1/144 Jorge Juan (ex USS McGowan)

[BB62vet]

Willie,

The answer is that the USN Stockless Anchor design includes a molded opening for passing a line, wire rope, etc. thru to tie off the anchor. Yep, that's the reason - No Sh#t!!!!

And I've seen guys tied off of the anchor fluke on a boatswain's chair to paint with a line passing thru the fluke to hold them steady while over the side!!

I've been using Tom's basic 3D anchor design, scaled to 1:144, and then slightly modified for my purposes. The anchor body came out fine, the shank has to be modified and then reprinted. However, the kit anchors are not EXACTLY to scale, so this was why I chose to take time to do my own. I'll post something on my STODDARD Thread when I have things all completed, etc.

By the way, your stack work is excellent!!! I'm very impressed!

Hank

[Willie]

Howdy Hank and all,

Thanks for the answer. I had no idea what it was for, and now it is clear.

And I've seen guys tied off of the anchor fluke on a boatswain's chair to paint with a line passing thru the fluke to hold them steady while over the side!!

Long gone are the happy days of a steady diet on salt pork and beef, hard tack and three pints of wine a day (can you imagine a F18 pilot or a radar operator working in these conditions???), along with the cat-o�-nine-tails as a peace maker; otherwise these anchors holes could be used with great success to pass some rebel under the keel in the middle of a shoal of hungry sharks. But after the merry adventures of of Captain Holly Graf on board USS Cowpens, no Captain Bligh would be accepted any more in modern days.

I'll post something on my STODDARD Thread when I have things all completed, etc.

We will be delighted to see this amount of detail you are building all together in place. I will do the same when I finish the 3" battery.

By the way, your stack work is excellent!!! I'm very impressed!

Thanks Hank. It is almost finished, but when completely finished it will be a full mack, instead of a humble stack.

Nice going in NC, and best regards from this side,

Willie.

[Fliger747]

The slots in the flukes were also used to secure spare anchors to the deck if carried. Also when hoisting for whatever Reasons, better control could be maintained as most of the weight is in the body rather than the shank.

The Navy Stockless Anchor has less holding power than the old anchors used say on sailing ships, but is designed to be easy to weigh in a short time as a warship might require. The hand carved basswood anchors I made for the APA lack these slots!

In my workshop I have a bare smooth wood floor, and still items commonly fling off of tweezers to forever disappear. For very small items I usually make a number of spares. The portholes with brows that I recently made probably had a 50% loss rate!

Despite the natural obstacles inherent in such a project, the progress and results are very nice!

Regards. Tom

[Willie]

Hi there all modeler friends again,

The slots in the flukes were also used to secure spare anchors to the deck if carried. Also when hoisting for whatever Reasons, better control could be maintained as most of the weight is in the body rather than the shank.

Tom, thanks very much for your input and your remarks. I have made this still from a late 1960�s documentary about the spanish Navy. This is the stb anchor of D�dalo, ex USS Cabot, displaying ropes attached to both slots, so the thing is now clear.

This week I was involved with the fourth part of oil canning, the sides of the middle hull.

I was researching dozens of pictures, and could realize that the oil canning in these mid sections is quite specific, to call it something. As it is done on the armor plating, it has nothing at all to do with the fore and aft oil canning in, say, small sections. The bumps are way bigger but with softer borders, what makes them virtually invisible when seen at angles bigger than 30�, good or bad light playing a role as well. This is the reason why many hulls in many Fletcher�s look perfectly even, although displaying very clear canning fore and aft.

I have one picture that, even if blurr and not too good at all by itself, shows the mid section canning at the right angle and with the right light. In it it is possible to see that the hull was also severely beaten in this area, irregularly and with different shape bumps. The thick rubber defences over the sides give a good clue of where these bumps come from.

Another picture shows the other side of the ship with much worse light, but again with lots of bumps everywhere.

The process is long and boring but easy: carving with a scalpel, and refining with different grain sandpapers. Once finished, this oil canning effect is not very apparent, unlike the smaller canning fore and aft.

Even at close quarters it is almost invisible, just as it happens with the real ships:

The difference in color allows to see or rather to guess where the bumps are:

Only at a close angle and with good light is it possible to see these bumps:

I would appreciate your opinions about how you see this process. As the plastic of the hull is relatively thick in this area, it would not be too difficult to make corrections.

TIA, and very best regards from this side,

Willie.[/size]

[Fliger747]

Willie!

As always, look forward to seeing your posts. I suspect the somewhat milder surface distortions midships by was of the splinter protection is due to real oil canning stresses showing from hogging of the ships structure in a seaway, as oppose to bashing in of the plating by wave impact telegraphing the framing. Similar plating pattern on Missouri shows no undulations, but then again it's 60 lb plate (1.5") vrs 20 lb plate (.5") on a bigger and stiffer hull.

