Return to modeling with the 1/96 Constitution

Modeling Subjects Ships
21

John,

I completely agree with you about Sons of Liberty. That said . . .

I lament the disappearance of solid hull kits from Model Shipways. Many of us don’t seem to realize that solid hulls are generally more accurate than plank-on-bulkhead hulls. The operative word is “bulkhead” not frames. In POB kits, the bulkheads are spread farther apart than the frames planned into the original ship, causing a certain amount of distortion in the final shape. That is one of the most egregious problems with the HECEPOB kits from Europe. In solid hull models, the hull is shaped according to the plans as if the frames were build in. There is very little distortion in the final shape of the manufactured hull. At least Bluejacket continues to manufacture solid hull kits!

Bill

22

“Sons of Liberty” was junk, but it still put me in the mood to start digging into early American history, so it was a good thing. I never paid that much attention back in school, and I didn’t really appreciate the level of sacrifice that went into that war. The other night I was unloading gasoline in the snow in -10 F weather with my breath forming ice in my beard, and I was feeling pretty miserable and sorry for myself, and then I remembered that first winter at Valley Forge. Most of our troops didn’t have SHOES, and that was one of the coldest winters in recorded history. What the hell am I whining about in my thermal over-alls, my thermal underwear, my insulated boots, my heavy socks, my heavy coat?

Plus it put me onto tall ships again. I always had a thing for tall ships and steam locomotives. (On other news, Norfolk Southern decided to restore the N&W Class J #611 again, and she’s just passed the boiler test after extensive and tedious renovation in Spencer, NC. It won’t be long now before she’s under steam again, and I will be able to schedule a suitable vacation and pay some money to see her and ride behind her at last! I reached a point in life when I had enough money to do this last time around just as they shut the steam program down.)

23

We have the temperature records for Philadelphia in the winter of 1777-1778 (the Valley Forge winter). The temperature only dropped below 32 degrees a few times.

That doesn’t detract from the Americam Continental Army’s tremendous endurance feat in surviving for as long as it did.

Lots of military critics have criticized George Washington. They point out that he only won one real battle (Yorktown, where most of the forces under his command were French).

Others (including me) see Washington as a military genius. He understood, as few if any others did, the unique nature of that war. Fighting battles and capturing geographic objectives didn’t matter much in the long run. The British took just about every significant city in the American colonies. But as long as the Continental Army existed, the war would continue - and the longer it continued, the harder it would be for the British to win.

I always tell my students that the predicament the British were in during the Revolution was remarkably similar to what the U.S. confronted in Vietnam.

Statistically, in one important sense the Revolutionary War was the second most expensive war in American history. It wiped out about one percent of the country’s population. The Civil War killed about two percent. No other conflict has come close.

I think that vital, moving story deserves to be told a lot better than “Sons of Liberty” told it.

I’m embarrassed to admit that though I live in North Carolina, I’ve only been to the NC Transportation at Spencer Shops once. It’s a great place but it’s about four hours from where we live. One of these days, though…

24

Mixing up the years slightly sure makes for a different winter at Valley Forge. This is what happens when you muddy up the details, instead of getting things right. I’m sure that’s your entire point about “Sons of Historical Inaccuracy” too. I enjoyed it, but only because I don’t know enough about the truth to see the huge holes in the story everywhere. All I can really say is after reading the Morgan short biography of Franklin over the summer, that show’s portrayal of that brilliant polymath doesn’t seem very inspired.

Comparing the rebellion of the American colonies to Vietnam is a really interesting perspective, and I see your point. In both wars, the superior side could take a hill, and it could take a city, but it couldn’t break the spirit of the resistance. The same thing happened to both the USSR and the US in Afghanistan too, don’t you think?

It’s amazing how the difference between a rebel and a patriot all depends on who wins in the end.

On a tangent, it’s also amazing that everything in the heyday of European colonial expansion took place in an age before they had so much as the telegraph. How difficult it must have been to rule an empire through ship’s mail that took weeks to travel in both directions.

Back to the Constitution, the story of the copper bolts Paul Revere reworked really amazes me too. As hard as it is to find just the right kind of fitting for a ship model surfing the collection of mostly bad 1990s looking web stores, that’s utterly nothing compared to the challenge of buying several thousand bolts from England right after the war, by mail order. For one thing, you’d have to know to whom to write your initial letter of inquiry, and I’d expect the entire negotiation to take upwards of six months. It is SO much easier being able to click a link, or in those unavoidable cases, pick up a telephone!

