Wooden ship question

Styrene - no kit ought to intimidate you. At least no decent kit should. (I can think of some continental European plank-on-bulkhead ship kits that would intimidate me - because they're so lousy that making scale models from them would be almost impossible.) If you can build the armor models in those photos you can handle a Bluejacket schooner - and if you play the French horn you have the patience and determination necessary to complete any kit that's ever been produced.

I haven't actually examined the Bluejacket Atlantic, but I'm confident that it's a well-designed kit and a sound basis for a nice scale model. I know it was updated fairly recently, with the addition, among other things, of a sheet of photo-etched metal parts. Bluejacket is one of three wood ship kit manufacturers (the others being Model Shipways and Caldercraft) whose kits I consistently recommend. Bluejacket hulls are well-known for being accurately carved from high-quality wood; my guess is that the hull would require a little carving to thin the bulwarks, but little else. The skills involved in building a solid-hull ship model are, in some cases, a little different than those of the plastic modeler, but in my opinion (though some wood ship modelers may regard this as heresy) neither form of modeling is inherently more difficult than the other.

I can offer one small tip about this particular ship, based on personal experience. Back in about 1981 or 1982 (I think), the remains of the Atlantic were being scrapped by a ship repair firm, Metro Machine, in Norfolk, Viriginia. The Mariners' Museum in Newport News, where I was working at the time, got a phone call inviting us to look through what was left of the ship and save any artifacts we wanted.

We talked the shipyard into cutting the aftermost six feet or so off the stern for us. (The last time I was in Newport News it was on exhibit in the Small Craft Building.) I vividly remember the miserable, rainy winter day when my boss and I drove over to Norfolk with a flatbed truck behind us to pick the thing up. By the time we got there the remains of the Atlantic amounted to a pile of lumber and a few miscellaneous pieces of metal. I rescued (with the boss's permission) a two-foot piece of deck planking, which is in my office in front of me as I'm typing this.

It's a pretty beat-up chunk of wood (the ship had spent some time on the bottom of the Elizabeth River before Metro scrapped her), but you don't have to study it for long to recognize that beneth the stains and crud is a beautiful piece of teak. One of these days I'm going to make a half-model of the ship out of it.

When we got back to the museum I looked up some on-board pictures of the Atlantic in the hope of figuring out exactly what my souvenir was. I wasn't able to do that, but I did find some good shots of the deck planking. It was spectacular - and fastened down in a way I can't recall having seen elsewhere. The Atlantic had a steel (or maybe it was iron) hull and deck beams, which had T cross-sections. The horizontal part of each beam had dozens of holes drilled through it. The deck planks were held to the beams by thousands of polished, round-headed brass screws, driven through those holes and into the planks from below. She was, in other words, just about the only ship I've ever heard of with no externally-visible deck fastenings. To the modeler, that makes the job of accurately representing the deck remarkably simple.

I say - go for it. Bluejacket makes good merchandise, the Atlantic was a beautiful ship, and she'd make an excellent "next step" after the Rainbow. Good luck. It's a great hobby.

John,
Thanks so much for the great information and the positive encouragement. Now, if I can only come up with the bucks to pay for the ship!

By the way, it's great hearing from someone who has lived and worked in my backyard. I have worked and known guys from Metro Machine, and I enjoy the Mariner's Museum. I had no idea the Atlantic was once on display there. I'll have to ask the custodians/curators if the remains are still there....

Thanks again.
Gip Winecoff

Glad to be of help. One small correction: The Atlantic herself was never at the Mariners' Museum. (The museum has never collected full-sized vessels, other than small craft that can be accommodated indoors.) Metro Machine cut off the last six feet or so of her stern and gave that to us. As you can see from photos of the Bluejacket kit, her hull tapered a great deal at the stern; the section we ended up with isn't very big. The last time I saw it (which was quite a few years ago), it was sitting on a specially-built mounting bracket in one corner of the small craft building (out in back of the main museum structure). I assume the museum still has it, but I don't know whether it's on public exhibition or not. If it isn't, I suspect a phone call in advance would get you into whatever room it currently inhabits.

I'm trying to remember the full story about the lettering (A-T-L-A-N-T-I-C) on the stern. As I recall, the letters were carved and gilded wood, held to the hull plating with screws. Some or all of them (I don't remember which) were missing when we got the stern. I remember my boss uttering some mysterious statements to the effect that he thought he knew where they were - and a few months after I left the place, they turned up. How he knew who'd lifted them off the ship, and how he persuaded the individual(s) in question to give them to the museum, I never found out. But the last time I saw the Atlantic's stern, the lettering was there.

