The Ship Model Forum

As the first side project of my Massena, the L'Arrogante was finished, I needed another one, to bridge periods of listlessness and frustration. In "Bizarre Ships of the 19th Century" by John Guthrie, the bible of all victorianophilic, julevernesc and overall steampunk shipmodellers (like me) I found a plan of the Nordenfelt II, the second submarine designed by the swedish inventor Thorsten Nordenfelt together with the british clergyman and submarine ethusiast George Garrett. As their first boat, the Nordenfelt I was sold to Greece, the Ottoman Empire was keen to buy the next two submarines the Nordenfelt II and III, which entered turkish service as Abd�lhamid in 1886 and Abd�lmecid in 1887 (the "small" naval arms race between Greece an the Ottoman Empire parallel to the big one between Britain an Germany in the decades before the Great War is quite an interesting little piece of history). The Abd�lhamid was the first submarine ever fired a torpedo submerged but due to bad maintenance rotted in the Istambul harbour.



The Abd�lhamid was 30 meters long and 4 meters wide. It was armed with two torpedo tubes and two Nordenfelt mitrailleuse guns.

As all my models the boat shall be a working one (O.K. it should definitely swim and maybe dive) the only suitable way to build the hull is a thin fibreglass sheet laminated in a negative form. So the first step is to make the master model of the hull.

The main hull was turned from a 40 mm beech rod. The �according to photos of the Abd�lhamid � very prominent joints of the tubular parts of the hull were also added on the lathe. A hole was drilled for the hatch-pipe and the pipe was added.



The next step the hemispherical turret. For this I used a 2-component-clay. This was kneaded together, arranged around the hatch-pipe and sculpted in the right place. The final shaping was done by sanding the hardend clay down using two templates I copied from the plan.



The turret also got prominent joints all around.

To be continued ...

What a lovely bizarre ship! Great stuff!

Awesome! I'll be going to Istanbul in the fall on an university exchange and it's good to hear some naval-related Ottoman history that I could look into!

>> "Bizarre Ships of the 19th Century" <<<

Its a great read at all times!!

There is sooo much inspiring stuff in that book....

Excellent choice of subject!

Jim Baumann

Also the "art nouveau"-style with its flowing lines on one and quite industrial parts on the other side are the reason I like the ships from the last decades of the 19th century (and especially french-style-ships) they make a hack of problems for the modeller because this means: no straight lines and no right angles. This was also the case with the skeg. I cut the vertical shape from 1 mm sheet styrene and glued it in place. The elliptical horizontal shape was cut from a copy of the plan and used this as a template to draw the lines on the hull. The space between these lines and the styrene sceg was then filled with my 2-component-clay and modelled/sanded to shape.



For the torpedo tubes on the top of the hull's tip I worked similar (although the main body consisted of two aluminium tubes that were covered with sheet styrene).

After that the last things to do were the rubbing strips on both sides of the hull (again: no vertical but flowing lines) and the hole for the funnel (the switch and the charging socket will be placed in the holes for the funnel and the conning tower as there will be no access to the inside of the hull once the boat is finished).



Now the master of the hull is finished and it's time to build the form from it.

To be continued ...

"A more elegant weapon, from a more elegant age..."

O.K., that's how to make a fibreglass-hull from a silicone rubber form:

I decided to make a two-piece form. One for the upper half and one for the lower. The parting line should be along the rubbing strips, so the joint of the hull parts won't be seen once they were glued together.

The first thing to do was to form an edge from plasticine along the parting line all around the master-piece.



Than came the messy part of the job: Unlike my forms for resin casting, that need a quite flexible silicone I used the somewhat stronger, heat-resistant material that is usually used for tin casting. I first mixed around 100 g of silicone and vulcanizing liquid and "painted" it on the master with an old brush. After it cured a little bit (but not completely) I laminated a layer of glass cloth on it to prevent the form from tearing when it is pulled of the master. Than 100 g more of silicone is spread on the glass-cloth until the form has a thickness of about 5 mm.

As this form despite the strong silicone and the glass cloth is quite flabby, the form is put ubside down in a flask that is effused with plaster to create a stable bed for the form.



