SMS WESPE 1876 by wefalck – 1/160 scale - Armored Gunboat of the Imperial German Navy - as first commissioned

[Ras Ambrioso]

Ce magnifique!

[Keith Black]

Bravo, Eberhard, bravo.

[Dr PR]

Just think how noisy it would have been on the bridge when that gun fired!

 

I lost my high frequency hearing and got ringing in my ears (tinnitus) on the cruiser I served on from standing watches on the bridge when the guns were firing - and it was an enclosed bridge.

 

The gun in itself is a masterpiece. The ship as a whole is looking good!

[BANYAN]

That is a very nicely detailed model; especially at the scale you are working at Eberhard.  Impressive!

 

cheers

 

Pat

[Gahm]

Fantastic work! The level of details and precision of work . . . it is hard to believe that it is really done at that miniature scale!

 

Thomas

[FriedClams]

Excellent work.  Impressive!

 

Gary

[KeithAug]

Eberhard - I have to agree with Phil that the gun is particularly magnificent. Firing the gun on the beam must have been a particularly unwelcome job for the bridge crew.

[wefalck]

Thanks, Keith ....

 

Well, while it would have been possible to fire gun something like 30° to either side, training the gun was not a very fast and precise. In fact, there were a number of men cranking away under the barbette, while the gun-captain could engage through some sort of reversing gear the lower carriage with this cranking sytem. In this way he could train the gun left or right with the help of a lever. However, I think the normal tactics would have been to keep the gun steady and then approach the target in a shallow arc - when the target went through the sights, the gun was fired. This would have been also the tactics for the Rendell-gunboats of the RN. In addition, the WESPE-Class was twin-screwed with two independent engines, so using the engine-room telegraphs, the boat could also be turned slowly by going forward with one engine and backward with the other, again waiting for the target passing through the sights, rather than training the whole ship onto the target.

I think the reason, why Middendorf (who later went on to design the five-mast ship PREUSSEN) opted for the central pivot carriage was, that another tactical concept was to allow the ship to fall dry on the tidal flats of the German Wadden Sea and be used as a sort of detached fort, keeping the enemy out of range from the coastal towns and fortifications.

[KeithAug]

11 hours ago, wefalck said:

that another tactical concept was to allow the ship to fall dry on the tidal flats of the German Wadden Sea

Eberhard - I think I had picked that up from one of your earlier comments and had assumed that in such circumstances that trining the gun would have been required. Grounding seems to be a bit of a dicey concept given the flat bottom and limited freeboard / buoyancy. I bet they had some anxious moments waiting for the suction between the hull and the mud to let go.

[wefalck]

One should dive into the files of the military archive of the state archive in order to see, whether any reports of the commanding officers have survived. My understanding is that the commanders had to send report to Berlin after each commission (the boats were not kept permanently in commission). Such reports still exist for instance for the Prussian gunboats of the early 1860s.

 

With the twin-screws the boats may have been able to wiggle themselves out of the mud.

[mbp521]

The miniature details of this build just keep getting better and better Eberhard. 
 

-Brian

[wefalck]

Chain-rails and smoke-stack stays

 

Due to several business and private travels over the past month not such much progress has been made …

 

In the meantime, I had received some special material for simulating the various small chains, namely for the railing and the stays for the smoke-stack. The material is black-oxidised Konstantan™-wire of 0.06 mm and 0.07 mm diameter. Konstantan™ is a CuNi-alloy that is characterised by a very constant specific resistance over a wide temperature range and low temperature extension coefficient. However, I am not interested in these properties, but it is the thinnest black wire I could get and its breaking strength is somewhat higher than that of pure copper.

 

The idea is to twist together two strands of wire so that the pitch is approximately that of the length of chain-link. Two strands of this twisted wire then are twisted together in the opposite direction. To the naked eye and with my +3 loupe this looks quite convincingly like a somewhat twisted chain. That is a close as I can get in this scale. 

Chain-rail on folding stanchions (from WAAP, 1900).

 

There is a photograph that shows details of the railing on the deck-house quite clearly and there is an instruction book for draughtsmen (WAAP, 1900) that has a drawing of the folding chain-railing as used by the Imperial German Navy. There is a scale bar that allows to calculate the various dimensions and the height tallies with the railings in the lithographs of the WESPE-Class. According to this the stanchions are around 85 cm heigh which translates to 5.3 mm in 1:160 scale. The chain-links are 60 mm (0.4 mm) long with a wire-diameter of 8 mm (0.05 mm).

 

Chain-rail around the deck-house on a WESPE-Class boat (LAVERRENZ, 1900).

 

Years ago, I had drawn my own stanchions and etched them from 0.2 mm brass-sheet. The idea was to solder two together in order to arrive at the correct thickness, without problems with under-etching in my primitive set-up. However, when I recently saw the commercially produced etched stanchions by SÄMANN-Ätztechnik in Germany, I realised that my home-made one could not compete quality-wise. However, their two-chain ones in 1:150 were too high (even at that scale). The three-chain ones, on the other hand, where of the correct height when using the lower ring to simulate the hinge for folding down. With the laser-cutter I also cut some small plates to simulate the foot-plates.