Tom

[BB62vet]

Willie,

Once again, extra detective work pays off!!! However, I will agree with Tom on this one - I don't really think there was much hull depression caused in the amidships areas by normal sea pressures (as was common on the fore/aft ends of the hull) but possibly by interaction when the rubber fenders were put over the side and the ship was pushed up against another or pushed against the pier at mooring (tugboat actions, etc.).

However, your representation of this effect is very convincing indeed!!!

Hank

[marijn van gils]

Those bumbs look good to me Willie: not too obvious, and while they show some internal structure they are not too regular.

[Willie]

Hi there Tom, Hank, Marijn and all,

Thanks very much for your remarks. Whatever the reason maybe, if you agree on the fact that it looks realistic it is enough for me.

On the other hand,

I will (dis?)agree with Tom on this one - I don't really think there was much hull depression caused in the amidships areas by normal sea pressures (as was common on the fore/aft ends of the hull) but possibly by interaction when the rubber fenders were put over the side and the ship was pushed up against another or pushed against the pier at mooring (tugboat actions, etc.).

I am no engineer myself, but from my own experience in the Navy, I would agree with Hank in this point. I can remember the thick (man, and heavy) rubber fenders, and how they worked against the sides of my ship when moored alongside a dock or another ship, the loud rubbing noise they made, and the big pressure that no doubt they were producing. Jorge Juan had an active life of 45+ years, so this effect was certainly multiplied virtually ad infinitum, what had much to to with the canning in the midship hull areas.

This other picture of USS The Sullivans is very interesting:

It shows how even a severe blow (and this one had to be, according to the results, bending two plates and the lower hull at the same time) caused a bump with remarkable depth, but with very indefinite borders all the same, which is what I think that has to be reproduced.

Other than this, I have added some more details to the hatches on the 5/38 gun mounts:

For mounts 2 and 3 I used some small scraps of 0.64 and 0.75 mm. Evergreen rod 0.75x0.40 mm. Evergreen stripes, along with small sections of stretched sprue.

For mounts 1 and 4, the same 0.64 and 0.75 Evergreen rod with sections of stretched sprue for the hoods. Every hood has 12 sections altogether.

These little things are very easy to build, even if only schematic, and add much realism and can be built in the little free time that I can afford myself at the moment.

I hope you like it, and best regards from the stormy North Atlantic,

Willie.[/size]

[Fliger747]

Such small details can be fun to construct and will look very convincing when painted. The illusions of realism are always better with a good "paint job". The project continues with always enjoyable developments.

Best regards from the frozen Arctic! Tom

[PetrolGator]

I love following your excellent scratchbuilding work on this ship! Brilliant work!

[Fliger747]

Certainly such large area dents as in the side of the "Sullivans" might be a result of the tendency of Destroyer Skippers to maneuver and dock with Elan. Perhaps a collision with a Dolphin (not the mammal) or an enthusiastic tug boat. Even a near miss whilst in Pacific operations? There might be a few such souvenirs remaining from McGowan's run in against the Japanese Battleships at Surigao Straight.

Certainly a step beyond what most of us try to accomplish in out hulls!

Cheers: Tom

[Willie]

Hi there Marijn and all,

Those bumbs look good to me Willie: not too obvious, and while they show some internal structure they are not too regular.

I have to say that the key words here are "they show some internal structure", and I have been thinking about this, to realize that all my bumps are irregular in size, but very similar in shape, what means that they lack some realism, so I have added some more, much smaller and at different angles. The thing looks way better now, but they are difficult to photograph and I have not been able to make a decent pic of the thing. I will keep trying.

Other than this, I have pushed further with the Mk.37 fire director, which lacked the antenna, one of the interesting issues to solve.

The one of the Revell kit is not very good, and its spider net model would very difficult to reproduce in better quality but I realized that the actual antenna on board Jorge Juan was not the same model. One of the pictures shows the very clear shadow of one of the whip antennas, what means that the antenna of my Mk.37 had to be flat, and this led me to the discovery that there was a second model, that is what I needed.

The only problem is that this thing is concave, a profile that is difficult to make, so I was looking for an element that allowed me to make this with minimal handling. It took lots of time, but I found it this week, in the shape of X-mas decoration:

The first thing was to completely sand out the color to bare plastic, to discover that this is a kind of styrene that also works wonderfully with the Tamiya fine glue that use. It couldn�t be better.
The exact dimensions of this antenna were found easily using this excellent picture of USS Isherwood:

After this I only had to cut a section of my X-mas ball, and refine it carefully until I got the right measures:

And then complete with Evergreen rod and stretched sprue, and done:

Big problems, easy solutions.

I hope you like it, and very best regards from this side,

Willie.[/size]

[Fliger747]

Willie:

The scratch modeler is always looking, at everything for possible use, a transformation! A good solution. In the pre printing era I needed to make the antenna dishes for the MK 37's on Missouri and ended up softening some styrene over an appropriately curved mandrill to produce the 4 needed dishes. I wouldn't have guessed these balls were made from styrene, but handling would reveal certain dullness of sound when tapped as opposed to glass.