This procedure was repeated for the other half of the hull. After curing they are ready to laminate the hull.

To be continued ....

After the plaster had dried it was time to laminate the hull.

For the first layer you need either gel-coat or a mix of epoxy resin and an adhesive filler (micro balloons or colloidal silica) to prevent this from running off the sides of the form and puddling in the lower parts. Gel-coat is in prinziple the pre-mixed form of epoxy, filler and colour but has the disadvantage of beeing expensive (esp. if you don't need large quantities) and leaving you no choice to tune the viscosity of the stuff right as you need it, so I used normal epoxy resin an mixed it with colloidal silicia. I could have added colour powder but I had none there so I went without. The stuff should have a consistancy somewhere between ketchup and mustard. This mix is painted inside the silicone form. By adding a little bit more fille you can get a thicker mix to smooth sharp edges that would otherwise be tricky when laminating the glass cloth. You have to paint every spot to prevent bubbles on the outside of the finished hull (or at least to get as few bubbles as possible).



After this is done you have to leave the coat to cure a bit (about one hour) then the first layer of glass cloth is laminated inside the form. I used a very light (25 g/m2) glass fleece to get a very thinn and light hull. The inside of the form is covered with epoxy then the fleece is closely dabbed to the form, letting the epoxy run through the fleece. Again let the layer some time to cure. When the rest of the mixed epoxy in your mixing dish is starting to jelly it is time to laminate the second layer of glass cloth (of course you need to mix new epoxy for that). Two layers of glass cloth are enough for a little hull like this to get a good relation between stiffness and weight. For bigger hulls you should add another one or two layers with heavier cloth.



After that you leave the laminate to cure completely. After about eight hours yo can pull the completed hull from the form, cuth the overhanging glass cloth and start to fill the bubbles or give the hull a first coat of primer (at least if you don't have used pre-coloured gel-coat or used color powder.



The pre-cut halves of the hull is weighing 65 g, thus leaving enough room for the technical installations and some trim weight.

To be continued ...

Cool looking boat.

Thanks for the details on the casting. I will be starting to cast parts of my DDE shortly and this helped.

Before closing the hull all the interior components have to be installed as later on there won't be any possibility to get inside it without destroying the hull.

I began with the steering-rudder and the sterntube. As the rudder is placed behind the propeller I had to find a way to let the sterntube pass through the rudder shaft. This was done by placing the two shaft ends on a 8 mm brass ring. Through this ring the sterntube will be running. To one side of the ring a smaller ring was soldered to hold the control linkage.



For the rudders and the propeller I made drawings using a graphic program. From these drawings I made a film and than photo-etched the drawn pieces.



The rudder-halfes were folded over a 0,8 mm brass shaft and than pressed together with two pliers leaving neat slots to put on the rudder shafts.



For the propeller I used the hub of an M2 plastic propeller (the original propeller was removed with a lighter), soldered the etched propeller behind it and bent it to shape, soldering the bottom edge to the side of the hub. After that the propeller got a galvanic copper coating.



As with the etched plate included also parts for the nordenfelt gun, I tried to put one together to see if the components fit. They did. To complete the gun I added barrels from 0,5 mm brass rod, shafts and a lever from 0,3 mm copper wire, etched handwheels and a magazine from an styrene section. The base was turned from a cast resin rod.



For those who are interested in how the nordenfelt is used:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GQZBGwQnnc&NR=1

To be continued ...

Wow!

BEAUTIFUL GUN

Very very sharp!

Jim Baumann

Just came to see your new challenge for the first time. Sure you're not surprised to see me glowing and thrilled. Maybe we will have a close encounter of "SMS Preu�en" and your Turkish submarine in some Constantinople of the 1890s near Wuppertal!
Great great Work!
Schmidt

Before I will be able to finally finish the hull I had to install all the RC components. As these had to be quite lightweight I used special micro-components from http://www.mikromodellbau.de. These were:

MKD-07-10 bell-shaped rotor motor (16 mm long/7 mm wide, idle speed 16900 tpm at 3.7 V)
GWS-JST Mini-40, 4 channel/ 40 MHz receiver
SC 100 Speedcontroller
350 mAh Lithium-Polymer-Cell
2 Modelcraft ES-07 Servos

The Sevos were installed liing on the side. As switch and battery charge I used mikroplugs that have the advantage that only the contact-pins have to go fron the out- to the inside, what makes me able to seal them watertight.. These were installed in the holes under the hatch and under the funnel.



