class ships, USS Cleveland CL-55 and USS Columbia CL-56, had the stern lights attached to the outside of the hull plating.  The white stern light and blue formation lights were used for formation steaming, and the conical light was the wake light that illuminated the ship's wake.
 
All subsequent ships of the class carried these lights in a recess in the hull plating that provided better protection from following seas. You would think that these lights would have been positioned along the ship's center line, and it looked this way in some photos. But others seemed to show the opening off center to starboard. The hull plating blueprints showed the opening but gave no dimensions and the position was still ambiguous. But the drawing referenced the blueprint for the stern lights so I searched for it on the microfilm. No luck! That particular drawing was not in the blueprint set! Arrggh!
 
I eventually got the idea of looking at the blueprints for the hull framing, and sure enough the recess was offset to starboard. The reason was pretty obvious when I looked at the drawings - the original ships had a large airplane crane on the centerline at the stern, and the hull frame below it was a massive "I" beam. The recess fit up against that centerline frame. The drawings also gave the dimensions. Of course, after I did all that searching someone sent me a very nice photo of the stern that clearly showed where the opening was.
 
Phil
 

THE HULL, PART 3
 
The Cleveland class hull was far more complex than the 40 foot boat hull. It had a skeg like the smaller boat, but it also had a fairwater on the aft end of the skeg to reduce turbulence as water flowed past the skeg. It had knuckles, or sharp breaks to the smooth curves, at the third deck level just above the armor belts (they were attached to the outside of the hull plating). It also had a bulbous bow and a very complex transom that was semicircular at the main deck level and almost square below the full load water line.
 

I used many different surface grids to cover the entire hull. Only the starboard half is shown - the port side was a mirror image of the starboard side. The hull was built up in three main groups, the upper hull, boot topping (water line), and lower hull.  The upper hull is three grids light blue and green. The boot topping is three grids dark green and dark blue. The lower hull was the most complex shape and is made up of three grids, orange, yellow and red, plus several more for the keel and skeg fairwater .
 
The yellow grid has a sharp knuckle near the top at the third deck level. The bow has some complex curvature to create the bulbous bow. The wireframe view of the grids is shown below.

Notice the different grid densities (grid line spacing). For long and fairly smooth surfaces you do  not need a lot of facets. But where surfaces are highly curved the grid must have many smaller facets. So why not just make all the grids with dense facets? This causes the file size to grow very large, and large files are much slower to work with.

After a few more modifications and details like the propellers and shafts, the rudder and bilge keel I finished the first pass at creating the ship's hull.  It was OK ...
 
But while I was working on this I was also following some other CAD model builds on line. One model in particular, a destroyer escort by a fellow in Perm, Russia, really impressed me. He was adding small details that I had not planned to model, such as nuts and bolts, wiring and external piping. I sent him drawings of the quick acting watertight door and he returned a working CAD model! When the handle turned the dogs rotated and the door opened!! A model of a battleship included threads on the turnbuckles in the rigging. Another fellow modeled the entire internal frame and deck structure of the INS Yamato! WOW! This was setting the mark pretty high.
 
I decided that if they could include such fine detail, so could I. That was a consequential decision! A 610 foot cruiser probably has five times as much external detailing as a 300 foot destroyer escort - I hadn't taken that into account. So my focus changed to including every visible detail on the ship's exterior, down to nuts, bolts, screws and rivets as small as 3/16 inch diameter. However, I did decide to leave out the threads on the bolts and screws - that would have made the file sizes ten times larger. After some preliminary work I decided to not model the internal frames of the ship.
 
This called for a lot more detailed research, close scrutiny of a lot of photos, and accumulation of drawings and data sheets for small parts like antennas, binoculars, searchlights, etc. Creation of the model slowed to a snails pace.
 
Phil

THE HULL, PART 1
 
I'll start the CAD model description with the ship's hull. I use the program DesignCAD 3D MAX, an inexpensive but very capable CAD program. I have been using it in my work and for hobbies since 1988.
 
First I need to introduce some terminology.
 
The Base Line is an imaginary line running the length of the hull on the center line - everything is referenced to the Base Line, especially vertical positions. The Base Line is often along the ship's keel, but sometimes with small boats it is drawn above the boat (actually, the boats are built upside down, so the base line is somewhere below the inverted boat). With the Cleveland class hull the Base Line was on top of some of the keel plating, 1 11/16 inch above the bottom of the keel. Why 1 11/16 inch? Just to make it harder to model I suppose.
 
The perpendiculars were vertical lines drawn through the points where the normal load water line intersected the bow and stern. The bow perpendicular was called the Fore Peak (FP), and the stern perpendicular was the After Peak (AP). Ship plans often refer to the length between the perpendiculars, or length at the water surface with a  normal load. With the Cleveland class hull the length between perpendiculars was 600 feet.
 
