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

[Roger Pellett]

Looks good!

[wefalck]

The square mesh was a concession I had to make to practicalities. The fabric is so delicate and slippery, that it would have not been possible to pull every other thread.

[KeithAug]

Very fine work Eberhard. Going off to search through our tea bag collection.

[cog]

Keith, could be Lipton pyramid like bags.

 

wefalk, That is some very fine detail on such a scale ... I wouldn't even consider it myself, very impressive, you seem to be master of miniature

[Louie da fly]

Beautiful work, Eberhard.

 

Steven

[wefalck]

Thanks, gentlemen, for your kind words ...

 

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Scrollwork and name-plates

 

As I had tried laser-engraving on cardboard for the gun-layer stand, I wanted to try out this technique also for the scrollwork and the name-plates. Originally, I had foreseen to develop the scrollwork by printing the design onto a decal-sheet and then build it up by sculpting it over the printed lines with acrylic gel. The name-plates could have been surface-etched in brass. One could have etched, of course also the scrollwork in brass and then complete it with acrylic gel.

 

Best available image of the bow scrollwork and name-plate

 

It is not very clear what the scrollwork looked like when new and from what material it was made. The fact that it seems to have persisted intact over the whole life of these ships may indicate that it was actually cast in some metal, rather than carved in wood.

There are no close-up photographs of sufficient resolution in the black-white-yellow paint-scheme. Closer photographs are only available from a later period, when everything was painted over in grey and some of scrollwork may have been picked out in a darker grey. Originally it was probably painted in yellow-ochre with parts of gilded. In any case, available photographs are not clear enough to truly reconstract the scrollwork, so some interpretation was necessary.

In addition to the scrollwork per se, there was a shallow sculpture of the animal after which the ship was named, for SMS WESPE, of course, a wasp. Existing photographs only give a vague idea what these sculptures really looked like. In any case not for SMS WESPE.

 

Only available image of the stern scrollwork

 

There has also been some scrollwork at the stern, but pictorial evidence for this is rather scarce. There is only one known photograph that gives a full view of the stern of this class of ships and this was taken at the very end of their service life. Available copies of this photograph are not clear enough to really discern what the scrollwork actually looked like, so a fair amount of imagination is needed to recreate it.

 

Artwork for the bow scrollwork

 

Creating the basic artwork for the decoration was a multiple-step process. First a photograph of the respective section of the model as built was taken in order to give the necessary proportions. In the next step the best available photograph with the least perspective distortions was chosen and fitted over the model photograph. In another layer of the graphics software (Graphic for iPad) the scrolls were drawn free-hand (with the iPen) using the paintbrush-function and a good amount of smoothing. This artwork was saved as a JPEG. On the Internet I found a nice drawing of a wasp and turned this into a pure b/w image with a good bit of editing in Photoshop. Both, the scrollwork and the wasp were saved as transparent GIF. In my favourite CAD-program (EazyDraw), the parts were mounted together. This could have been done also in Photoshop, but I did have a scaled drawing of the bow-section in EazyDraw to which I exactly fitted the artwork. There were also some addtional parts to be cut.

Some examples of the (unused) laser-cut scrollwork and the name-plates

 

The scrollwork was cut/engraved with the laser-cutter using the ‘half-tone’ function, which means that the laser is modulated to emit less power when a grey pixel is encountered and full power, when a black pixel is encountered. I had to play in several iterations with the settings of the laser-cutter in order to arrive at a satisfactory result.

 

Scrollwork and name-plate in place

 

In a first try the name-boards were made in the same way, but the half-depth engraving around the letters resulted in a somewhat fuzzy apearance of the letters. I, therefore, tried out a different idea. From previous trials it was know that the laser had no effect on transparent materials and very limited effect on translucent materials. Hence, I covered some cardboard with a thin layer of Pleximon 192 (essentially liquid, light-hardening Plexiglas). A thorough curing this sandwich was sanded flat and presented to the laser-cutter. The laser removes all the cardboard, but leaves the acrylic virtually untouched, with the exception of some light surface roughness. One ends up with a piece of thin acrylic sheet to which the letters and the scrollwork of the name-board are attached. Within the limits of the resolution (0.05 mm) of the laser-cutter the lettering turned out reasonably clear, perhaps not as crisp, as when photoetched though.