To be continued ....

Very very good.!

so much fine work--and then you immerse it in non-scale water...!

Only for the brave!!

What progress on Massena...?


best Wishes

Jim B

You really want to make it dive dynamically?????????????
Schmidt

Desaster struck:

I soldered all the cables in the right places, tested the functions (all worked well), trimmed the ship with lead glued the two halfes together with epoxy and, after the epoxy set, went to the bath for the first real test. And then ... nothing happend. All systems were dead.

As even rudest cursing hadn't the slightest effect, I had to remove the two part the two halves again (using a heated knife) to fix the problem (the cable between the LiPo-Cell and the speed controller had a cold junction). The halfes were glued together again (due to the parting the splice didn't look as good as the first time) and after the epoxy was hard the first test was taken. The ship manoeuvred O.K. only the hydroplanes had no effect. They were just to small, the buoyancy to high or the motor to weak to push the ship under water. But I was willing to accept this. As I sanded the hull to remove the traces of the prior parting and the second glueing I noticed that the rudder had unfastened. Well, I was really pissed and ignored the model for some days.

At least I decided to build the ship again from the start (thank god I made a rubber mould for the hull) as I didn't wan't to imagine what the hull would look like after a second parting and third glueing. So I laminated two new halfes and installed all the internals. To give diving another try I added some more ballast to reduce buoyancy, thus giving the ship in the water more the look like in the lowest drawing (see my first post in this thread) than in the upper one. At least the halfes were glued together and until now all systems work.

This time I wanted to paint the ship before sea trials but then the question for all pre-color-film ships occured: How the hell was it painted? The only clues I had were some drawings and bad pictures leaving me to guess anything between light and dark grey (also even blue might be possible). As on one picture of the boat in dry dock there seems to appear a slight metallic glance I decided that it had no paint at all (thus corresponing with the fact that when the Germans discoverd the boat in 1914 it was so corroded that they had to scrap it for safty reasons) and to give it a metallic look. For this I used Model Master Metalizer paint. First all the joints got a pre-shading with "Exhaust" than the over all colour (a mixture of "Exhaust", "Burnt Metal" and some "Stainless Steel") was applied followed by a thin shade of pure "Stainless" steel in the middle of all areas. This gives the ship some nice structure a prevents a boring one coloured look. At last the guns and the little diving propellers were added.







The pictures show the boat in its overwater configuration (with funnel) As on the original Abd�lhamid the funnel can be removed when the ship should dive covering the hole with a hatch.

When the weather is fine tuesday will be the first trial on the lake.

To be continued ...

I'm sure Jules Verne would appreciate very nice subject, build and painting!

Your tenacity and perseverance in the face of adverse modelmaking... is admirable!!( enviable even!)

I will admit that I would have been happy to keep it as a static model after your first non-function findings....!!

JIM B

O.K. today was the day (or at least it should be): The weather was fine so the Abd�lhamid went for the water. Well, it was a ambiguous experience. The ships draught was not as deep as I had imagined (this might be due to the surface tension of the water � in my washbasin the boat lay deeper in the water but there might have been remains of soap on the surface of the basin � so after a dive and the breaking of this tension this will most surely change). The efficiency of the rudder was horrible (I expected this, as the rudders lie behind the screw and are very small) but the boat was steerable. Unfortunately the Lipo-Cell was quite empty so I couldn't wether the boat will dive or not, because the motor was far from able to develop enough power to push the boat under water. So this test remains to be taken.


The Abd�lhamid at full speed (although with quite discharged Lipo-Cell)





@ Jim: Well, pain forms character (or at least believing in this gives you the strength to carry on - O.K. if there would have been problems after the last glueing it would be a static model by now. Even faith has it's limitations.)