The hull was originally drawn based upon imaginary stations along the length of the hull. They were placed 15 feet apart between the perpendiculars,  so there were 40 stations. But there were also two stations "1/2" and "1/4" forward of the Fore Peak, and one "End" station after the Aft Peak. In the actual ship construction there were no features placed at the station positions. Stations were just a starting point for calculating the shape and volume of the hull.
 
Note: In US Navy drawings the Fore Peak is station zero, and the other stations are numbered from bow to stern. Some other navies place station zero at the After Peak and number from stern to bow.

Hull faired line drawings show station lines, water lines and buttock lines. Station lines are hull cross sections at each station, perpendicular to the Base Line. Water lines are where horizontal planes intersect the hull at different elevations. Think of different water depths in a dry dock when the dock is being filled. When the water level is two feet above the Base Line it would form a 2 foot water line around the hull. When you plank build (bread and butter) a hull with multiple horizontal boards stacked together, each junction between boards forms a water line. Buttock lines (butt lines) are lengthwise vertical slices through the hull at distances from the Base Line. If you plank build a hull with the boards oriented vertically, the join between boards form butt lines. In the drawing below the water lines are dark red and the butt lines are pale blue.

When drawing a 3D hull the idea is to draw the station lines and then stretch a surface over them to create the hull surface. So you draw a Base Line and position the station lines along it to form the rough shape of the hull. You can also include water lines and butt lines to check the accuracy of the hull surface. Each CAD program uses different terminologies and methods to accomplish this goal.
 
****
 
I obtained a drawing of the CL-55 station lines (see below).  The right half is the station lines forward of midships, and the left half is the after station lines. I traced these into the CAD program and started to fill in the hull surface. But I discovered that the hull width was different amidships for the forward and aft station lines! It created a nasty ripple in the hull surface. I tried to correct this in the CAD drawing and ended up with a mess! That was a waste of time!

On the blueprint for the faired hull lines was a "Table of Offsets." If you are building a 1:1 scale CAD model or large scale physical model the Table of Offsets is a far more accurate way to create the hull than working from a crude drawing of station lines. I have attached part of the table below showing "Water Line Half Breadths." These are the distances to points on the station lines outboard and vertical from the base line. Each row of numbers defines points along the associated station line. The table is a bunch of numbers of the format F-I-E, where F = foot, I = Inch, and E = eighths of an inch. So 4-10-7 is 4 feet, 10 and 7/8 inches. You will find this number at Station 2, Water Line 2'-0". The 4-10-7 number tells where one point is on the number 2 station line. Occasionally you will see a value like 5-1-6+. The "+" means more than 1/8 but less than 2/8.

For CAD modeling you must use a common unit of measurement for all parts. I decided to model the ship in inches because the original blueprints were dimensioned in foot/inch/fraction units, and it would be more convenient to model small parts in inches rather than fractions of a foot. The ship was about 7320 inches (610 feet) long.
 
I reduced each F-I-E value to a decimal inch number (4-10-7 = 58.875 inches). Where a table value ended in a "+" I added 1/16 inch (0.0625") to the number. The section line 2 water line 4'-0" entry 5-1-6+ translates to 5 feet, 1 inch and 13/16", or 61.8125 inches.
 
After translating the entire table I created a comma separated variable text file with the XYZ values for all points on all station lines where X is the longitudinal distance along the Base Line aft of the Fore Peak, Y is the elevation above the Base Line, and Z is the transverse offset from the Base Line (hull center line). For example, the station 2, 2'-0" water line point became the XYZ values 360,24,58.875. Then I imported these values into the CAD program and it magically created the entire set of station lines shown in the Station Line picture above.
 
****
 
One thing you should realize about these station lines is that they define the inner surface of the hull plating. After the initial calculations based upon station lines the engineers created a much larger Table of Offsets for the actual frames of the ship that the hull plating attached to (for the CL-55 hull there are 81 pages of mold loft offsets). Then these offsets were used in the shipyard Mold Loft to assemble the actual frames of the ship. So the generated surface is actually the outer surface of the frames. For the outer surface of the hull plating you must add the thickness of the plating - more about that later.
 
I was almost ready to start creating the hull surfaces. But there were a few problems. The original blueprints with the Table of Offsets were drawn by someone sitting at a drafting table and copying notes made by an engineer, one number at a time. There are lots of numbers, and either the engineer or the draftsman - or both - occasionally wrote the wrong number. This produced spikes on an otherwise smooth curved station line. But the errors were always in values of feet, inches or eighths, so it was easy to correct the lines when a spike appeared. Points that were off by a foot or two were very obvious, an inch or two less so, and I had to inspect each station line carefully to spot errors of 1/8 inch.
 
Eventually I had a corrected set of station lines to work with.
 
Phil

OK, so I had a good working set of blueprints that gave me accurate dimensions and positions for all parts of the ship, right? Wrong!
 