 

Stern scrollwork in place

 

The scrollwork elements were attached to the hull using fast-drying varnish. The actual painting and guilding will be done, once the hull has been painted.

 

 

To be continued ...

[KeithAug]

Very interesting Eberhard and a very good result. What programme do you use to read the image and create the code needed to drive the laser cutter? You probably covered this earlier but I obviously missed it.

[druxey]

At the size that you are building this model, a very impressive result with an innovative technique!

[wefalck]

Keith, this is a very simple machine. I started a separate thread on it: https://modelshipworld.com/topic/23478-miniature-desk-top-laser-cutter/

 

Essentially, it is a very simple piece of software that reads the image pixel by pixel, row by row. It's bit image driven, not vector driven.

[KeithAug]

Thank you for thr link. Good bedtime reading.

[BANYAN]

You are really getting to grips with that laser cutter Eberhard; a very good result with the nameplates and scroll work.

 

cheers

 

Pat

[wefalck]

Thanks, Pat ... but close-up photographs are really unforgiving, as one can also see in the following ...

 

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Further work on the lower carriage

 

Back to the lower carriage. The (mor or less) central pivot determines its rotational axis, but the weight of the gun is actually supported by four (kind of) caster wheels running on cast-iron rails bolted to the bottom of the barbette.

The rails had been turned already a long time ago. The forks for the caster-wheels were fabricated from laser-cut cardboard. The wheels themselves are simple turned steel discs with a groove.

 

Caster wheels prepared for assembly

 

For the assembly, the rails were taped down onto an appropriately scaled print-out of the original plan of the vessel and carriage fixed with a clothes pin. The wheels and forks are temporarly united by axels made from short lengths of copper wire. The casters then were cemented under the carriage in the correct position with respect to both, the rails and the carriage frame, using again varnish.

 

Caster wheels in place

 

The wheels will have to be removed again before painting the carriage, because they will be left in bright steel. I do not know, whether this is correct for the flanges of the wheels, but it gives the whole arrangement are rather ‘technical’ look. The axles with cylindrical end-caps have already been prepared from steel rod and will be installed during the final assembly.

 

Caster wheels in place

 

To be continued ...

 

[Bob Cleek]

On 6/4/2020 at 11:17 AM, wefalck said:

In any case, available photographs are not clear enough to truly reconstruct the scrollwork, so some interpretation was necessary.

In addition to the scrollwork per se, there was a shallow sculpture of the animal after which the ship was named, for SMS WESPE, of course, a wasp. Existing photographs only give a vague idea what these sculptures really looked like. In any case not for SMS WESPE.

That must have been a frustrating problem! So close and yet so far.

 

While greatly hesitant to say anything critical, I feel compelled to ask why the "bug" in the bow scrollwork appears to have eight legs, making it a spider or a scorpion, even though the vessel was named "Wasp?" 

 

 

Thanks for sharing what is a most interesting build!

 

 

 

 

[druxey]

Bob: That IS a scorpion: see the name - that photo is of a sister ship!

[wefalck]

Thanks, druxey was faster ...

[KeithAug]

58 minutes ago, druxey said:

Bob: That IS a scorpion: see the name - that photo is of a sister ship!

Its always good to have an eye for detail, I just marvelled at the level of detail, I must try harder. 

 

The roller track looking very authentic. It seems the arc of fire was limited to forward of abeam - or am i just misreading the drawing?

[wefalck]

You are right, the gun could be trained only through a relatively narrow arc. Otherwise, the boat should have had a much broader and/or deeper hull in order to take up the recoil forces from the massive gun. However, this would go against the foreseen tactical concept.