 

The holes for the stanchions were enlarged at the top with a round burr, so that half of the lower ring would be embedded. It would have been nice to have also photoetched parts for the foot-plates, which would have looked much crisper …

 

The chain-stays for the smoke-stacks caused me some head-scratching, in particular the connections to the stack and to the deck. The chain was done as for the railings, but with the 0.07 mm wire. Making and fitting shackles of less than 1 mm in length was physically impossible. So, I resorted to some dark grey thread. Not ideal, but there are just some physical limits that are impossible to overcome.

 

In order to not damage completed work, I am working from the centre of the ship outwards. For this reason, I also had to put on first the inner stays of the smoke-stack and then the railings.

 

As always, close-up photographs are rather discouraging, but the rails look quite reasonable at normal viewing distance (me thinks).

 

A problem is the springiness of the wire, so the double-twisted wire is more forgiving than the simple wire. It is not so easy to shape a nice catena that properly sags downwards, with the upper and lower chain in one plane. Luckily, deviations are only noticeable, when looking straight down. I still have to work on the stays …

 

 

To be continued ....

[Keith Black]

 Eberhard, I think it looks great. 

[Bedford]

You've come up with a very clever solution and it does look very much like chain. Well done, as usual.

[mtaylor]

True craftsmanship and artistry, Eberhard.

[BANYAN]

Ditto Eberhard: that looks very effective, and I defy anyone to manually create scale chain that small.

 

cheers

 

Pat

[Gahm]

You came up with a smart and very convincing solution. Beautifully done!

 

Thomas

[FriedClams]

18 hours ago, wefalck said:

the rails look quite reasonable at normal viewing distance (me thinks).

 

Me thinks so too.  1:160 is just too darn small to do much of anything else.  Nice work!

 

Gary

[KeithAug]

On 4/2/2023 at 8:00 PM, wefalck said:

As always, close-up photographs are rather discouraging

As you commented some time ago, postage stamps images are the way forward. It all looks pretty crisp to me. I guess the stanchions are quite delicate.

 

[wefalck]

Thanks, gentlemen, for your kind words. Progress is slow due to interruptions by business and leisure travels.

 

Keith, the stanchions are surprisingly strong. They are etched from 0.3 mm nickelsilver, which is a bit tougher than many types of brass. For my taste they could have been even a bit thinner (flimsier), but that would push the etching technology, particularly considering that it is a commercial product. In my own etching attempts I tried to make them thinner all over, but in my primitive cuvette set-up results were not consistent. The German manufacturer presumably uses a spray- or foam-etching set-up, which ensures uniform and repeatable etching over the whole fret.

[Marcus.K.]

Hello Wefalck,

 

this tiny work is fascinating! I can not imagine how you can do things like that!

 

A proposal for the foots plates of those stanchions which you wished to be not that prominent: I noticed on the real ship´s photo: for me it seems, the foot itself was painted in the colour of the deck - dark gray. If you´d do the same, you would take away the "optical weight" of those foots. But maybe you do a test on a sample first - because it looks already so excellent.. and I would not dare to try to optimize and then mess it up! 

 

Wonderful work!!

[wefalck]

Thanks Markus for your kind words and the comments.

 

While there is enough photographic evidence for the paint schemes, when the Imperial Navy switched to grey, the evidence for the 1874 and 1878 regulations is not conclusive. On some photographs the stanchions appear quite light in colour and on others rather dark.

 

I had considered painting the footplates black/dark grey and might still touch them up in that colour because their optical weight is indeed quite heavy. On the other hand it adds a bit of detail and the stanchions don't look like just stuck into the deck - for me it is important to also indicate how things work and parts are connected.

[BANYAN]

Eberhardt, to my eye (at least from the more distant photo) those stanchions look great and well balanced; I think touching up the footings would have the opposite effect.  Just an opinion though; what matters is what looks right to your eye.

 

cheers

 

Pat

[wefalck]

Thanks again for all the encouragement!

 

*****************************************

 

Rails continued …

 

I have installed the rails around the deck-house on the starboard-side too. This time a picture with a coin for size reference.

 

In the meantime, a forum colleague made the suggestion to braid the wires instead of double-twisting them. I think I had tried this earlier on, but the copper-wires were too soft and broke to easily. I’ll give it a try again with the Konstantan wire and will report. They used chain on this boat for a lot of things, where today one would find wire-rope instead.

Mast and rigging

As noted above, my intention was to work ‘inside-out’ when installing the rails, so as not to damage already installed parts. I now realised that I should have installed also the mast and its stays first, before the deckhouse rails. So, it was high time to do it now, before going on with more rails.

The pictorial evidence is rather scarce for the early form of the mast. In fact, there is only the very first photograph that shows SMS WESPE being fitted out. All other photographs show later forms, when the mast had acquired a top-mast and a fixed signalling yard. When this was installed is not known. Perhaps around the time of the first minor refit, when the boat-racks were installed, or when she got the conning tower with the search-light on top, as shown by the only other photograph with the black/white/yellow livery (as per 1878 regulations).

