schooner

Rigging Cargo Booms - Hatch Nr 1

Well it’s finally time to start rigging this pig. I’m going to start with Hatch Nr1, which since it will be shown secured for sea it will be the easiest.

The forestay for the foremast goes on first. I thought it would be some simple work with tweezers to attach the upper end but I ended up using needle nose pliers and tweezers from a lot of angles so I decided to attach the upper ends of all the shrouds and stays now while the area is free of other rigging so there is some spaghetti hanging from all the masts:

The 2 5-ton booms where rigged up next. Since the booms will be in the stowed position the blocks normally used on the vangs have been left off and the wire rope pendants are just lashed to the booms.

On my first post for this log I mentioned that one of the things that caught my attention about Liberty Ships was the use of large chains on the masts:

I came to learn that they are call “bull chains” and they are a clever solution to a problem. The topping lift on a boom is used to raise and lower the outer end of the boom and it also supports the boom and whatever load is is lifting so they are made of wire rope for strength. The topping lift is taken to power on one of the capstan heads on the boom’s winch. The problem comes in that you can’t wrap wire rope around a capstan because it won’t

“grip” it and you can’t have manila rope as part of the lift because it is too weak to support lifting a cargo load. They solved the problem by having the end of the wire topping lift attach to the top of a triangular plate, the bottom of the plate was connected to both a length of manila rope and a length of chain. The rope was wrapped around a capstan head and taken to power. When the topping lift was in the desired position, the chain next to it was shackled to the deck using whatever chain link was closest to the deck eye, the rope was then slacked off and the weight of the boom and load was now carried by the wire rope connected to the chain. By having a long length of chain they could position the boom anywhere from horizontal to vertical and still have a strong topping lift. Pretty neat. They could get away with this because these booms were fixed in position and were not swung or raised or lowered while in use (I’ll explain how that worked when I rig one of the “working” hatches).

Here’s the topping lift/bull chain in place:

And here is the completed hatch after some touch-up painting. The booms are shown stowed in the horizontal position. If there was over size cargo stowed on to of the hatch, like a tank, crated aircraft, PT Boat, etc then the booms would be stowed in the vertical position when at sea.  The 2 additional  fore stays where only rigged when the Jumbo Boom on the aft side of this mast was in use, it will be on this build hence the stays are rigged. Although they partially block the hatch opening it wasn't an issue because all the winches for both Nr1 and Nr2 hatches all had to be used to work the Jumbo Boom which I will show when I get to Nr2 hatch:

1 hatch down, 4 to go.

Just caught on to your build, fantastic as always. I thought the Orange Hobby PE sets were tough but this one takes the cake, it is one thing to lose PE parts into the carpet but to lose them into the folds of your fingerprints!

Thanks for the feedback Carl and Lou.

I wish I knew about this earlier….

I’ve been spend the last week or so getting ready for the last big job on this build - rigging the cargo booms. I’ve been fabricating cargo hooks, drilling out and painting britannia blocks and doing what seizing I can off the model.

About 50% of the rigging will represent manila line which I will tie off with seizing wherever possible. The other half will be representing wire rope, both greased (slushed) and painted. I’ve been mulling over is how to tie-off the wire rope. Knots would look pretty bad and seizing, while better, is still not realistic since wire rope was not seized - the eyes are either secured with poured sockets or clamps. I didn’t think I could pull it off with just glue but then I saw something on Mahuna’s amazing build log for the skipjack Kathryn here on MSW, he used crimping tubes to secure some of his rigging. Crimping tubes are used in jewelry making and, lo and behold, my wife happened to have some on hand:

When I squeezed them with needle nose pliers they secured the eye in the line OK but they were inconsistent in how the lines led into them and were too flat and broad for my eye.

After poking around on that great repository of knowledge, YouTube, I found the trick is to use crimping pliers.

The pliers use a 2-step process, the first flattens the tube but also leave a crease down the center of it, in the second step the tube is moved to another spot on the pliers and the tube is folded over the crease leaving a nice, tight and consistent seizing that is realistic for wire rope:

These might be useful for anyone wanting to secure rigging that represents wire rope, radio antennas or even “rope” where there is not enough room to put on a seizing.

Amazing job Greg!

I've always shied away from trying to weather my models because I've seen so many otherwise great builds ruined by a heavy hand but you have an excellent sense of what will work - your models are the most realistic I've seen. You ought to see if the film industry is hiring for special effects model making!

It was a pleasure to watch this take shape.