Jumping subjects again, for that matter, I really wonder at the Hull model. Those were a bunch of most likely illiterate sailors floating around on a ship with very limited resources at their disposal. Where did they come up with the hammock crane irons? Those parts are quite beautiful on the Hull model, and much better than anything I’ve seen in brass photo-etch or plastic, though I’m thinking they may be slightly over-scale.

Maybe they cast parts like that out of lead or something. I wouldn’t be surprised.

And anyway, I’ve continued working on the plastic Connie in spite of myself. I glued up the major mast and yard components, as though I intended to paint them. Maybe I will.

I also bought the Lauck Street Shipyard practicum, and got access to Bob’s private forum where several modelers have builds in various stages of completion. Several of them are quite gorgeous, and quite inspiring. It seems to take people 1.5 to 5 years just to complete the hull, and I will likely be on the longer end of that time scale. When I take breaks to escape the frustration, I will probably work on the plastic Connie in spite of myself, and I may even mast and rig it as a smaller scale dry run for the major event.

On the one hand, things go together and look like something faster in plastic, and on the other, I don’t find plastic at all agreeable to work. I will probably never do another plastic ship after this; assuming I get the Connie together eventually.

I’m really enjoying myself. I’m finally pulling myself out of a very major depression, and I’m enjoying the camaraderie around here. I wish all of you the very best.

25

Thats the spirit, Arbs.

The thing about plastic is that its often hard to love “other peoples plastic”, never know quite what you’ll get. But working with good basic stock such as Evergreen, its amazing what can be stuck together in very little time.

26

Wish you the best on your build, it is fun working out details and modifying a kit to a more correct appearance, I will be posting pic soon as I begin my build of a vintage 1976 Connie. cs.finescale.com/…/164251.aspx

On the subject of “the Sons of LIEberty” I couldn’t agree more John, as soon as I saw a half drunk, young, athletic, single Sam Adams doing the rooftop to rooftop ninja thing I knew this series would be a disappointing fallacious joke and promptly turned it off. History as well documented as this should NEVER be glamorized and rewritten for dramatic effect, IMHO to was dramatic just the way it happened. And you are correct on Washington, he did not need to take territory, just keep the British fighting and spending money they did not have.

Dan

27

Now that I’m a month into it, I agree completely the Model Shipways Constitution is NOT the one to start with. It’s completely crazy trying to make something out of this lousy kit, even with help from Bob Hunt.

I talked myself into diving off the high dive, because the money was going to come out about the same in the end, and I would have a better model to show for my work. A month into it, it’s clear the money is not going to come out the same in the end. I’m into this thing over $1,000 now. I had to buy a band saw to get through the filler blocks. I picked up a few new goodies from Lee Valley too. This project has swallowed my entire desk, and it’s slowly turning my whole den into a secondary wood shop.

I made the right decision though. This is a lot more fun than wrestling with badly molded plastic and nasty solvents. This is wood, wood glue, shellac, brass, solder… I speak this language well! I also own a rope walk now, and have started making scale rope for the future, while I wait for glue to dry.

I’ll let this thread I started drift back into limbo with the plastic kit I started, but I wanted to stop back and let everyone know that the crazy train hasn’t derailed yet.

28

That Model Shipways kit was designed for a particular market: people who have built lots of ship models before, have considerable familiarity with ship construction and nautical terminology, and are prepared to commit something over a thousand hours to a complex, advanced project. The company warns that it’s on the “Advanced” level.

I haven’t built it, but I frankly have trouble believing that it requires a band saw. At worst, it should be possible to buy pre-milled basswood to make those parts.

It sounds like you picked the wrong kit; we’ve all done that. But dont you think calling it “lousy” is going overboard?

29

Hey if you’ve spent $ 1000 for a kit that will take you 1,000 hours, you have no complaints. In the end it comes out right if you stick it out. I can’t think of too many places where entertainment is that cheap. Hell, Comcast charges $ 3.99 for a 90 minute movie.

Eat your words on it being a lousy kit.

A lousy kit is one that cannot be made to be right. Not one that you can’t make right.

About buying expensive tools, it’s ok to outsource. Even Longridge had a shop make his metal gun barrels. Sometimes these kinds of projects take management.

30

It doesn’t require a band saw. You can make those cuts a hundred different ways. I was going to use a scroll saw, which would have just barely worked, with enough patience and care. I bought the band saw to save at least six hours of pure misery, and it was a beautiful investment toward that end.

Believe me, I’ll find dozens of other uses for the band saw. If I just needed a few cuts one time, I would have called the high school wood shop or something, or made the blocks out of balsa instead of using the basswood supplied in the kit. I’m not insane, I’m just crazy. [8o|]

31

I find nearly any excuse to give me a reason to purchase a new tool appropriate.

