Keel supports/stands

On my 1/350 th scale subs and battleships, I've been using a rectangular oak base about 1" larger all around than the model, rounding  over the edges with a router, and finish it with some stain and sealer. I then cut up a length of 3/4" by 3/4" oak into pieces that act as keel blocks for the model, starting with narrow ones at the bow, progressing to wider ones at the midships and tapering to the stern. My Bismarck has 19 of them holding it up. I stain and seal the cut blocks and then using the hull as reference, I space them out between 3/8" to 1/2" so that there is an equal spacing down the length. I mark the base down the centerline and using a touch of white glue, I mount the keel blocks in a symetrical pattern, that is an equal distance from the sides of the base and from each other-the keel blocks I use line up directly under the edges of the hull. Once the glue has set firmly, I position the empty hull on the keel blocks and decide which blocks will have screws through them to hold the hull solidly. I mark the inside of the hull to add extra lyers of resin or thick plastic sheet so that a 2 or 3 inch screw coming up from the bottom of the base will hit in the middle of that reinforcement in the hull. After selecting the keel blocks for the screws, I drill them completely through with a drill bit that is barely oversized and countersink the hole at top and bottom-this keeps the screw head from protruding at the bottom and allows the screw to slightly pull the hull down to keep any gaps from showing under the hull. Set the hull on the base, insert a screw through the bottom, and nick the plastic so that you can drill a slightly undersize hole for the screw to bite into. As you finish the hull, you can mount it to the base by hand tightening the screws from the bottom. The heavy base definitely keeps the lightweight plastic model from moving around while you finish the superstructure and detailing. These oak bases are pretty impressive looking to me and you should plan them in at the earliest part of your project. Naturally, real keel blocks aren't nearly the size that I make them but they do look nice.

Very interesting!  I built the Revell Constitution a couple of times, longer ago than I care to think about.  None of the kits I bought had the mounting method Mr. Gonzales describes.  The stands consisted of two oblong pieces of wood-grained plastic with diagonal props at their ends and rectangular holes in their centers.  Tabs molded into the bottom of the hull halves fit in the holes.  To my eye that mounting system was all wrong for that particular ship.

Between 1978 and 1980 (the dates come from Dr. Graham's Remembering Revell Model Kits) Revell marketed its big Constitution and Cutty Sark kits as a "Museum Classics" series, with Philippine mahogany baseboards and brass-plated plastic pedestals.  Putting two and two together, I suspect those sockets for nuts got added to the molds at that time.  I wonder whether all Constitution kits sold since then have had that feature.  (Do the ones from Revell Germany come from the same mold - or a duplicate that got shipped to Europe before the mold was modified?  I have no idea.)  And I suspect some pre-1978 kits are knocking around on e-bay. 

Mr. Gonzales's comments illustrate beautifully the problem I was talking about earlier.  Changing the mounting system of a model can make it look almost like a different ship.  If you do decide on pedestals, the height, diameter, and number of them (two or three?) are all crucial - as is their location.  If they're placed too far apart, the model will look like it's on the verge of sagging in the middle.  If they're too close together, it will look unstable.  I've also seen nice models that look incredibly awkward because their mounting pedestals are either too far forward or too far aft.  (I saw a picture of one in a magazine with the aft pedestal just forward of the rudder and the forward pedestal just forward of amidships.  The poor ship looked like it was about to take a nose dive.)  What frequently happens, I think, is that the modeler doesn't think about any of this until the model is almost finished, and by that time he's so sick of it, and has been staring at it so long, that he's either lost sight of the model's basic aesthetics or doesn't care about them any more. 

The best I can offer in the way of pictures is my little model of the frigate Hancock:  http://gallery.drydockmodels.com/hancock .  It's a scratchbuilt model on 3/32"=1' scale, with an overall length of about 18"  (about half the size of the Revell Constitution, in other words).  I don't claim the mounting system of this model is perfect by any means, but I did work on it quite a bit and after looking at it for twenty years I'm still pretty comfortable with it.  I got some help with it from my father, who was a professor of architecture and had excellent old-fashioned training in such aesthetic matters as scale and proportion.  (He also had a superb eye for proportion - and if he thought something could be made to look better he didn't hesitate to say so.)  He and I sat down one evening with a copy of the ship's plans and figured out how high, how fat, and how far apart the pedestals ought to be.  Dad then drew the basic profile for me (he described it as a "classic" column shape, frequently used for such things as stone balcony and bridge railings), and I turned the pedestals on my faithful Unimat. 