Tim

Jumbo Boom Blocks

One of the details I had to finish up before starting the rigging was the 30 and 50-ton “Jumbo” booms. Unlike the 5-ton booms which got their lifting power straight off of the winch, the booms used for lifting heavy loads like tanks and planes needed the extra lifting power provided by large pulleys, 5-sheave for 50-ton, and 4-sheave for the 30-ton. They were some big honkers - almost 6 feet high including the cargo hook:

Fortunately Bluejacket sells some 1/4 inch blocks that are exactly what I needed for shape, height and length:

The only problem is that they are triple blocks so I needed to modify them to get them right for this build. I started by sanding off the stropping on one side for the 4-holers and both sides for the 5-holers. Then I used my punch set to make sheave discs from sheet plastic of the right thickness:

After gluing on the discs I covered them with oversized sheet plastic:

The plastic was then trimmed and sanded to match the original shape. The 4-holers needed to have the lifting eye cut off and new ones added to the “new” centerline, all of them had new stropping to replace what was removed, and half of them had beckets added (the starting point for rigging a set of blocks):

After painting these should do the trick:

With a stack like that I bet she rolled even at the pier!

Thanks for all the info Lou, especially for the 50 cal photos - I wish I had found those.

I suspected the #3 photo was on a 4-piper but the Royal Navy cap on the sailor threw me until I recalled the destroyers for bases deal in 1940 or 41. This photo must have been taken when the RN crew was taking one of the ships out for shakedown right after the transfer because the RN heavily modified those ships as soon as they could to better suit them as convoy escorts and I'm sure the 50 cals were craned off right after the 4 torpedo tubes mounts!

Jim, your note about the hanging shot racks got me thinking so I did some looking around online. The Connie as currently fitted out in Boston does not have any shot racks evident on the gun deck, maybe they thought they would be trip hazards for the tourists. The full scale mockup of Connie's gun deck at the US Navy Museum in the Washington Navy Yard likewise lacks shot racks.

Soooo . . . I googled "USS Constitution shot racks" and the first thing to pop-up was a discussion thread from here at good old MSW titled "Cannon Shot Stowage on Deck" from Mar of 2015, if you look at the last post in the discussion someone put in a link to another discussion thread from someone who was building the Revell kit and had similar questions to yours and what he found out about them.

hope this helps

Thanks Lou. That is an interesting photo of the 50 cal in action. Now that you point that out, that must have been a tough location to work. When researching photos I tend to focus on what I'm after (in this case .50-cal info) and miss some of the other interesting stuff in the same frame!

.50 Cal Machine Guns

Once the Liberty production line got into full swing by late 1942 their light anti-aircraft weapon suite consisted of 6-8 of the excellent 20mm Oerlikon guns:

The kit provides very nice cast Oerlikons:

Like everything else weapon-related, the Stephen Hopkins was built too early in 1942 to get the good stuff, her light AA guns were water-cooled .50 cal machine guns from the USN which had plenty laying around since they were rapidly abandoning them in favor of the Oerlikons. When I saw the kit’s 20mm guns I thought it would be easy to convert them to .50 cals by thickening the barrel to represent the water jacket, replacing the cylindrical ammo magazine with the “tombstone” one which was unique to the .50 cals and changing the shoulder rests to the 50 cal grips that looked like bicycle handlebars. The only problem was that I was unable to find any photo evidence that shipboard .50 cals were ever mounted with a shield (unlike today where virtually every USN ship has multiple .50 cals with shields). All of the .50 cal mounts in early 1942 were variations of the “Tora Tora Tora” mounts that were on the battleships during the Pearl Harbor attack, they looked like this:

So I needed to scratch build them. I made the pedestals and “C” shaped mounts from strip and rod:

The details like the cooling water hoses, water tank, magazine, elevation crank were wire, wood and plastic, the gunsights are Northstar PE valve hand wheels:

And the finished product after painting ( I decided to paint the mounts Navy Gray since that is how they would have been shipped and, like any shipyard, they would not have been repainted if it wasn't spelled out in the contract):

Congrats on reaching the end, it took you about the same amount of time as it did to build the real ship!

Amazing metal and sail work and your ice sheathing passes the dreaded close-up shot with flying colors!

Very nice build Reed.

Before moving to NC my wife and I had many great weekends on the Eastern Shore over 20 years, and like you, I became interested in the skipjacks. I'm currently about 80% done with the Willie l. Bennett kit from Model Shipways, probably the best kit I've found for any build, wonderful directions and plans - learned a lot. I remember reading somewhere that the skipjack design was so successful because it could be built by house carpenters -- not needing any experience with the complex curves associated with most hulls. Not sure if that is true but it sounds good. Great job on the winding machine

Deck Details

Although I have been spending a fair amount of time on the build lately there isn’t much to show for it since it has all been detail work with small strip plastic and wire. Anyway, the steam and fireman piping/shielding is all in, the fire stations installed (most are on the port side), and about 80 pad eyes are almost all in along the hatches and in the waterways. The pad eyes will be important when rigging the booms but since I'm not sure which ones I will be using at this point they are all pinned to the deck for additional strength.

