1:48 Battleship New Jersey Animated Steering Gear Model Start-to-Finish Build

[Samphoto]

Every time I look at this project, I’m blown away by the design and construction.

Having never worked with 3D-printed resin, though, this is something I hadn’t thought about. If styrene doesn’t bond particularly well with CA or epoxy, and regular solvent cement won’t work on the resin, is the idea that the screws will provide enough clamping pressure for the epoxy to get a good bond?

That’s a problem I never would have even considered. And now you’ve got me thinking, because I’ve got some custom resin figures coming that I’m going to have to glue down. Apparently I need to start paying attention to how I’m going to do that, too.

[Builder_2010]

It does bond, and usually holds like heck in places where you don’t want it. But you do need to use accelerator and roungh up the styrene surface.

After getting the framing drawings from John Miano, I got down to business drawing them in 3D. The first thing I noticed was their quality. Not good. I could barely make out any text, but just enough to make out a few dimensions that I could use for scaling. That brings up the second challenge. I would scale the drawing to a specific measure, for example: 4’-O". I would draw the part. Then I find that on the other end of the sheet with another 4’ dimension, it measured 3’-9". I found out from John that the microfilm transcription sometimes warps the microfilm. I then had to individually scale each frame on the sheet to ensure that they’re based on the same scale.

Lastly there was a 3rd challenge. The 1:32 scale frames came out to over 11" wide. No material what I did, that sized part will not fit on my machine. I then started working on Plan B; sending scaled 2D profiles to CorelDraw and drawing them for auto-scribing the shapes on the digital vinyl cutter. This would have taken a ton of time. Then when visiting the shop this morning, I realized I could break down each frame into parts to fit the printer. That is what I’m doing.

You will notice that the parts of the longitudinal members are included in the drawing and being printed with them. This serves two purposed: it automatically sets the frame spacing for assembly and ensures that all these pieces are shaped and positioned properly. In communications with John he explained that the longitudinal are installed in long sheets and it’s the frames that are welded in pieces to them. I conceived it in reverse. Actually, to build the model prototypically would have been much more difficult.

I can get two frame parts of the four onto the printer and this image shows the job almost complete.

Lastly, here’s the progress so far. If you’re paying attention, you will note that the frames are not lining up vertically with the section diagram of the ship. They are situated much lower. Turns out that this diagram, that I have been using for lots of New Jersey projects, is not correct. It’s an illustration, not a blue print. I know that the frames are correct since they are drawn from builder’s plans.

The plans have the bulges on the sides of the skeg portion. The plans call this the “Twin Keel”. Actually, those bulges on the ship are the massive prop fairing casting which I’m printing separately. So everywhere I drew them according to the plan, I’m removing while editing each frame for printing.

This project is starting to cost some $$$. I have to buy heavy 1/4 plexiglass to make the support, case and base materials, and sheet styrene for the skinning of all the parts.

[Samphoto]

That sounds like quite the undertaking. I’m really impressed with how far you’re digging into the original plans to get all of this right.

It’s amazing how often we assume that because something is in a drawing, reference, decal sheet, or whatever, it must be accurate—until you start comparing sources and discover they don’t even agree with each other.

I can certainly relate to falling down that particular rabbit hole, although what you’re doing here is on a whole different level.

[Builder_2010]

Thanks for the moral support! I’m figuring all this out as I go. With each new piece of puzzle I have to reconsider what I’m doing. On Friday, Ryan sent me 99 images representing many of the drawings of the hydraulics section. Due to the width of these original blueprints (held in the ship’s “Blueprint Room” next to Ryan’s office) he had to take multiple exposures of each on. There’s actually around 25 actual drawings involved.

For them to be usable I had to import them and then… hopefully…clean them up so I can read and trace over top of the them.

This is what it looks llke in my file directory. This is not all of them.

Many have details that I don’t need like specific designs of gear boxes, etc., but reading them all is interesting in its own right. For example: the Navy calls the massive hydraulic rams “Servos”. I suppose they do what a servo does, but that would mean all hydraulic actuators are “servos.” It also have the actual pipe runs for ALL the piping including the critical high pressure lines. They’re interesting too. There’s one pipe that goes to the starboard fore cylinder and the port aft, and another that does the opposite. There are T’s that carry the fluid to the first end and then to the other. This means the opposing ends get exactly the same flow giving the push-pull force needed. And there’s two identical pump systems in each rudder system. Only one pump is running at any time. They are switched over for maintenance and there’s a 6-way valve that controls this. There’s a whole page of plans on the control lever system that operates that valve.

I’m going to have to meld plans from the same sheets together to give me complete drawings. That won’t be easy since there’s a lot of distortion introduce by the creases in the plans. It would have been better if they were photographed under a sheet of plate glass to flatten them out. But, hey, I can’t complain.

Designing the frames has been somewhat nightmarish due to the changing of scale from one to the other. I’m redrawing all of them since I could tell there were significant errors. They weren’t lining up properly due to scale size differences between them.

The first one is complete. I used epoxy on the mating surfaces and it worked as designed.

And it’s huge! Almost 12". The finished model will be about 18" wide.

The longitudinals are 3’ 9" long (scale) giving the four foot separation of the frames when you add their thicknesses.

One down and 15 more to go… Ugh!

[Samphoto]

Wow. Seeing the actual plans really puts the scope of this project into perspective.

Ninety-nine images just to capture roughly 25 drawings, and then you still have to piece all of that information together and turn it into something you can actually use to build the model.

That’s an impressive amount of work before you even get to the actual modeling.

[steve5]

what you are doing , is above my pay grade , just something to behold .