Another small victory on the way forward!

Cheers: Tom

[marijn van gils]

An excellent example of creative problem solving!
And with a seasonal flavor too!

[Willie]

Hi there Tom, Marijn and all,

Thanks once more for your encouraging remarks, always appreciated.

This week�s work had to to with some pending things. First, I have taken further steps to improve my hull, adding the stern�s oil canning, something that was discussed some months ago, to conclude with pictorial evidence that at least in the Spanish Navy Fletchers it was actually there, and so had to be made.

The process is the usual, measuring, taping, drawing and then some hours of boring job, scraping, correcting and sanding. Of course this job would have been way easier had shafts, brackets and struts not been there, but they were, and after the pain that they were I preferred not to destroy them to be rebuilt later. Anyway, it is useless to cry over the spilt milk, and eventually I was able to do the canning more or less properly, without damaging anything around. At last, the thing became this :

Once the lines were deleted the canning is soft, and I would say it matches the rest of the hull properly.

Other than this, I have also finished the practice loader set with a further device that goes along with it on its left.

I don�t know what it is, so any tips will be very welcome.

Best regards from this side of the Atlantic, and nice going,

Willie.[/size]

[BB62vet]

Willie wrote:
"I don�t know what it is, so any tips will be very welcome."

That is part of the upper handling room's 5"/38 projectile elevator trolley - the proper name of this escapes me. The projectile is loaded into the elevator cart between the two doors (rt/left) which swing open to accept the projectile. It is loaded upside down and the fuze setter inside the loading ram sets the projectile's fuze to what the Fire Control Director has dialed in. This is all done while the projectile travels up to the gun mount (above) and is then loaded into the gun's breech and fired. A power-driven chain loop raises the projectile from the handling room to the gun mount. Only the part of the mechanism that holds the projectile is present on the practice loading machine.

Your example looks really good - keep up the good work!!!

Hope this helps,

Hank

[Fliger747]

Willie:

Your practice loader looks very good. I built a double version for Alaska, I'll have to check if I got the shell hoist included on mine, been a while. If there was a Marine mount crew on board, this often engendered some competition.

Best regards! Tom

[Willie]

Hi there Hank, Tom and all.

Thanks for your explanations. It seems quite logical that the loading practice set includes all the basic stuff, so that the practice is complete with the full process, and not only ramming the shells into the firing chamber.

Yesterday was hatch day.

There are two hatches fore and aft quite specific to this class, I would say. Definitely, we had not them on board my ship back in the 80�s. We had hatches in the same positions, some of them raised on deck, but way smaller, and some of them leveled with the deck. All these hatches were supposed to be watertight, but running hurricane Hortensia off Finisterre in October 84 we could discover that our watertight hatches were anything but watertight. I have vivid memories of lots of greenwater taking non-stop on the forecastle, turning into small brown waves on the lower deck and splashing everywhere with every movement of the ship, and after two miserable nights with the North Atlantic showering prodigally on us while in bed we were allowed to take our blankets and have the sleep we could in the aft torpedo room; lots of noise from the screw there, but at least dry. This was the kind of show we were starring those nights...

...And days:

This was the only moment in my two years when I asked myself, and very bitterly, what the h*** I was doing there, after I had been offered a shore position very close to my home. Later on I considered this experience a pure blessing, as I could then very well picture what were the Atlantic convoys runs in WWII. For the Artic convoys I lack enough experience, thank God.

I have no clear pictures of these hatches on board Jorge Juan, but there are plenty of examples in many other places. This one was made, as usual, on USS The Sullivans:[/size]

The molded hatches offered by Revell were no good, and were deleted at the beginning of the construction.
The process was very easy, using some Evergreen and PE scraps, along with generic handwheels:

Once in position the effect is good enough, both fore and aft:

With this, the forecastle is (I hope) complete minus hand railings and paint.

A little progress, but if I am able to complete some of these minor elements in loose moments I am happy anyway, as these are things that sooner or later would have had to be made.

I hope you like them, and best regards from this side,

Willie.[/size]

[Fliger747]

Willie!

The hatches are very nice. Hank made a version of that hatch for his project, which I used on my APA. I remember transiting the aft deck hatch to the berthing many times on Watts. As coming and going were the main objects of my mission I didn't regard it with a modelers eye at the time. My question is whether or not the forward hatch is installed level to the base line or follows the ships sheer line?

The British Battleship Rodney apparently had a lot of first deck wetness in heavy seas, being of somewhat light construction.

Cheers: Tom

[marijn van gils]

Great hatches Willie!


Can you imagine how sailors in the 15th - 18th century must have felt in their little wooden ships when riding such storms?