Bumpy Ship Hulls .

Do you have a pic of these bumpy things on say the Arizona turret?

I've seen those but not tried them.

For the Lindberg ship, at 1/292 that's not going to work.

Since I can't see rivets in my photos of the ship, it's not too important to me.

Two things to keep in mind. The rivets Micro-Mark is offering are in roughly 1/8" scale and 1/4" scale. They were intended to replicate the round head rivets in locomotive boilers and tenders. Therefore they are much too large and spaced too far apart for the relatively small scale ship models.

Also the modern (WWII era) ships that I am familiar with had rivets with a very slight crown to them not the high round heads that these rivets replicate. Unless you are very close to them they disappear.

Unless you are building a very large scale ship model it hardly seems worth the effort to put rivets on it.

When did welded hulls become the norm?  Seems to me it was during WW2, so I guess some ships would have rivets, others not.

Don

I think that welding came into its own in the WWII era. However I think that it was not really trusted for high stress seams. I remember the Haskell/ Victory hull as having at least one riveted seam visible on the exterior of the hull, but I don't remember where it was now.

Henry Kaiser came up with the idea to use welding.  A liberty ship expected life span was only  one successful trip so welding was cheap and didn't require a lot of manpower or assembly time.  

Is this what you are thinking about? It's called "oil canning".

Definition of oil canning.

Oh , Well :

   That too . I just didn't want to get into two different categories in the post . Now in reply to one who re-posted .There are rivet sheets available that have rivets so small you cant hardly feel them . Now they are for aircraft , but Can be used on small scale hulls . Shoot they even make some for the teensy Armor kits guys build .That's tiny .

  The thing is " Oil - Canning " and rivets bring a hull to live , to me at least . " Oil Canning " is easy to do .You just have to be careful where and how much you want . A lot is from pier strikes and tug bumps . Where subs are concerned there was a lot if they had to stand for a depth charge attack and some of those were Lu-Lu's ! The area you picture was very susceptible because it was very thin and hollow .

NAW ;

   My 1/200 ARIZONA has them already .

Most of "Oil Canning" is due believe it or not to wave action. It will occur on any ship with relatively thin plating and widely spaced frames over time. Take a look at the pictures of the Joseph Kennedy a destroyer, now a museum ship at Fall River.

Hey , Amphib .

Did you know that many Aluminum and steel Navy ships are plagued by this  ? I saw the Arleigh Burke at her launching and she hadn't been to sea yet  , of course , and there were " Oil-canned " places everywhere !

Airplanes also suffer from this and similar metal buckling.  Look at the side of a B-52 when it is sitting on the ground.  Some severe buckling is a sign that plane was overstressed, but on some planes a small amount of wrinkling is normal.

I think "oil canning" on a hull is also refered to as the "hungry dog" look. The Coast Guard cutter (Treasury Class)  that I served on was built in 1936 and "shot welding" was used in place of rivets. But there were other places in the cutter's hull plating that was riveted in the traditional manner.  

I've designed quite a few metal panel clad buildings and "no oil canning" is a pretty good performance spec. You know it when you see it. On a plane or a ship, the bounds of the panel are rigid and and distortion of the panel either normal to it or in its plane, is going to stretch the metal, even in compression. With nowhere to grow but out, that's what you get.

On a building the panels float free of the structure. But a lot of wind load and vibration over time can create the same effect. The usual solution there is that since each panel is a pre engineered, expensive goody it can be made to be flexible enough not to blow out, but rigid enough to return to its original shape.

Back to TB's original post. Yes I line the idea of rivets too, and have advocated their inclusion in aircraft models at 1/48 and larger. I've got piles of photos from static displays of aircraft at air shows such as DC-3's and co forth. Not only bumpy rivets but overlapping panel seams and stiffener plated, patches, gussets.

Yup;

    And the list goes on .The Lindberg Company has re-released their Coast Guard Cutter again . I had a coastie tell me that this was the most accurate model of the type ever produced . Now that said .When you sand down those ubiquitus weld lines there will be great examples of the type of " Oil Canning " on a model you could  never install !

     The beautiful thing .They are a good match for the real thing ! On the real Cape Class cutters !