Thanks indeed
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The 30.5 cm Rk/l22 gunThe main armament of the WESPE-Class was a massive 30.5 cm (12”) Krupp breech-loading rifled gun (Ringkanone, abbrev. Rk). This caliber stayed the bigges in the German Imperial Navy for many decades and well into the Dreadnought-era. It is this gun that essentailly made the boats in floating batteries, rather than ‘real’ ships.
Large-scale instruction model for the 30,5 Rk on-board the Danish HELGOLAND in the Orlogmuseet, CopenhagenThe guns and their carriage suitably impressed the naval circles of the time, so that it is quite well documented in the German and foreign literature of the time. Krupp was also able to sell this gun (just over ten years after the German-Danish war of 1864!) to the Danish Royal Navy for use in the HELGOLAND. A large-scale instruction model survives in the Orlogmuseet in Copenhagen, which shows many relevant details, even though the carriage was adapted for use in an eclosed turret, rather than the open barbette of the WESPE-Class.
http://www.dreadnoughtproject.org/plans/SM_Wespe_1894//305mm_laffete_100dpi.jpgOriginal drawing of the mounting for the 30,5 Rk (©
http://www.dreadnoughtproject.org)
A few years ago a detailed dtawing of gun-mount originating in the adminralty archives in Berlin surfaced on the site ‘
http://www.dreadnoughtproject.org’. The arrangements for all the heavy Krupp guns of the time were similar, so that a visit to the Finnish fortress Suomenlinna (
http://www.maritima-et-mechanika.org/maritime/models/wespe/suomenlinna/suomenlinna.html) off Helsinki was helpful; here a number of Russian clones of 28 cm coastal Krupp guns are still in place since the time, when Finnland was part of the Russian Empire.
28 cm Krupp-clone coastal guns in the Suomenlinna-fortress off HelsinkiRails for the Lower CarriageThe lower carriage of the gun is supported on four races that run on semicirucular cast-iron rails bolted to the deck inside the barbette.
These rails need to go into their place in the barbette early during the construction. The same applies to the semi-circular toothed rack that is part of the gun-training machinery. I decided to make the rails from steel, even though ferrous metals in model construction are frowned upon by many. My justifications were that it is difficult to represent cast iron or steel by paint and that there hundreds of models in museums around the world that contain iron. I have used steel in models some twenty years ago and presumably due to the lacquering they shows no signs of rust.
Roughing out the rails from a metal disc with the backing of a wooden discGrooving the rails with a specially ground bitCutting thin disks from round stock of large diameter is a pain I wanted to avoid. Against my better knowledge I picked a suitably sized steel washer as starting material. Unfortunately, the steel used did not machine very well and lot effort was spent to avoid chatter marks while turning and to obtain a reasonably good finish. The various types of wheel collets and chucks available for the watchmaking lathe came into good use for working on inside and outside diameters of these discs. The rails were shaped using a specially ground forming tool.
Cutting out the inside of the large ring for the tail-races of the lower carriage, while holding it in a so-called bezel-chuckTrimming the outside of the smaller forward ring holding the material in a so-called wheel-chuckThe rails laid out in the barbetteTo be continued ...