Javelin

So, as crazy as it seems, this ship has little detailing to it, probably the reason why I loved building it. I love building hulls, but I sort of hate detailing (although I do torture myself by adding as much detail as possible to any build). So this subject was great for me. Oil tankers are quite simply in construction with only few different pipes on deck. First I started with some fixed points as I usually do a bottom-up approach towards detailing of tankers. These fixed points were all cargo and ballast tank entry hatches. These particular ships however had something extra. Any tanker is equipped with an inert gas plant, a plant that produces inert gas (basically exhaust gas from combustion, scrubbed with water to remove contaminants), which is used to lower the oxygen content in the cargo tanks to avoid explosions/ignitions. On gas tankers it's normally only used to prepare for dry dock or after dry dock/repairs. On oil tankers however it is continuously used to top-up/maintain cargo tank pressures. On these 4 sisters however they thought of something new. Considering the large surfaces of ballast tanks, they thought of reducing the oxygen level in the ballast tanks as well, using the inert gas plant... This meant of course that the ballast tanks also could be sealed from the atmosphere with a sort of pressure control (including vent valves to avoid over pressure). This reduction in oxygen level should then prevent corrosion and reduce the need to maintain the coating of the ballast tanks. This resulted in pipes running from the central inert gas line towards each ballast tank. These lines unfortunately made the use of bicycles (normal on such large oil tankers) very difficult, and therefore it was not done. Two deck houses were also present, which is also a very usual feature of such tankers. Close to the manifold, containing oil spill equipment as well as other things used on deck (transfer baskets etc.), since the cranes also rest on those houses. All of it was basically dry-fitted to allow me to draw out the outlines of the longitudinal piping supports. Slowly she received more pipes. In this case the Crude Oil Washing (COW) pipes, which are connected to small rotating washing machines that hang on the top of the tank. Crude Oil (=cargo) is pumped through these at certain pressures, which in turn makes the machines spin in certain cycles. The crude is then sprayed against the walls of the tank to mechanically wash off any residues of the cargo. Additionally the sprayed crude acts also as a detergent that absorbs some of that residue that is then being collected down in the tank to be pumped out. The pipes can be recognized by their transverse central pipes branching off to longitudinal pipes that connect the washing machines (spread around the tanks to fully cover the tank top/walls and bottom. The helicopter deck is also outlined in pencil. The helo deck was strengthened to take on the landing of a Sea King or similar sized helicopter. This is not too common as in most cases there is only a hover place/winching area or a helo deck for light helicopters that are used by pilots to board the vessel offshore. The central piping supports are made out of 0.3mm stainless steel wire, bent over a jig. The COW lines are a combination of 0.5mm brass, 0.3mm steel and 0.1mm copper wire. They are glued directly to the deck since this is 1/700, so the 10cm clearance between the deck and piping wouldn't really be visible.

But why did you put clay blobs in your bottle? I was thinking though, in real life, the largest part of an iceberg is below the surface... Do you consider adding another layer of epoxy/water to submerge part of you icebergs? Or is too late in the build to consider that? Love what you did with the ship. Difficult not to overdo the ice effects, but you clearly managed to make it work.

Next step is actually sanding off that filler/primer again to show where the bad spots are. It happens from time to time that there is a spot where the 2 components haven't mixed well and soft spots appear. In this case it's not very surprising that this happened due to the large amount of filler needed. If I encounter such a spot, I immediately see it when I'm sanding and I scrape it out with a knife until I hit hard edges. I then refill it with a smaller and better mixed amount of filler. On below picture you see such soft spot just on starboard of the stem, here I already removed some of the bad mixture. In following picture you see a spot where not enough filler was applied and a "hollow" was present in front of a frame. It shows immediately by keeping the dark colour of the primer/spray filler and getting a rather sharp outline. So extra filler was applied. and sanded smooth again. In the above pics you can also see the start of the "warts" for the anchors. To keep the anchors from hitting the rather large bulbous bow, the hawse pipes extend beyond that bow. A lot of work for a hull, but since the build is 90% hull, it should also look accurate. After the main hull work came the rudder and prop. I made the prop of 0.3mm styrene. Luckily it's a gigantic propeller in real life, so making a model of it still results in a decent size propeller (same in fact for the rudder). And a picture of the real backside of the vessel during one of her rare actual port calls. You can see how wide she is by looking at those lifeboats and the distance between them...