 

The mast had been turned a while ago from a steel rod and fitted with belaying pins. Not sure, whether I showed already pictures of this. 

It seems that there were double stays leading forward to the front of the boiler-casing, but there are no pictures that show how they were fastened and the drawings are silent on this detail. So, I assumed that there must have been ring-bolts rivetted to the casing. In fact, I should have installed this before painting and installing the casing, but did not have sufficient foresight. Hence, they had to be ‘retro-fitted’ now. Then there is a pair of shrouds on each side – quite a few for a simple pole mast. These shrouds seem to have been made fast on eye-bolts between the rail-stanchions on the deck-house, for which there is a vague indication on the drawings. Again, there is no evidence for how they were set tight. I gather it must have been some hearts with lanyards between them.

 

I assume that the stays and shrouds were wire-rope. On some later picture it vaguely looks, as if these ropes had been served all over. To imitate such ropes, I have collected over the years electronic copper wires and stranded wires and are spun with silk (as used in high-frequency coils). I choose a 0.15 mm wire for the purpose here. The silk in my case was green, so it had to be given a light coat of black paint first.

Before the shrouds and the stay could go on, the signal halyard blocks had to be installed. I assumed that these were stropped double-blocks, but this is purely conjectural, based on the number of belaying pins. For the signal halyards I used some of my treasured nylon-thread as used in the old days for mending ladies’ stockings – a tightly spun two-ply thread that does seem to be out of production now (better than the fly-tying threads). The lay still was not tight enough, so I twisted it a bit more and stabilised the twist with a light touch of varnish.

 

At that time a steamer should have carried a steamer-light at the mast at night, but the available photographs are not are not clear enough to be sure that it would have been hoisted from a halyard in front of the mast. I just installed the halyard without attempting to model any additional arrangements, such as guiding ropes. The lithograph from the early 1880s also shows a crane for light just in front of the casemate, but it is not visible on the photographs.

Making working hearts for the stays would have been asking a bit too much, so I simplified the arrangements and just provided seized eyes at the end of the standing rigging and roved the lanyards through them and directly through the eyebolts. I gather this is good enough at this small scale. It was difficult enough to install all this without destroying other things already put into place.

 

 

To be continued ....

Edited April 30, 2023 by wefalck

[Snug Harbor Johnny]

  This is a great model.  'Wonder if anyone ever did the Koenigen Louisa and the African Queen as a pair?

 

[wefalck]

Why would you want them as a pair? AFRICAN QUEEN is purely fictional anyway - see HMS MIMI by Ras Ambrioso ...

[Keith Black]

4 hours ago, wefalck said:

These shrouds seem to have been made fast on eye-bolts between the rail-stanchions on the deck-house, for which there is a vague indication on the drawings. Again, there is no evidence for how they were set tight. I gather it must have been some hearts with lanyards between them.

 Absolutely gorgeous work, Eberhard. Is it possible that the shrouds were tightened with bottle screws particularly since wire cable was used? 

Edited May 1, 2023 by Keith Black

[Hubac's Historian]

On 4/14/2023 at 11:08 PM, BANYAN said:

Eberhardt, to my eye (at least from the more distant photo) those stanchions look great and well balanced; I think touching up the footings would have the opposite effect.  Just an opinion though; what matters is what looks right to your eye.

 

cheers

 

Pat

Your progress, Eberhardt, is incredible, and I am just catching up now.  On this point, though, I am inclined to agree with Banyan.

[KeithAug]

Nice detail Eberhard. In the second to last photo the stays from the mast to the deck abreast the smoke stack seem to have some curvature but this isn't obvious in the other images. Is it a photographic effect?

[Snug Harbor Johnny]

17 hours ago, wefalck said:

Why would you want them as a pair? AFRICAN QUEEN is purely fictional anyway - see HMS MIMI by Ras Ambrioso ...

   'Just imagining ... based on the classic movie with Bogey and Hepburn when the Queen went out to torpedo the Louisa.  Some choose to model 'imaginary' ships - like Captain Jack's Black Pearl (as seen in the movie), the H.M.S. Surprise as seen in Master and Commander, the first Disney Nemo's Nautilus - complete with giant squid, and even (on this forum) a cartoon Asterix boat heading for a Viking ship.  It's all up to the whim of the builder.

 

  Now I knew a man years ago who built an 18" long version of the African Queen with a working mini steam engine (it was 'lake worthy') as well as a working model sailboat with a 'vertical multi-blade' windmill for propulsion.  His name - Richard Derby Elwell - who was on the U.S. fencing team in the 20's that competed in the olympics, a self-employed designer of warehouses and serious fly fisherman who would not hit the streams of Long Island until well into the season when the 'easy fish' were gone and the ranks of fishermen had thinned.  Outfitted by Abercromby and Fitch in NYC, he was a rare example of an accomplished gentleman and connoisseur.

 

  I was a boarder at his residence in the 70s for one of two semesters of paid internship  for the Navy at Grumman Aerospace and worked on the F14, among other projects (they PAID qualified interns in those days, whereas today young hopefuls are free labor 'for the experience').  Perhaps I was just remembering that grand old man, and regretting not availing myself of his mentorship more than I did.