 

At that time the naval strategic concept of Germany was entirely defensive (probably with France as the main anticipated enemy). The gunboats were designed as a kind of mobile detached fort. The main operating area would be the Wadden Sea, the tidal flats separating the German coast from the open North Sea. The heavy gun of these boats was meant to engage enemy ships before they could bring their own guns to bear, operating in the shallow tidal waters into which most enemy vessels could not follow. There were probably two tactical concepts: the gunboats would approach the enemy in shallow curved trajectory and once the enemy would pass through the line of the gun sights, one would fire. That is essentially the same tactics as used by the earlier rowing gunboats of Sweden, Denmark, France etc. Prussia had also such gunboats from the 1840s to the 1860s. The British Rendell-gunboats were designed for a similar tactic, as their gun could not be trained. The other tactic would be that the gunboats would retreat into shallow water, off the shipping lanes and let themselves fall dry during low tide. For this they had a flat bottom (for this they had German nicknames, such as 'mud bug'). When high and dry they would serve as gun platforms and to be able to do so, their gun neede to be able to be trained through a certain arc.

 

The tactical concept was developed just after the Franco-Prussian War (1870/71), before the fish-torpedo became an operational reality. Their concept became largely obsolete, when the first torpedo-boats appeared in the early 1880s, as they themselves are vulnerable to such attacks. Nevertheless, their tactical usefullness was augmented in the mid-1880s by fitting them with an underwater forward torpedo-tube.

[Keith Black]

On 11/30/2014 at 5:09 PM, wefalck said:

30.5 cm rifled breech-loading gun designed and manufactured by Alfred Krupp AG in Essen

Eberhard, what is the gun's barrel weight and weight for both barrel and carriage combined?  Thank you. 

[wefalck]

Keith, the weight of the barrel incl. lock is 35.6 t (metric tons), the weight of the lock alone is 1.3 t. The total weight of upper and lower carriage together is 23.2 t. This means that with a loaded and manned gun close to 60 t would have needed to be controlled by the training mechanism.

[Keith Black]

 That's a total of 134,400 LB's which is an absolutely amazing amount of gun weight for a ship to carry back in that era. One wonders how they managed to lift off the flats if they let the tide run out from underneath them? Tidal flat mud is some very sticky stuff and and a great deal of suction is created when the hull of a ship is allowed to settle in at low tide particularly when heavy-laden. Operating in low waters had to be a gut-wrenching affair, a Captain couldn't afford to guess about the tidal topography of the area in which he patrolled.

 The weight of the XI Dahlgren gun (barrel 15,000 LB's) and carriages for a total of 20,000 LB's was stunning to me but they are mere toys compared to the Krupp 30.5 cm rifled breech-loading gun. 

 You're doing a very nice job on the gun and carriage, it's the guns that are the crown jewels of a warship.  

[wefalck]

To my knowledge the operational log-books have been lost, when the archives of the Admiralty were plundered in the days after the end of WW2. So we don't know, whether they ever practiced this settling on the mud-flats and what the experience with it was. The boats never saw real action, as they were decommissioned long before WW1. Half of them were stationed in the Baltic and other half in the North Sea, but they were effectively commissioned only for short periods of exercises.

 

There are known sandbanks that would have been safer for the pupose than the actual mud-flats. I would have picked a sandbank close to a known tidal channel with the chance of a high current washing away the sand. In peace time these channels were and are marked with 'pricks', kind of brooms stuck upside-down into the banks of the channels. However, during war time all such marks were removed. So, in the Wadden Sea they would have certainly needed a pilot with pretty good local knowledge, probably a local fisherman.

 

I gather, these 30.5 cm-guns were among the heaviest of their time, only surpassed, I think, by the 45 cm-guns of the Italian DUILIO and DANDOLO. I may mix this up, but I seem to remember that they built a special (still existing) steam-crane in Venice to insert these guns.

[Keith Black]

This from your website. 

Hence, the WESPE-Class was designed to be mainly a heavily armoured gun-platform, giving long-range protection to the tidal North Sea harbours that are surrounded by mud-flats and to give mobile protection to the deep fjords of Schleswig-Holstein's Baltic coast. They would be backed-up by heavy artillery (and later torpedo batteries) in coastal forts.