Thanks Glen, have no fear, I have obtained quite a collection of interesting bottles nowadays, each one screaming for me to put something inside. 3 of them actually have a very long body with a short neck, ideal for putting and manipulating a ship inside. I've been making plans for this and one of them will likely be a sailing vessel, following your lead. Next phase of this build was the filler. After many builds I've given up on trying to do this in 1 go. It's a dirty job, mixing the epoxy filler and applying it, so I'm always postponing this and trying to do it in 1 time, mixing decent amount of filler. However after sanding, I always end up with spaces requiring more filler... In any case, here was the first coat of filler pressed on and around the frames. And after a first rough sanding, to determine where more filler will be needed. And the white blob slowly starts to look like a ship. And after more filler, I decided to get going with spray filler. Something I had used on one build before, but that has become a standard practice on my builds by now. It fills up small gaps etc. while making any deficiencies pop out and it allows for smooth sanding. In this build it also showed some areas that needed improvement, so it was definitely not ready yet. It did start to show the typical voluminous tanker shape.

So much effort in that ensign, but the result is fabulous. The structure really appears a fabric rather than simply paper or plastic.

Great to see more models of these ships. I see the one in your picture is TI Africa, which I believe now is known as FSO (Floating Storage and Offloading) Africa. As you can also see in these vessels they don't have the regular huge bridge wings like VLCC's. Due to the presence of camera's around the vessel, she received an exemption of these bridge wings (used to look along the vessel during mooring and sailing). You can also see the big gap in the accommodation, the crew is quite small on tankers nowadays, yet there is a rule for view from the bridge towards the bow, you need to see any vessel/object passing 500m (or 2 ship's lengths, whichever is the smallest) in front of you. This means that for a big ship like this, the bridge needs to be quite high up, resulting in a pretty big accommodation. Since there was no need for a large accommodation, they made that gap in the superstructure, to both have a high bridge, but still limit the amount of internal accommodation space. One of the legs of that bridge houses a staircase, while the other side houses an elevator. Back to the model. I continued adding the frames and outlines, including the bottom plate. You can also clearly see that the stern is a lot more sleek and slender than the bow below the waterline. This is actually the case for most merchant ships, but it's not always this pronounced. I normally use this method of construction for smaller ships, but on such a large vessel, filling in the space between the frames is even more important before applying any filler. On smaller vessels I use mostly scrap pieces of styrene that I cut some angles off etc. Kind of like a jigsaw of scraps. This helps to avoid large amounts of filler. In this case I did actually cut pieces of styrene from a new sheet to fill most of the space near the bow. For the stern, I did use more scrap from my scrap box. Since the two component epoxy filler I use is rather difficult to manipulate, I used some reinforcements on the edges of those filler plates to avoid them being pushed in when I apply the filler. This happened sometimes in the past, when my scrap pieces were not well fitting for the space they occupied. I don't care too much about having a perfect match, small holes and gaps will be filled by the filler after all. You do however need some gluing surface if you want it to be sturdy enough to push the filler around.

In my haste yesterday, I forgot to add a couple of pics of the real thing. So here we go. When you see it in loaded condition from a distance, it looks rather flat and not so big, but once you get closer, you start getting an idea. It's ok right? Until you realise those orange dots on the starboard side midship and forward are actually people. You can also see the small hiding shelters amidship and the big wavebreakers on the deck. Those hiding places are necessary as it takes a long time to get from forward to the accommodation block. In ballast condition, disembarking is not for the faint hearted. So why the white? Well, we used to say, hospitals are white too, to keep the patients calm... But the real explanation is that the color was chosen to reduce cargo boil-off. Oil tankers have quite a reduction in amount of cargo due to boiling off of the lighter elements in their cargo. Pressure inside the cargo tanks starts to rise because of that and eventually it blows off through overpressure vents. Over such a large surface/structure, the colour actually did make a difference, probably also the reason why it was never changed, eventhough the ships changed hands several times. They were actually built too late. The heyday of oil tankers was already over by 2000. ULCC's were a thing of the past, as a cargo volume of 3.2million barrels of oil made it very expensive to load these beasts, while the amount of ports and voyages was limited. Nowadays some of the sisters are used as Floating Storage Units in oil fields, while on Europe (and perhaps Oceania) are actually used for transport. One big advantage of such subjects from a modelbuilding point of view, is the large "parallel" surface. Something most merchant ships have as it helps them to moor safely. These are often also drawn on the plans and make their box shape easier to build, only really requiring frame shapes forward and aft. I didn't actually have many plans to work from, but I combined all sorts of shapes I had from those plans. I therefore combined frames as well as floor outlines and heights to get an accurate shape.