32

No, I won’t eat my words on it being a lousy kit. This my first ship, but this is not my first laser-cut wooden kit rodeo. You want a good kit, buy a clock from Jeff and Marcie Schierenbeck. The holes will be round, and in the right places. If you buy a plywood kit (though I think all his kits are MDF now), it will be high-quality, multi-ply plywood with a minimum of voids. If you buy his plans, you can use them to make parts identical to the ones in the kits he sells. The whole thing will not only assemble correctly and accurately, it will run, and even tell time!

If Model Shipways made the parts for Jeff’s clocks, they wouldn’t stand a chance. Bulkhead B is totally different from the plans. If you try to trace the plans to make a new one, do you use the profile on the starboard side or the port side, because they’re different. Every single one of the bulkheads is cut such that those ribs that protrude upwards from each bulkhead are significantly thinner on one side than the other. The thin ribs are cut so thin the laser burns all the way through the core from both sides, so you have a fragile matrix of charred mush that breaks if you look at it too hard. To get the bulkheads to fit into the false keel, I had to chisel out 1/16" or more of material from every single slot, because the plywood they used was obviously a lot thicker than the plywood they designed for. The little holes that are supposed to align all the double thickness pieces are wallowed out on one side, so the alignment dowels are useless.

It just goes on an on with this kit. I guarantee you if Jeff put his mind to making a laser-cut ship kit, it wouldn’t take you a month to work through the many problems with the basic pre-cut framework!

Maybe Jeff caused me to have unrealistic expectations in model ship world, but if some guy in Wisconsin can do this in his basement…

33

Exactly! This build has reacquainted me with my long-lost friend, Lee Valley! I’ve also dragged out a lot of dusty old friends, and I used a plane that was more than 100 years old to take shavings so thin you could read through them. That’s satisfying.

34

Very well and good, you have it in front of you and I do not. Looking at photos of the kit however, you may have gotten a bad run of laser cutting. In which case you could probably get replacements.

35

That was my first thought too. I entered the build very cautiously, documenting these problems to the nearest 64th in detail. The guys who have gotten some quite beautiful models out of this thing unanimously told me to just get over it and deal with it, because that’s Model Shipways. If I order new parts, I’ll get them, and they will be just like these parts. The problems with bulkhead B were documented all over the archives, and have existed since at least 2009, for example.

It’s my fault for not doing my due diligence. It’s an eye opener.

I would love for the laser-cut parts to have been of better quality, but either way that’s only maybe 25% of the parts you end up using. Most of this is scratch built, and I have another eight pounds or so of raw lumber to turn into everything that’s left on the build.

It’s fantastically good advice to try to talk anyone out of attempting this build. If you aren’t certifiable, and an experienced woodworker, there is little chance of success.

Fortunately, I have 20 years of woodworking under my belt, and I’m a few bricks shy of a full load. [proplr]

36

Could be you’re experiencing just the sense of the challenge. [bnghead] Beautiful houses are built with a pile of material, not perfectly matched parts that can be assembled. I built them all my life. Real ships too were built from raw timbers, carefully fitted by the craftsmen builders, not a factory that produced parts. Kits are boxes of material.

Have fun with your build, that’s what this hobby is all about. [t$t]

EJ

37

I did a web search and ended up running across my old plastic Constitution thread here, so I thought I’d pop by, even though I’m no longer working on the Revell kit now. (I’m still using it as a reference, and it’s a handy thing to have around.)

In some ways, I regret the decision, and almost wish I had opted to mast the plastic hull in wood and leave it at that. In other ways, I’m glad I went all in. I’m a woodworker, and as frustrating and time-consuming as it is, I’m loving this. It isn’t going tremendously well, in part due to problems with the bulkheads in the kit, and in part due to my inexperience, but even though it has problems, it’s still really looking like something now that I’ve framed out and opened a few gun ports.

I’m modeling the ship in 2005, before the current level of restoration, because the MS kit is designed with high bulwarks and a high waist, and she had those features in 2005, but doesn’t have them today. I could lower the bulwarks and open the waist, but then I’d be responsible for too much research, and I have enough to do as it is. She looked like that for much of her life, and there are early photos going back to about 1910 showing all the same features. That’s historical enough for me.

I was spending too much time preparing photos for web forums, and decided to streamline things. I do daily photo dumps of my progress on a blog at Wordpress, if anyone is curious to see how it’s going:

https://modelshipwright.wordpress.com/