I haven't seen the wooden Atlantic, but I picked a large styrene version at the e-place. It's rather crude, 60's-ish molding, originally meant to be motorized (the Atlantic had auxilliary steam power). I picked it up thinking it might make an interesting RC sailing project. But then I bought a RC sail racing kit (ODOM class) and got hooked on the racing... so now it's in the "to do" pile out in the garage with about a hundred other kits.

But to the point, if you are interested in the Atlantic, you need to get a copy of "Atlantic: The Last Great Race of Princes ". The amazon place has copies for under 5 bucks. It's a very interesting and entertaining read.

I think the plastic kit Schoonerbum is referring to is the old ITC one. I haven't seen it for years; I think it dates from the fifties, but I'm not sure.

Those ITC kits were indeed pretty crude by modern standards - but the company's selection of subjects was pretty astonishing. Some of them have reappeared lately under the Glencoe label. ITC, back in the days when only a handful of companies were competing for the modeler's money, was doing airplane, ship, and armor subjects that no manufacturer since has ever touched. (Sikorsky flying boat? "Billy Mitchell" bomber? 1/48 Grumman Duck? Coast Guard surfboat? WWI subchaser?) I don't imagine they sold well; maybe that's why the firm gave up on the plastic kit business. But it had a sense of adventure and originality that few, if any, modern plastic kit companies can approach.

Hello Gip,

Not to counteract jtilley's advice (which I have always forund to be encyclopedic in shipmodeling knowledge) but I have a suggestion...ATLANTIC had three masts, that is a lot of painstaking rigging for a newcomer to shipmodeling. My suggestion would be to look at something like the BlueJacket MARY TAYLOR (two masts) and reduce your frustration by one-third. She is a beautiful 1850 pilot boat and, in the larger scale of 1/64, may be an easier build. I speak from experience concerning the rigging of schooners having built the MERTIE B. CROWLEY, a six masted schooler

I agree that BlueJacket puts out wonderful products. I have the MARY TAYLOR in my shop and it is next on the to do list.

Al Blevins

Styrene,
Just pay attention to the rigging of the "rainbow", she was a "J" boat, and the "Atlantic" used the recycled masts of three "J"s
My first plank-on-frame model was a 1/64 scale 40' cutter rig. I had designed the hull, and wanted to see what she'd look like. 28 double sawn frames, planked with 1/32" X 3/16" mahogany from Northeastern Scale. It wasn't as difficult as I had thought it would be. (I did a lot of reading before starting the project)
"Atlantic" is a good looking tern, a little patience with the kit, and you'll have a model you'll enjoy for years.
Pete

I don't disagree with any of the above advice. The Atlantic does indeed have three masts - and three involve more repetition than two. On the other hand, she's a schooner, with no square yards. The actual amount of rigging on each mast is, compared to that of a square rigger, fairly simple. Remember, gentlemen, that we're talking to a French horn player here. If he can handle that instrument, I suspect he can handle a three masted schooner.

Now that sumpter 250 has jogged my memory, I think I recall that the Mariners' Museum also salvaged a section of one of the Atlantic's masts. My memory here is pretty foggy (all this took place more than twenty years ago), but I know her masts were recycled from J-boats, I remember fairly clearly that we got a mast from a J-boat somewhere in Norfolk, and I can't imagine where else we could have found it.

The piece we got was, I think, fifteen feet tall or thereabouts. We got it for the purpose of exhibiting it as part of a temporary exhibition about the America's Cup races. (Our timing was impeccable: that was the year the U.S. lost the cup for the first time.)

I do remember clearly that the mast had a complicated series of tracks on its after side for hoisting the various varieties of mainsail. The mechanism looked sort of like a couple of oversized turnouts on a model railroad. Sails of different sizes and weights apparently were stowed on the lower ends of the tracks, and run up the mast as needed. Some of the pieces of the mechanism were missing when we got the mast. I remember making up replacements out of heavy sheet brass - and stamping them with the date, 1983, so nobody would think they were original equipment. I also remember giving the whole mast a coat of zinc-chromate primer, working the brush with one hand while holding a flashlight with the other because the exhibit design people were working on the gallery lighting.

That job had its drawbacks - quite significant ones, which made me leave after three years. But the great thing about it was that when you went to work in the morning you were never quite sure what you'd be doing between then and five o'clock. And where else do you get paid (not much, admittedly) for making replacement parts for an extinct racing yacht?

In the hope of stimulating a little interest in that grand old ship, I'll make the following offer. If Styrene, or anybody else reading this thread, actually buys a Bluejacket Atlantic kit and wants a curious little souvenir to display alongside the finished model, let me know and I'll chop a piece of teak off that deck plank and mail it to you. Not as nifty as a copper spike from the Constitution, but not without interest.