Victorian Era Deck Fittings

[perotech]

Hello to all!

First post here, but I've been on RCGroups for a number of years.

Currently building a 1/72 RN Gunboat, launched in 1877. I managed to somehow find detailed drawings of this extremely niche ship, but now my question is regarding deck fittings.

Most are marked or identified on the deck plans, but some simply say "steering (helm) indicator".

So my question is does anybody know of a collection of reference photos for ships fittings of this era? I've managed to scour the web for pictures of HMS Gannet (1878) and her fitting, but some stuff like age appropriate binnacle, engine order telegraph, etc. escape me.

Thank you!

[wefalck]

Well, it would be very useful, if you could post some pictures of the ship you are interested in.

The kind of fittings you are looking for might depend on the size of the ship, where they are actually placed, and in case of binnacles also, from what materials the ship was constructed.

The Internet these days is a rich source, but one needs to look at other places as well. I have been photographing such details in museums for decades to build up my own reference library. Or, I have been collecting books with photographs of ships. And I have been collecting text-books etc. of the time I am interested in. So all this requires patience and perseverence.

Many museums have now, and not only since the pandemic, started to photograph or scan their resources and make the available on the Internet. The NMM has a searcheable picture database as has its Parisian equivalent. The Danish are digitising the archive of drawings of their naval dockyard, which includes many detail drawings of period details.

[perotech]

Thank you for your advice, your Wespe build is phenomenal.

I've attached some photos of the ship, just a few, as I've been collecting photos, drawings, and literature for over a month now. HMS Tweed, a Medina Class Gunboat launched in 1877.

I suppose my question was more of a general "Are there any good sources for specifically Royal Navy ships of the Victorian Era?"

[wefalck]

This is one of the follow-ons from the STAUNCH-class of the 1860s. Many navies build similar gun-boats.

Both, the NNM in Greenwhich and the Science Museum in London have contemporary(?) models of such boats in their collections. It is now a matter of tracking them down, or photographs of them, to see, whether useful detail can be extracted.

A strategy to find details appropriate for this type of boat could be to identify the various classes of gun-boats in the RN that were based on the design idea of HMS STAUNCH and then to search for material, such as photographs or drawings, of them. There must have been at leas two binnacles and, them being twin-screw vessels, probably two engine-room telegraphs (earlier boat may have had just voice pipes). At that time they were most likely of the horizontal type, as I used on my model.

BTW, thank you very much for your friendly comments on my efforts in this respect.

[Pieter]

Vladimir Yakubov did a 1/700 build of the very similar HMQS Gayundah on this board some years ago. Hope this helps. viewtopic.php?f=13&t=107052