Well since I'm longer onboard, without the possibility to show new progress. I'd thought I'd fuel @KeithAug newfound love for complex piping a bit further. I consider this build, for an unknown reason, still as one of my best builds. It's an eye catcher in my display closet, probably by its color and size. As the title says, I'm talking about the TI Europe (TI standing for Tankers International, an oil tanker company pool). The TI Europe is an Ultra Large Crude Carrier, one of 4 sister ships built by the Korean Daewoo yard. They were built for the Greek company called Hellespont, but were sold after a few years to the larger company called Euronav and renamed as TI Africa, TI Asia, TI Europe and TI Oceania. TI America was deliberately left out for fears of terrorist attacks since this all happened in the beginning 2000's. When built they were the largest double hulled ULCC's in the world and still are some of the heaviest ships around. Their size, 380m (1247ft) long on 68m (223ft) wide, was huge for those days (nowadays however this is not such an exception with many container ships measuring around 400m long x 56m wide), however their full load draft of around 24.5-25.5m (80-85ft) made them huge. With that full load draft they were unable to pass Singapore Strait, the English Channel etc. in a safe way. Due to that size, they were also restricted in amount of ports that they could enter. These vessels weigh about the same as 5 US Carriers together when fully loaded. When I went onboard, we were doing Ship-to-ship transfers off the coast of Los Angeles to smaller vessels. The voyage then went to Saudi Arabia, where loading happened on buoys connected to the actual terminal by submerged pipelines. Other voyages she often did, took her to Europe, discharging part of her cargo in France before transiting the English Channel to go to Rotterdam with the remainder of the cargo. The model. I built her, using the experience I built up with frame on keel methods from plastic. Size and rigidity was the real challenge here. Since that's also an issue in the real design of such vessels, some solutions were given by the original. The main deck of the beast, can easily fit a US CVN on top of that deck. I've made the main deck of 1.5mm styrene, this was still not very rigid over such a length. However, on the real ships, the corners are rounded, this help divide the forces over a larger surface instead of a single angle. A square angle would simply break loose under such forces. To simulate this rounded corner, I cut a piece of styrene rod and glued it flush with the deck. This added to the rigidity of the deck where it was most needed (the central part). Additionally you see the deck is divided in 3 parts, creating a camber like the real ship. On the real thing, that camber is truly large as well. Then I started building up the skeleton structure bellow, using the table surface and deck to keep everything flat. At the same time I started building the (small-ish) superstructures for this vessel. That's it for today. Since I can't get home for a while, I'll continue soon.

Hi Vinoth, are you talking about the real ones or the model ones?

Thanks for that Glen. Basically how I made my crude hinges for Sea Installer then. They were far from perfect and luckily hidden by the casings on my model. Also thanks for pointing me to @John Fox III 's build. He cheated by putting "in a lightbulb" instead of bottle and avoided showing up in my bottle searches. That is indeed a work of art, I love his hinges and might have to try and steal that method ( but likely end up on a level of "doing the job" rather than a work of art as you mentioned).

Great attention to detail again Nils. It is very odd to see a non-studded anchor chain. They are normally studded to avoid knots in the chain. I assume they don't consider that an issue with this type of vessel and anchor, where that anchor is not regularily hoisted.

Your penguin is somewhat out of scale, I dare say. I'm quite curious how you did the mast hinges? Did you make 2 halves, 1 on the top and 1 on the bottom part of the mast or did you sandwich 1 piece of top mast between 2 pieces of the bottom part? Kind of difficult to explain what I'm talking about I guess.... Also, the hinge pin, how do you keep it in place? Difficult to make out in your pictures due to the paint. Looking forward to your method for making the ice in the bottle.