The fireplugs and hose racks are from BlueJacket’s catalog, the fireplug hand wheels are from Northstar and the rest is scratch. I’ll probably fabricate the 50-cal machine guns next.

Steam Piping

As I said in my first post for this log, one of the techniques used in the design of the Liberty ships to reduce costs and simplify building was to run piping outside the skin of the ship, mainly steam and fireman lines. The steam lines ran along the stbd side of the ship and the fireman lines along the port.

Because any exposed piping on the main deck would be a high risk of getting squashed by a load of cargo, they were protected either by “fencing” along side the cargo hatches, or by overhead shielding in other areas such as between the hatches and the pipe runs to the winches and windlasses:

I used small strip plastic to imitate both types-here the hatch on the left has the fencing:

And here both types are done:

I’ve still have a little more of the steam piping to go and then I’ll tackle the fireman - which will look the same except there will also be fire plugs and hose racks.

Hey Jack, nice to see another Lib build underway, I've got a build log here for BlueJackets 1/192 scale Liberty.

If you are interested in some onboard photos of the Brown this site has been a big help for me in detailing:

http://www.geoghegan.us/brown/JWB-walkaround.htm

best of luck

Thanks Nic, You have put out a great kit that would look super out of the box, but at this scale, and with plenty of online photo references, it is irresistible for an OCD type like me to detail to it the point of absurdity!

Warping Engine

The Lib ships had a steam-powered engine on the after deck that was used to drive two capstan heads which were used to take the slack out of mooring lines or even to pull the ship into a pier if no tugs were available (the same thing could be done by the anchor windlass up forward). It was a simple two-step reduction gearing. Interesting feature was that there was no crankshaft - the piston rods were connected to the outer edges of two discs on the outside of the bedplate.

The kit provides a simple drum winch of britannia metal to serve as the warping engine. It is a little under scale for height and I thought I might be able to scratch build something more realistic. Here is the the kit and what I started out with:

Here’s after the gears (from a bag of old watch parts) , guards and shaft have been added:

And the finished product with the shaft supports. The capstans are after market from the Bluejacket catalog. The kit provided slightly smaller ones which I had planned to use but then I got careless while sanding them and squeezed one out of round too badly to repair, I forgot just how soft britannia can be.

Here it is installed on the model with the canted fairleads in place:

Aft Hatches

With the installation of the mizzen mast, the hatches and their winches all the major pieces are now in place:

Nr 2 & 3 Hatches

The rest of the big items for the other forward hatches are in place.

Tom, I just came upon your build - nice work! Are the carronades you are using the ones that came with the kit or are they aftermarket?

Main Deck

I’ll fit out the main deck working fore to aft and bigger to smaller. Hatch Nr1 has the big pieces in place:

Thanks John! And thanks for all the likes

Lifeboats

The kit provides boats in britannia with laser cut inserts for the thwarts.

I decided to show the boats with their canvas boat covers in place. I used a piece of wire as the internal brace for the covers. I tried to make the covers out of tape but that did not work very well so I used diluted white glue brushed onto tissue paper -you can see it one one of the boats here (it dries almost transparent):

After trimming and painting I was satisfied with the “canvas” look of them. Here they are rigged in place:

I’ll add coiled up monkey lines later but they are real dust magnets so I’ll wait to the end of the build for those. This finishes up the deck house except for the railings. Now it’s time to move to the main deck and start making this look like a cargo ship.

Thanks Kevin

Boat Davits

The kit provides britannia davits. I had planned to drill out the tops and insert 1/16” split rings as the attachment point for the upper block of the boat falls and the span wire that runs between the davit pairs but there was not enough material (room) up there to support drilling a hole big enough for a split ring to run through. I thought about flattening the tops with a pair of pliers to provide more drilling surface but I was worried that the metal would become too brittle. Looking through my parts locker I found my stash of .75mm Backstay Eyebolts from Model Shipways. Although I have never used them for their intended purpose they have been invaluable every time I needed to anchor a small eye. They will work with a #77 drill bit which is about the smallest I have. There was enough room to put them in place:

The line handling gear associated with the davits consisted of a T-bitt and a small line reel for each davit:

The kit shows both items on the plans but does not provide any material or mention them in the instructions - just an oversight I guess. The T-bitts were easily fabricated out of plastic rod and wire for the cross piece. I also drilled them for pinning to the deck since they will be under tension.  The reels were a little more work. They are quite small so 1/192 scale aftermarket line reels would be much too big. I have some 1/350 scale PE reels that would have worked but I did not have enough to build 8 so I ended up making them out of rod with sheet plastic supports:

Here is everything in place:

When I rig the davits I’ll snub the inboard end of the falls around the T-bitt and then pass it under the reel, draw up the slack and glue it in place.

I’ll have to finish the STBD side and then fit out the lifeboats.