 The guns usually could only be trained by turning the whole boat. This seems more difficult then it probably was, because even in the old days of the rowing gunboats they would attack by rowing in a wide circle and when the intended target passed through the line of aim, one would fire. As the WESPE-Class was designed to let themselves fall dry on mud-flats, a possibility to train the gun was needed. 

 

I surmised that a Captain had to have all his skill sets at the ready when letting his ship settle on to a mudflat at low tide. I'm somewhat familiar with mudflats having worked on the Egegik River in Alaska.

 

[Roger Pellett]

Beautiful work and interesting innovation to produce detailed work at this small scale.  

 

Perhaps you you should consider a tiny Dulcinea (Riddle of the Sands)!

 

Roger

[FriedClams]

Good grief - everything so tiny, fragile and detailed.  Splendid work Wefalck.  It's always a pleasure (and education) catching up on your build.

 

Gary

[wefalck]

Fragile you can say aloud!  Thanks to all for your comments !

[wefalck]

Two steps forward and one step backwards ...

  😡

 

... as I said somewhere above – on Friday the plastic globe on my 12W LED globe-bulb in my architect’s lamp fell out and dropped right onto the lower carriage on the workdesk. One of the caster-roller snapped off and two others were loosened – then I spent an hour turning everything on the table upside-down and didn’t find the roller – then I sifted through the waste-bin nearby for another hour and still couldn’t find it – eventually I gave up, cut a new bracket on the laser-cutter, fitted it and then turned up a new roller. Perhaps should have done it like this in the first place, as one always spends more time in search of a part than it takes to make a new one, but I just could not believe that a part like that could have been ejected so far ...

 

 

Still work on the lower carriage ...

 

 

OK, the gun is the key feature of a gun-boat and its very raison d’être, but this gun and its carriage seem to develop into a model of its own right. Perhaps one day I should build a larger scale fully working (the mechanics, not the ballistics, which would be probably illegal over here in Europe) model, now that I have a pretty good understanding of its functioning.

While I was drawing some additional parts to be cut with the laser, I realised, that I had completely forgotten the stiffening brackets for caster wheels. They are essential elements in the construction, as the wheels each have to carry around 15 tons of the total weight of the gun. The brackets were fabricated from steel plates and forged(?) angles, fabricated on the model from tiny pieces of Canson-paper cut with the laser.

 

 

Stiffening brackets added over the caster-rollers

 

 

There were also two brackets needed for the operating lever including connecting rod of the gun training mechanism and for the clutch that connects the cranks below the barbette with the gun. The latter allows to connect gears for two different speed ratios, a high ratio for fine weather and a low ratio through as self-locking worm-gear for foul weather. A quite sophisticated arrangement actually, but as nothing of it will be visible on the model, it was ignored.

 

 

Supporting brackets and connecting rods for working the training gears

 

 

Connected to the gun training mechanisms is also a kind of capstan to help run-in the gun. A tackle is hooked into each side of the upper carriage and the runner lead by two guiding wheels into the lower carriage and onto the capstan. The wheels were turned from steel rod and their supporting brackets cut from Canson-paper. I meant to closely reproduce the original design, but in the end had to simplify it, because the parts were simply too small to laser-cut and handle. Because they are so flimsy that had to be put into place now and will have to painted over.

 

 

Rollers in brackets to lead the running-in tackle

 

The next challenge will be the fitting of the eleven gratings distributed around the lower carriage.

 

 

To be continued ...

[druxey]

Sorry to read of your mishap with the lamp. How frustrating! Progress looks good, though.

[BANYAN]

Nice recovery Eberhard; if you hadn't told us about it one would never know.  That gun is going to be wonderfully detailed, especially at the scale you are working at.

 

regards

 

Pat

[Bedford]

Eberhard, I like the idea of a larger scale model of the gun and carriage. With your tooling and attention to detail it would be absolutely exquisite.

[cog]

Did somthing go wrong? I can't see any damage! Very well saved, wefalk. As I found out, you'll probably find the missing piece when you no longer need it, and least expect it