I was just about to send you a message, enquiring about this one as I had seen it in your signature, without a build log link! It's great since I'm scrolling through your sailing ship builds in search of your techniques for a similar build of mine. How lucky can I get? Looking forward to see the rest of this build!

Very sharp and solid work Nils. An astounding pace of construction as well. I believe not many here can match your building speed.

Thanks Nils, This is the (partial) result of the corrections. You can also see in the first image what I meant with the boundary thing on the edge of the hatch. The filler chipped (and will probably continue to do so) at the edge, probably during removal and placement of the hatch (under which the battery and ballast are). If I would have put a vertical styrene plate (sanded flush with the filler) on the hatch and ship edge to contain the filler, this chipping probably wouldn't have happened. I've been thinking about inserting it now, but I guess this might do more harm than good. Sanding it flush and repainting only that edge will be difficult to blend in with 10-year old paint. There is of course also the issue of already placed details on that edge. The I-beam that supports the cargo lines next to the drip tray will also have to be redone. Some clean-up work to do on this side underneath the drip tray. There are some cut remains from the original glued boundary plate on the deck. Currently I'm building up a view of all the support structures in the manifold area. I'm looking at pictures from a lot of different angles to figure out how these structures are made. Unlike today, where things are rather uniform, it seems these supports were somewhat improvised around the piping. This is one of these typical things where you can spend hours figuring out what to build, to be called away to do something else and having to restart the next day... That's why I'm making these plans now. No doubt I'll still have to look at some pictures to verify things, but at least I have an idea of the way ahead when I restart building. The left part is actually a blank version of the walkway on top of the manifold area taken from of the ship's plans, which I then copied several times and where I can then add different layers of piping and supports without remeasuring all the time. It also helps me to verify some distances with comparisons of other equipment.

Interesting project. I'm quite curious how you will finish that hull and keep it water tight. I've checked the ship and saw she has a single propellor, so the shaft will have to pass through the keel. Hope you took that in account from the start. Good luck and I hope to see some update on that hull soon.

Great to see another build of yours Nils. Always fan of a colourful odd subject, so I'm following this one with great intrest. The finest mesh I've used is a plastic teabag. Not sure if you can stil get those. That could be glued rather than soldered to the platform. Another fine mesh is stainless steel mesh from a splash shield from Ikea. Very cheap, very fine and strong mesh. Of course it would be more difficult to hold in place. Examples of both meshes are shown in my Chaconia build. Looking forward to more progress on this build!

It definately looks very useful, but I live in Belgium, so I guess it might be a bit difficult to order from them. I have however found some online shops for plastics closer to my place, so that's where I'll go shopping very soon. In the meanwhile I've continued with the hose handling crane. Painted it, detailed it further (not yet on this picture). I will however keep it loose untill the equipment around it is finished. I had the idea (at the beginning of this build) of putting a thread bar with nuts through it, so I could use it as a handle to lift the lid from the hull, but I've decided against it. There was little room inside that crane to put a nut and I guess grabbing it, pulling some weight on it, would probably destroy the crane eventually. Apart from this, I've finally started tackling some issues passed on to me by the younger-me. For structural members that can take some hit from the water, I decided to glue it directly to the wood rather than to the filler coat that covers it. However, this means I have to remove some of that filler to insert the pieces. On the manifold drip trays, I made a mistake in that, so now I need to cover some gaps and paint them over. On both sides I made a measuring error, placing the drip trays too much forward. And on the forward edge, those drip trays should have acted as camouflage for the lid seam. The idea was good, the execution on the other hand... Not sure what I was thinking when I thought of fixing the aft boundary of the drip tray on the vessel and the forward and aft boundary to the lid. Apart from that, there is also a small angle that's supposed to be there, but it seems younger-me didn't really think of a solution for that. I have now removed the aft boundary from the vessel, inserted a plate as a doubler to the bottom in order to have the complete drip tray boundary fixed to the lid. Since the grating is on top of that drip tray, the plate will be hardly visible, an acceptable sacrifice to solve this little issue. Still lots of clean-up to do on the vessel, I guess I'll start using my airbrush along with my regular paint brush that I've been using to remove the dust up till now.