The USS Oklahoma City CLG-5/CG-5 may have been the worst possible ship to try to model. It was originally a "modified" Cleveland class - the square bridge version. Unfortunately, it appears that almost all blueprints for the square bridge version have been lost, or at least those of interest to modellers. There are a lot of wiring, plumbing and ventilation diagrams, but  none for the hull or superstructure. I had to figure out if there had been changes to the hull from the original USS Cleveland CL-55 that carried over to the USS Oklahoma City CL-91 and CLG-5 (almost everything from the main deck up was removed for the CLG conversion). I eventually discovered several by scrutinizing hundreds of photos.
 
Then there were some very obvious differences between the different CLGs. Three were Terrier ships and only superficially resembled the Talos ships. The USS Galveston CLG-3 was the first Talos ship, but it didn't have the flag conversions on the forward superstructure, and even the missile house had significant differences. That left the USS Little Rock CLG-4/CG-4, the sister ship to the Okie Boat. Fortunately, the Little Rock has been preserved at the Buffalo and Erie County Naval and Military Park in Buffalo, New York. So I shuffled off to Buffalo to walk the decks of the last Cleveland class ship.
 
It was a weird experience - deja vu all over again. The Little Rock is still almost exactly like it was built in the 1950s - just like the blueprints. But the Oklahoma City had undergone hundreds of changes during it's 19 year service. Some of these were major changes, such as the removal of the Mk 34 main battery director and it's barbette extending down to the third deck (it was the only CLG to lose the Mk 34)! The superstructure had been modified to remove parts here and add parts there, mostly in efforts to reduce topside weight. The CLGs were very top heavy and unstable, and messing around in WESTPAC typhoons in an unstable ship was asking for trouble! So the Okie Boat was extensively modified to reduce topside weight. The Little Rock wasn't, and walking around on it was a strange experience. Even little things, like the location of the phone in the missile test cells, was different. The radar towers were built differently from the OK City's! And the bridge was very different. I got some good photos of winches and dimensioned drawings of the missile launcher, but there were a lot of unanswered questions when I got back home!
 
I began studying all the photos I had accumulated, making a list of changes that occurred and the approximate date. By this time I had all of the ship's histories from the Archives, so I knew when the ship was in the yards. I eventually compiled 24 pages of changes that I noticed and the dates of the changes. The ship was a chameleon, changing just about every time we went near a shipyard. I eventually decided to model it as it was in the summer of 1971. This was just before the FAST gear was removed, and was while I was aboard. I used the blueprints for the basic model structure, but then had to make changes that the photographs revealed.
 
That was the starting point for building the model, but I knew I would discover more changes as I progressed. So I stopped work on the 1:96 physical model and decided to model the entire ship in 3D CAD. It is a lot easier to make changes to a CAD model than to rip out parts of a real model and start over again. I did discover a lot more changes as I worked on the 3D model. Now that it is finished I can start again on the 1:96 model, confident that I won't have to rip out and start over much of it.
 
In following posts I will describe the steps for making the 3D CAD model. Sorry if this has been a long discussion, but I wanted to explain the steps for researching the model.
 
Phil

that is a lot of guns! congrats and good thinking with "the cheat". one can hardly tell the difference...

Cheers Gents, appreciate the support, comments and likes...
 
Welcome aboard Ian 🙂
 
A rather dreary rainy day precluded any other activities so as able get a decent amount of time in.  Spent most of the day completing the cannon carriages, these really are incredibly time consuming and seemingly never ending, but can now report are complete.  I did decide to cheat a little on those carriages that will be mostly obscured away from the waist.  Rather than continuing to use the  pins to simulate bolts which are incredibly fiddly, the carriage bolts were simulated using a fine tip black pen and then touch of dark iron paint to tone it down.  Pins have been used on all the carriages that will mount in or immediately about the waist.  The macro photo below shows the 'real' bolts in the foreground and the 'cheat' in the rear.  At real life viewing distance these are difficult to tell apart if you didn't know - the difference really being the lack of about 8hrs of cursing.
 
Experimentation with the cap squares and royal cyphers next...
 

Still dressing up Bissy in her shiny gold "jewelry"... 
 

 

 

 

 
Many hours into this part of the project with many, many more hours to go... 
 

Hi Gaetan, 
 
I use Solidworks professionally and enjoy building models in 3D as a hobby. I find it most interesting to see how the parts fit, I don't need glue or paint, and I can zoom in to areas as much as I like. I can also build models wherever I am, from my office in Montreal, to the resort in St-Lucia. 
 
I've attached a picture of my latest project, a 1:6 scale version of a western stagecoach. Of course, I have done many ships but you seemed to be interested in the textures and colors that you can get. 
 
In this model, you can turn the wheels, apply the brakes, change direction, and even see the functioning of the support mechanism for the passenger compartment, which is still "under construction". 
 
Of course, there is a drawing made for each part, if someone ever wanted to make this in the future. Even the spokes are all separate pieces. 
 
 
 
Best Regards, 

Rick 
 
 

 
 

Lots more done. Here is the partially completed frame :

 
And more frame pieces :



 
The start of the rear suspension :


 
Danny