Jumbo II Class Ferry "Tacoma"

Very nice Ferry, you've done a great job on it.

Nicely done. And you built two?
You don't work at Rauda do you?
Send me a set of railings for the passenger decks.

My Super class will get done some day....



Built from plans aquired from the WSF archives.

More here.
http://groups.msn.com/ModelsandMiniatures/wsferryboat.msnw

Umi_Ryuzuki: Funny you should ask. As a matter of fact, I did serve time at Gulag Rauda back in the early '90's. This wasn't one of Vigo's toys, but I know he bid on it. Not too happy was he to find out a former employee got the job! Guess he shouldn't have laid me off! I built this while at a company called Modelwerks in Seattle. And as a matter of fact, I do have some of the railings left over, but not much. The railing was a MAJOR HASSLE to build. The first model had machined railing that took almost 2 days of run-time to machine 12 feet of railing, then I had to inlay the wire mesh screen into the rails! On the second boat we had the railings P-E to same time and money. I see from your home page you are a commercial model maker too.

Yeah, the railings are one of those, "maybe I will start those later,..." things.
I did the ones around the life boat stations and established how I would do them.
Essentially hand cut the frame, glue in some mesh. Plastic weld the rails, glue in the frame and mesh. PE sounds good, but I have never gotten a good idea on how to transfer something that fine from a drawing or cad, to metal. Most people say, "Just use a laundry marker on both sides of the sheet." Yeah right,...Works on large and rough items,... LoL and then they leave me hanging.

I just noticed the "...700 parts" statement about your model. I think I have 800 on just the interior of the car deck girder work,..."What waaas I thinking,... " that's per side

Because my boat (52") is R/C, They will probably take damage every time I move the boat. A second reason it's become one of those, "maybe I will start those later,..." things. I run a small business in Portland, But it's just me. And I am just beginning to run into those laser cutting shops. I am still just a hand drafting, hand cut sort of person. So are you still in working in the field?

We simplified anything and everything to make this tub. It was a constant battle between our shop and the engineers at WSF as to what would be built and what was "outside the budget". Geez, for a bunch of engineers, they just could not "fathom" why I wasn't going to put toilet seat covers in the restrooms. [:0] They wanted me to put "Matchbox" cars on the car decks. They could not comprehend that they were way out of scale and would cost over $600 to buy them!
I looked at your photos of the Kaleetan, very nice work! This is obviously a labor of love. At 800 parts per side just for the car decks, we could not even approach this level of detail and still turn a profit. If you can't see it without standing on your head, we didn't build it!
What was really funny though, the first thing the engineers did with the finished model was to take it off it's stand and lay it on the table to see how it would beach! They told me that never in the history of the WSF system had any boat ever dropped anchor. Why? Because there is no way to retrieve them without sending divers down to attach a cable and having a barge with a crane winch it back up. If them had a boat start taking on water, they were instructed to head towards the nearest designated "beaching area" and drive the beast on shore!
Alas, I am no longer working in the field. The fickleness of not having a constant work schedule, or not having any work at all, drove me to other pursuits. Working at Rauda was another reason. Maybe if I moved to southern California I would think about doing it again. I would love building models for movies.

I agree with the "Working on movies part", but I would end up a peon and slave to wages dictated by interns willing to do anything to work in Hollywood. So I scratch by here in Portland. I actually get about one call a year from someone leaving the Movie industry. One lady worked on Titanic. Most of them say that the, "We need it last month!", mentality will burn you out.

Nice story about the beaching. I know that the hull I built would just roll over on its side if it ever got too far up the beach. It's that "wakeless" hull design. It does what is supposed to, but it is not a real stable platform for beaching or an R/C sailing model.

So is the Jumbo II a 1/96 scale build?
Where did you get the 220 cars? (It's only rated at 206 you know)
I can't believe the engineers accepted that!

I also noticed you posted the image at Rongorge. Is there still a public sign in and password there? I haven't been able to log in there lately.(most of the first page is our club ships)

Peon and wage slave? That's working at Gulag Rauda! You have Vigo, his wife and 2 sons running the place, and slave labor doing all the work. My favorite quotes were: "Needs more yellow!!" (Vigo is color-blind), and "You are picking my pockets", if he thought you were not breaking a sweat. Mental burn out? I nearly gave up my hobby!
I may be wrong about the number of cars, but I'm pretty sure that 220 is the number that we bought. I thought that was the major difference between the Jumbo I and II classes was the increased car capacity, among other changes. Yes, it was built to 1/96th scale and the cars were HO scale railroad pieces. Certainly out of scale, but better than the 1/72 scale Matchbox cars they wanted and HO were all we could find. We ended up with some cars left over, so I may be off on the final count. That was the strange thing about the engineers at WSF. Sometimes they would be really picky about the smallest details, other times they couldn't care less about scale accuracy or understand why certain things would not be visible. They were a real pain to deal with.
As for the beaching, that is what was really weird. The hulls are basically the same, with minor changes from previous designs. When beached, the ferries would list about 30 degrees to their sides, which would probably have caused the cars to slide to one side. One wonders if the shift in weight distribution would have caused it to roll over completely? They sure spent a lot of time playing with it on the table. Maybe they were worried their gin and tonics would slide off the table if they had to beach.
Ron still has public image hosting. The passwords are "newfsm" and "models"

Leopold:
Great model!
My corvette is built much the same way; prototypical from plans published in a reference book. I use Auto-CAD to plot the shapes, print them onto Avery full sheet labels, then apply those to the styrene and cut out the part.

The University of Alberta recently purchased some 3-d copy machines. I don't have any contacts over there but it sure would be a good way to turn out things like those railings, from CAD direct to finished part!

Seems like Star Trek is becoming more like reality every day.

As I said earlier, great model!
Regards,
Bruce

Thanks to everyone for the compliments. Bruce, great idea on printing plans onto Avery label sheets. By coincidence, I'm trying to transfer a camouflage pattern to 2x4 inch Avery labels and use them as a mask. I didn't see full size sheets of the stuff. I could print the pattern directly onto the label and cut out the masks. Guess I better look again.
As a final addition to the ferry and an inside joke, I asked the WSF guys if they wanted people on the decks. The said they did, but only on one model. I asked if they minded if I put myself on deck. They didn't have a problem with that, so I miniaturized myself and now stand on permanent watch, sunglasses and all!

Leopold:
The full size Avery labels (removable type) are number 06503. You might have to have them ordered. There are also the regular kind that stick like s**t to a blanket; you probably don't want those unless you can leave the label on and hide it in the niterior of the model.
Bruce