Recently, during a trip, a stumbled over 2 bronze guns made by Burgerhuys in the Netherlands around 1670's. That made me look around for more info on those and I found a rather interesting file about Dutch guns and in fact guns/cannons in general. It's written in both Dutch and English and contains lots of pictures and drawings of preserved or discovered Dutch guns around the world. The file can be found online, but I has trouble linking it. It's from Cultureel Erfgoed, which means Cultural Heritage from the Netherlands. I've just started reading a couple of days back. Interesting read so far, clarifies also a lot of terms used in cannon/gun subjects. Edit: figured it out. Here is the link as well. Dutch cannon file Kanonnen+van+Nederland+-+Guns+of+the+Netherlandsweb.pdf

Oh yes, dusting is an issue, although I am thinking of a display case for this one. Probably won't sail with it anymore in that case, or just make a case where I can easily put the vessel in and out (perhaps even through the bottom of the case? ) In any case, when I'm dusting off parts of the vessel where I'm working, it literally has piles of dust on it... Since I need to go to sea again (yes, time to continue my research on that manifold area), I've been doing some small items and projects around the vessel. Somehow I've always avoided the ventilation of forward spaces. It's a pipe with several bends in it, connected to a more or less central vertical ventilation shaft containing the fan. I now built that. The head of the fan was turned on a mini lathe, but I believe the diameter is too small, so I'll probably have to redo that. One of my issues is availability of styrene rods for easy machining. Currently I've had to glue tubes of different diameters to each other, but often the glue is not evenly distributed, causing damage when I'm turning on the edge between the tubes. I guess I'll have to find a source of rods as I'm a bit tired of trying many times to get a single good result. It still needs to be painted. (you can also see the crooked forward mast, this happened in a collision with a bridge, where I lost sight of the vessel. I will still need to fix that some day) Next were the bursting discs of the hold spaces. Each (independent) tank is sitting inside a hold space. This space is normally filled with either inert gas (LPG/flammable cargo) or dry air (ammonia). The pressure in those spaces is above atmospheric and of course subject to change with temperature. In order to protect the ship's structure, there are overpressure (safety) valves on those hold spaces, to release pressure when it gets too high. If, for some reason, the pressure is rising and the safety valves cannot handle the rise, there is a big bursting disc on each space. This disc simply breaks and open the space up to the atmosphere. Since you don't want parts of those discs flying around the deck when that happens, they are mounted in a protective cover that catches any debris. I had built 3 elbows about 10 years ago, finishing 1 completely, and then somehow never completed the remaining 2. Since I had an example, I knew exactly what to do, so they are all ready now. The very fine net around the piece is actually a tea bag. In those days they sold these plastic tea bags, luckily I saved a few, since I don't see those in the shop anymore. They have a very fine, strong netting texture. I also made a platform for tank 2, that will later on be sided by 2 stairs, 1 on each side of the big seawater pipe. It will receive a few more feet, but I first need to complete the piping below before I can finalize that (part of the research).You can also see one of those unfinished bursting disc structures. The platform will eventually be flush with the tank dome. Although I didn't remember the crappy paint job on this vessel, I can see some spots that need some fixing.... A lot of them in fact. Painting, clearly my least favorite part of this hobby.

Didn't have the best of days yesterday. The next pipe on the schedule was a cross connection from the IG line towards the cargo tank. The difficulty in these pipes is a double bend of 90°, 1 horizontal, 1 vertical. The vertical one is not truly an issue, but it's the distances that have to be correct. You can adjust the height of the vertical bend, but between the vertical and horizontal 1 it needs to be correct, since you want the end to land where you need it to land. Spend about a day working on 1 pipe, which seemed to fit perfectly. Only in my haste, I made a branch at the top, and that branch had be at the bottom... So started all over again. Of course you can't do such a double bend twice at exactly the same distance... So it was a bit off, but I thought I could correct that by making the horizontal bend more than 90° and adjusting the length of the pipe at tank side. Issue with testing the fit of this pipe is that it wasn't stable. I had difficulty keeping it in place for an overall check and adjustment of measurments. After a day I decided it was ok and I started painting the thing for mounting on the model. This time, the branch was where it should be. At the bottom. The system is in some way quite brilliant. On the IG side, the aft connection is high, the forward one is low. On the tank side, the aft connection is low, the forward connection is high. There are two angled connection pieces that allow either the two low and two high pieces to connect to each other, or form two low-high connections. This allows you to either put gas to the bottom of your tank and evacuate through the top or to insert the gas on the top and evacuate from the bottom by only shifting two spool pieces. In following pics you see the forward IG pipe, 2 days of work (for some odd reason they painted part of that pipe white and not grey...). It looks ok from this side. But not from this side... It was too much of an angle compared to the other transverse pipe, I couldn't live with that, so I eventually tore it off again. So off to a new start. Bending it further was not possible without destroying it, but I still had the old pipe with the better bends. I decided to cut those bends off at the "flange" and mount it on the flange of the faulty pipe. Somehow those bends weren't proper neither. After some playing, I sort of rediscovered my old method, electrical wire. It nearly has the same diameter as the pipe itself and the copper core allows for a lot more adjustment than the styrene pipe. I did also find a way to support the salvaged part of the original pipe, which was cut at the flange, for making the double bend. So now they lined up properly. In the meanwhile I have also mounted the aft connection to the IG line and as you can see in the above pictures, I have completed installation of the manual valve pieces and painting of the condensate line on the aft edge of the dome. With this done, the piping work (apart from fixing and painting of the portside safety valve) on tank 2 is finished.

