ss Miltiades 1903

[Richard SimpsonParticipant @richardsimpson88330]

Maybe a bit too ambitious but what about building a single larger scale example then getting it scanned and reproduced in your chosen scale.  This is exactly what Modelu do with figures, maybe they would be worth a call.

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

Thanks for the suggestions but 3D printing is not a viable option both on cost grounds and quality of reproduction. The whole winch has to sit on a base 10mmx15mm. You can buy one at 1:76 scale which costs around £20 each. Even at that scale it looks too ‘chunky’ with way oversize gear teeth and lacks sharp definition. and if halved in size would probably just be a sort of expensive blob!

There is also a rather crude white metal based N gauge one for £6.60.

The winches are not actually all that difficult. The key factor is to get the shape of the side plates right and drill three holes at the correct distances on them to support the three axles carrying the drive from the cylinder and supporting the winch drums. Once this is right I can make a template to cut the sideplates from plasticard and mount them onto the baseplate. The axles themselves will be thin brass rod. At this scale the various gears can simply be represented by disks of various sizes in plasticard or metal and threaded onto the axles. The drums themselves will be very small eyelets in two sizes which I already have. (a number of the winches are handed with drums on one side only). Steam cylinders will be small plastic tube with plastic rod to represent the pushrods. Once assembled and sprayed black the winches will look convincing enough with a decent amount of crisp definition.

At 1:150 scale a person is only around 12mm high. Their head is just a pink blob with a dash of brown on top to represent hair. In a sense, the model is a sort of 3D painting rather than a photograph!

Colin

 

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

Well, I have my very expensive photo etch fret designed by Steve Mahoney now and it is a work of art! I now need to think very carefully about how I fit the railings as they are very delicate and easily damaged. The davits are experimental and the tiny size of the parts means that they don’t clip together the way Steve was hoping but there should be scope for assembling the various components using extra support. Deluxe Materials sell a water based photo etch glue which could be very helpful so I have ordered some. Very much a case of act in haste, repent at leisure! Fortunately there are plenty of spare components on the fret to allow for mishaps. Wish me luck.

Colin

[Richard SimpsonParticipant @richardsimpson88330]

Good luck Colin.  I have to say those handrails look beautifully proportioned, far better than many after market sets you can buy.

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

For various reasons I’ve not been in the workshop very much recently, I did find a bit of time to play around with the photo etch lifeboat davits though – they are horribly small and delicate and I think only the arms will be usable although they need stiffening with brass wire along one edge. They were an experiment to see what could be done at this scale and designed to clip together but the scale was simply too small to make it work. At a larger size I suspect they could work quite well but this is one instance when the accuracy of the drawing could nor be matched by the etching process with these tiny parts. Just having the arms is a bonus as they would otherwise be be almost impossible to make. Lifting eyes on the davit heads are two links of fine chain. One is glued over the wire extending from the davit head and the other is used to reeve the falls.

Once again it has been two steps forward and one back as the lifeboats I made using the Deluxe Create and Shape casting material turned out to be  a few millimeters too long, or maybe the plan was a few millimeters too short. For the odd lifeboat this wouldn’t have mattered much but when you have a line of four of them they take up noticeably too much overall length on the boat deck and the first one was in front of the funnel rather than overlapping it.

Another search online turned up an eBay supplier offering ships boats at 50mm long. These were fractionally too small and of a more modern design. However needs must and they were only £1.17 each so I ordered 12 on the basis that I could make up a few millimeters along the length by bending the davit heads over slightly and leaving a slight gap between the last boat and the end of the deck. Unfortunately, these particular boats share davit frames with an arm on each side where the boats adjoin so I can’t simply get the space by separating the boats slightly. I can make up frames in plasticard in place of the photo etch ones, not totally accurate but they will look the part at 1:150.

The boats themselves are probably intended to be metal open boats of the mid century era, a bit like those carried on the old Queen Mary, but by adding short decks fore and aft they could pass as an older design at a glance and a bit of thin Trimline tape along the thwarts can suggest a sheer that isn’t actually there. The boats on the 1:48 scale builder’s model have very little sheer and a bit of decking fore and aft so I will be replicating a similar effect. In fact the more I get into this build the more discrepancies I find between the various sources of information. There are strong indications that the naval architect drew up plans for the construction and fit out for the vessel and left it for the shipyard to finish off the detailed design and source a lot of the fittings ‘off the shelf’. The builder’s model differs from the completed ship in a number of respects and was probably made during construction rather than afterwards. Its purpose would have been for display at the Shipping Line’s offices to encourage customers to buy their passage in such a fine vessel.

So, in a way, my intended near scale model, within the constraints of the 1:150 scale, is becoming in part an artistic reproduction. But if I get it finished it will look like the original Miltiades from the pondside and I will be happy with that.

Getting back to practicalities, It has become obvious that, even with the very simple rigging of the lifeboats that will be necessary, it would be foolish to attempt this after fitting the very fragile photo etch railings and supports between the promenade and boat decks and that the lifeboats need to be in place first. In fact fitting them directly to the detachable superstructure risks damaging some of the already fitted detail. The answer I think is to build and rig the lifeboats onto separate thin strips of decking which can be stuck down on the existing decking and the joins  concealed at the deck edge by the side plates and inboard by the run of the railings along the sides of the lifeboats.

With all this in mind I have been experimenting and made a rough unrigged sample of what this might look like which I can use to get all the dimensions right before final assembly.

For those of you still with me, I apologise for the long winded descriptions but thought it might be of interest to highlight some of the practical problems when you ‘do your own thing’ and have to battle with contradicting information sources. It is well beyond building from a kit or from a well drawn model maker’s plan. Personally I find it all very educational and a challenge to bring all the threads together to try and create a model of a ship that was built over 120 years ago and which will capture the essence of that vessel even if some of the detail can never be definitive.

Colin

[Richard SimpsonParticipant @richardsimpson88330]

Interesting Colin.  I agree we can sometimes get too wrapped up in following a detail when, invariably, ships were not actually built precisely to the drawing.  Having been involved with the building of a couple of relatively modern ships I can confirm that modifications can be made during the build process that didn’t actually get to be corrected on the official drawings.  Added to that modifications and enhancements then occur throughout the ship’s life, sometimes during refits and sometimes on the run, which do not always become included in the official ship’s drawings.  Identifying precisely how a ship should look at any specific moment in its life is invariably a very difficult thing to do.

I suspect you will probably know more about the Miltiades than perhaps just about anyone else out there so I suspect your interpretations will have as much credibility as anyone’s could have.

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

Richard,

I think back in 1903 that records were far more lax than they are in recent years and the builders had a much freer hand than would be acceptable today. Different world.

Colin

[ashley needhamParticipant @ashleyneedham69188]

Cor! Read and mostly understood!

Lovely etchings I must say.

Ashley

[Author]

Posts