Hey I’ve had a 1/196 Revell USS Constitution sitting around for some time, and I’ve had the idea of cutting her down to a waterline model and converting her into another ship. The HMS Boadicea has come to mind because of my love of The Mauritius Command book in the Aubrey/Maturin series. The only difficulty is that Boadicea is a 38 gun frigate, and Constituition is a 44. So my question is, does anyone have any advice on cutting 6 guns out of her length. I read a recent article in Finescale about cutting an airplane down several feet, and I was thinking that this would work alright for my idea, I 'd cut 3 ports a side out of the widest part of the ship. The one drawback about this thought, aside from cutting up Constitution, is that she’s already assembled. Is it too late to go to work with a razor saw?
do you have or can use somebody’s bandsaw as i did that with 2 arizona hulls to shorten to become the nevada & oklahoma. i’ve also done the reverse with 2 airfix hms ajax hulls to lengthen & widen to become hms york & exeter.
This is tossing aside any notions of accuracy. Having it put together will certainly work in your favor. But be prepared at any moment to toss the thing in the trash and open a beer!
I’ve done it with airplanes and train cars. You need to find out where the section profile is the same in two locations, and with a wooden ship I’d have little to no idea how you’d figure that one out. it would seem obvious that these two points would be more or less equal distances fore and aft of the widest point of the ship. Which may not match the shear of the deck, i.e. it may be sloping fore/aft at the same direction at both points, in which case there will be a step. Good place for a stack of boats, barrels, hammocks etc.
Once you do, cut it a good 1/8" short of the final faces, and finish the job with your hull held face down on a big piece of gritty sandpaper and sand it to the final dimension.
To do the job properly, your cuts may not match the gun port patterns, then you’ll have to cut and fill ports.
Wouldn’t it be easier to blank off a couple ports at each end?
Good Luck. I turned that model into a mythical British frigate I named the H.M.S. Caligula. That complicated conversion involved using ochre rather than white paint, and I was happy with the result.
Thanks this helps, i kinda spaced the fact that a ship has so many crazy angles in it it will be difficult to find a good place to cut. I’ll have to look at the ship and find a good spot. I still think where the beam is widest would be good. And while I’ve yet to find any actual pictures of this ship or the plans (any good sites to find this info?) I do have the dimensions of the ship and she would be considerably shorter than Constitution, so blanking out gun ports wouldn’t look quite right. And as to ddp59’s post, i don’t have a band saw, but i do have a Dremel, which i hope and pray will make cutting a lot easier than a razor saw. I had mixed results with one cutting the water line of a Gato I was playin around with earlier.
And yeah, I kinda figured that if this doesn’t work out I’ll have to can it but I think it will be an interesting project to help build up my conversion/scratchbuilding experience.
heck I’ve used my Craftsman hacksaw. the point is: don’t try to cut anywhere near the final line, leave yourself a good 1/8", and spend time sanding it flat. Of course for the waterline you can hide it in the waves.
It doesn’t really work that way. I’m not familliar with a Revell 1/196 kit (I think there is a 1/96 and a 1/192) but if you count the gun ports you should find that there are 27 per side for a total of 54. Sailing warships usually carried more guns than their rating implied. There are 15 gunports per side on the Constitution’s gun deck (the foremost port was not a gunport, but a bridle port and should not have a gun). According to a source on the internet, per side, Boadicea carried 14 eighteen pdrs on the gun deck so I would assume that she had 14 gunports. If you fill in the bridle port that means you only need to shorten the hull enough to eliminate one gunport per side.
Just did a quick check and the overall length of Boadicea was supposedly 148’-6", while the Constitution was 204’, If my math is correct, that works out to about a 3.4" difference in 196th scale. The beams were about 3’ different in real life, which works out to 0.015" in scale; not enough to worry about.
Nothing is impossible, but this would definitely be a challenging conversion. I guess it depends on how accurate you want to be, or if you just want it “look like” the Boadicea.
As I think about it, modifying the hull might be the easiest part, especially if you’re going to do a waterline version. The Boadicea didn’t have a full spar deck, so you’d have to do a lot of scratch-building, including at least a part of the gun deck.
I think the first step might be getting some drawings/pictures of the Boadicea to see what features you want to include to at least have the model be a representation of the Boadicea, if not an accurately scaled version.
Mark
H’mm interesting.
I would imagine cutting such a huge section out of a hull is going to really upset the lines. Frigates of this age simply didnt have parallel sections in them, so there is nothing you can easily lose. I don’t think there is anything available in plastic that could be easily converted to a British 32 or 38.
On the otherhan, how about trying to convert your constitution model to a large British frigate built to counter the Constitution and her ilk- Newcastle or Leander for instance. or howabout HMS President?- a British ‘replica’ of the captured USS president which was very reluctantly broken up after her capture.
Either way- sooner or later you get to the point when it becomes easier to start from scratch! I have seen quite a few models of frigates built in plastic in this small scale without too much fuss. Sure, it would need a big time commitment (the sole reason that stops me trying!), but it appears such things can be done without the skills of an admiralty board modeller…
Will
I’ve just dug out a copy of Boadicea’s draughts (printed in ‘Heavy Frigate’ by Gardiner, and I must admit I’m not encouraged. Built on a french model (after L’Imperieuse) she was a noticeably sharp frigate with the contingent shallow depth of hold. The design included a chase port adjusted for a broadside- i.e brought much further around into her sides than usual. At least her tumbleholme dosnt appear as extreme as some french prototypes.
tbh, if your set on this cutting job-I’d be tempted to try one of the truly bloody-big British frigates (usually french inspired) such as Endymion or Naiad!