Although I don't really share Keith's opinion about the beauty of these pipes, here is something totally fun for him... (less so for me). All in all I do enjoy this part as well. My 2-parts-per-day target system seems to work as I have made more progress than I had expected. Somehow the remaining work seems less than what I had anticipated. Since the heater bottom level was finished and I need more research for the next level on the manifold, I decided to go for tank dome 2. I had done some work on it before, but left off before finishing. At first it looked like my younger self put my older self in a tight corner there... Untill I discovered most of that piping wasn't glued yet! So you'll see things disappearing in the next pictures, this is just to make more space to work. All in all it was ok to work in that crowded area. The painted pieces are old, the unpainted pipe is something I just made, with flanges for valves prepared, but not glued or filed down yet. Next up was finishing that line on the tank dome and make its connections to the cargo system. As explained, Tank 1 and Tank 3 are on a different system, while Tank 2 can be connected to either of these systems (and the systems can be connected to each other to form 1 system as well). This means that the piping of tank 2 can be shifted by shifting elbow pieces. They had a rather funny system that is used all around the ship, where the elbow pieces have an L-shape, with a long and short leg. By mounting it with either the short part or the long part on the pipe, you connect to a different system. You can see the possible connections in following pics. Next was the connection of the condensate line (return from reliquefaction units) to the tank. I had already made a large part of that system, including the strainer, but not the by-pass line to the liquid line. So off to another run of dry-fit tests and adjustments. Luckily the thicker parts are insulation, while the thin, brass wire parts, are the actual pipe. Valves are mounted on the pipes themselves of course, so the insulation stops a little before and after the valves. From a modellers' perspective, this gives addition points to adjust the length of the piping. The brass wires are also drilled in, so eventually I can also add length by simply not pushing the brass wire all the way into the drilled holes. And the next step was more supports and additional crossing lines from the large diameter Inert Gas line towards the tank dome. Another dry fit. Slowly this tank dome will be finalized, a pretty big step (mentally at least). By using my 2-part-per-day method, I'm also not held back by any research (for now). If I finish something, like this tank dome, I still have a lot of individual items to make, so even if I'm somewhat stuck in the order of things, I can still make items that will be placed later on. I need to make them after all and for the time being, progress is progress! Although you don't really see it, I'm drilling most parts inside the deck for fitting. This gives additional strength apart from the glue. Although I haven't had any water over the deck yet, I also haven't sailed at full draft and I don't want half of the detailing disappearing after one accidental wash (one never knows).

Sad to hear this Keith. You (and yours) are in my thoughts. Your build can definately wait until Maggie is fully recovered. On the brighter side I'm happy to see she "got away with it" relatively lightly, if I'm allowed to say so.

Since I love colourful ships, you can count me in. Never really seen a model of a lightship being constructed from scratch, should be interesting!

Fantastic work Glen. Your plants are out of scale, 2-3 sq ft leaves? But I know you don't mind and it doesn't bother me either! Great work on those waterfalls, if there's 1 ghing you won't be improving anytime soon, it's those... Because you can't improve those, they're perfect, colour, opaqueness and topped off by those cotton splashes. Didn't notice before, but I love that splash where the water enters the "sea" inside the bottle!