Will
Steve, thanks i hadn’t put 2 and two together yet, but i did see that Boadicea had 28 18 pounders on her gun deck. And that’s great that boils down to one gun port per side on the cut. although the cut will be tough from what the other blokes have been telling me.
As to the plans, I’m still very curious as to where I should look for these. Heavy Frigate was mentioned that had Boadicea’s draught, where else can I find plans of ships from this time period? I haven’t had any luck on finding her plans, and the one place I thought I found them online doesn’t have them anymore.
Hey I think the reference length for Constitution is too long. RedCorvette posted 204 ft as her length, which was 3 scale inches, but when i looked at the model, 3 scale inches cut out 6 ports, and it meant that Constitution 44 was 50 feet longer than Boadicea, 38. Now there’s no way you can cram 14 guns aside in a length that could only take like 6 and that would have meant that Constitution was massive! But in that time period they took the length of the gundeck, I believe, as the lenght of the ship and when i looked up Constitutions dimensions, she was 204 ft overall, jib boom to the tip of the gaff, and 175 ft at the waterline, which is closer to the gun deck and only 26 ft or 1 scale inch off of the Boadicea, and cooincidentally cuts about one port out of the side of the ship. Crazy how you figure this stuff out when your goin to bed. Now all I have to do is figure out where to cut that gun port out…
Instead of going through the anguish of wondering if it would be wise to kit bash the Revelle kit of the CONSTITUTION (H -398), why not convert your kit to the U.S.S. PRESIDENT ? The above picture demonstrates that it can be done. Practically a sister ship to the CONSTITUTION, the PRESIDENT was launched in 1800 at New York and captured by the Royal Navy in 1815.
If one plans to make this conversion, having the publication “How to Build Plastic Ship Models”, by Les Wilkins, and published by Kalmbach Books, would be of enormous help. This book gives a step-by step instructions of adapting the Revelle kit to the PRESIDENT. Unfortunately, this publication is no longer in print. Trying to contact used book stores might work, or asking some Forum member if they could donate their copy might be another tactic.
Montani semper liberi ! Happy modeling to all and every one of you.
Crackers [8-|]
There aren’t many places online where sailing man-of-war plans can be found. The UK’s largest repository is the National Maritime Museum, followed by the Science Museum. In the USA the Smithsonian holds a great amount of material. I thinnk it is fair to say a bit of experience with the records is required before ordering copies of draughts, and none of those options are likely to be cheap.
That leaves published works. I mentioned Gardiner’s ‘Heavy Frigate. The 18pdr frigate 1778-1800’, which was one of an intended series on ship types in which admiralty draughts (albeit much reduced) were used to illustrate the book. That book (along with its companion volume -‘The First Frigates.9 & 12pdr frigates 1748-1815’ ) have been long out of print and you might struggle to find them in libraries.
Although not directly dealing with the big frigates of the 1790s you seem to be principally interested in, Gardiner’s latest volume on frigates is a vastly superior book to his earlier works: ‘Frigates of the Napoleonic Wars’ deals will all classes of frigates 1800-1820, and it has chapters on their fitting, changes over time and even frigate tactics. Moreover- it is currently in print and very comptetitively priced. It includes several admiralty draughts to illustrate it. You may find a vessel in there you like!
The Anatomy of the ship series are written much more with the needs of modellers in mind- the book on HMS Diana, (an Artois class 38 of 1794) is likely to be an important resource for you. But the books raise an important point viz., even when one is working from original builders draughts or admiralty models, the modern historian/modeller needs to do quite a bit of reconstruction in order to get enough data to see what she actually looked like at any given time. I think it is this fact that means very few plans of sailing frigates are available to the modeller ‘off the shelf’. They require a tremendous amount of work. One of the few I can think of off the top of my head is that of the generic 40 gun frigate of the 1790s produced by Underhill and available from Brown, Son & Ferguson. Perhaps the plans available seperately from kit manufacturers would be of similar utlity.
Finally, the sailing ship of the period was the pinnacle of technology at the time. Understanding the basic elements of their architecture, evolution, and even the politics behind them and you’ll be in a much better position to make modelling judgements. Many books are available on the subject. A couple I’d recommend are 'Nelson’s Navy: Ships, Men and Organization, 1793-1815 (Conway)'. and the 'The Construction and Fitting of the Sailing Man-of-War, 1650-1850’ (Conway). But for anyone interested in frigates of the period I’d still say the book to get hold of is Gardiner’s ‘Frigates of the Napoleonic Wars’
Hope this helps a wee bit.
Will
There’s a copy of the book , How To Build Plastic Ship Models by Les Wilkins on ebay now, 360274259835.
55 bucks is a lot. There’s used copies on Amazon starting at $ 9, Alibris too.
Thanks Will for getting me these titles! I already had a hold on Nelson’s Navy, and would love to look through Frigates of the Napoleonic Wars. The ships of this time period have fascinated me for years. And I’ll keep my eyes peeled for How to Build Plastic Ships, I would love to build my skills in this rather difficult subject matter.
Big big wow on those sails and the overall look of it. What a pride and joy! How did you do the sails? It doesn’t look shortened. Revell kit? (I’m too lazy to read it all now heheheh. Thanks, Paul
Well, she was, by contemporary standards. Closer, really, to a 5th Rate, but with only the one gun deck.
Which is the trickier part about conversions of one named ship to another named ship. Which is what makes the Beagle/Bounty fiasco so egregious.
A person might could “pass off” a Spitfire as a Yak-3; but calling it an Il-3 Shturmovik wwould cause howls of outrage (or an M3 Lee as a Ram).