All this happened before I started carving the hull.  For this model it was especially important to work out the mounting system early, because the ship's keel has quite a bit of drag and the forward pedestal needed to be considerably taller than the aft one.  It's easy to work out those dimensions by drawing the pedestals on the plans - and extremely difficult to do it right after the model's finished.  (More than one model has gotten mounted with its waterline on a slope for that reason.)  One of the first things I did in the actual construction process was to drill the holes for the pedestals.  While I was working on the model I mounted it temporarily on wood blocks, to keep the pedestals from getting scratched, but having a means of fastening the hull down securely made life a lot easier throughout the six years I worked on it.

The model normally lives in a plexiglas case (which is why it's still in near-new condition); the screws that mount the pedestals go through the walnut-veneered plywood baseboard.  For the photos I ran a paper backdrop under the ship, punched two holes in the paper, and screwed the pedestals down to a piece of plywood.

Here's a model (1/8"=1' scale) of the New York pilot boat Phantom, based on the resin-hull kit from Model Shipways:  http://gallery.drydockmodels.com/phantom .  The base is a simplified version of a set of launching ways.  The kit came with something similar, in the form of a bundle of basswood strips and an illustration.  I liked the idea but didn't like the basswood, so I made my "launching ways" out of maple.  To give a slightly more realistic impression (though this isn't by any stretch of the imagination a scale model of a real set of launching ways) I dressed it up with styrene "nut bolt and washer" castings from Grandt Line.  I'm pretty happy with the results - but my wife isn't.  She thinks the model would look better on a pair of simple brass pedestals.  Maybe she's right.  Like I said earlier, personal taste has a lot to do with this sort of thing.

Think it all out carefully - as early in the building process as possible.  Take a look at how other people have done it.  (If there's a maritime museum within driving distance it can offer all sorts of ideas.)  Get a notion in your head of how you want the model to look when it's done.  Trust your eye; it's as good as anybody else's. 

Hope that helps a little.  Good luck.

Hello all!

The Revell 1/96 Constitution actually has built-in provisions for such mounts. Just inside the hull, above the keel, are slots to which nuts can be secured. The keel has circular cutouts for running a screw through. For my model, I used a pair of 3-inch bolts and nuts. I fixed the nuts in the slots on one of the hull halves with some putty. and cleared out the half-circle cutouts on each half of the hull before gluing the hull together. I drilled a hole through a wooden drawer handle, and used a circular drawer handle trim piece made out of antique brass, and a maple plank. I ran the screw from underneath the plank, through the drawer trim and handle, through the keel and screwed into the fixed bolt inside. Here is a link to some pictures:

http://home.san.rr.com/hojimo/Picture%20008.jpg

http://home.san.rr.com/hojimo/Picture%20003.jpg

Looking back, I think I could have gone more decorative - drilled out lamp finials for example. I might paint or stain the drawer handles, or switch them out completely down the line - I'd just have to unscrew the screws carefully so as not to disturb the nuts seated inside the hull. By the way, I'm still working on the model - I've got the lower shrouds in, and am working on the head gear and lower mast stays.

I also built the same model many years ago, and I recently brought home from my parents' house for repair. It was mounted using the original stand that came with the kit. The impression is quite different. Having the hull mounted so low to the display surface, as the original kit stand does, increases the impression of massiveness of the hull, and to my mind, more of a feel of the ship in its element, afloat in the water. On the other hand, mounting the hull higher, as I am doing now with my homemade stand, allows one to see the hull lines and get a better view of the lovely lines of the hull, but requires more of an imagination to picture the ship as a ship in the water. It is more like a statue on a pedestal, and less like a diorama.

Jose Gonzales

There are lots of nice ways to mount a finished model.  Getting rid of the shoddy-looking stands that come with most plastic kits is a big step toward making the finished product look like a serious scale model.  The choice of mounting method should be based on the shape of the ship and the modeler's personal taste.

Brass lamp finials will do the job all right, though the range of different ones available is limited.  Another consideration:  if the ship's keel has any drag to it (i.e., if she draws more water aft than forward), one pedestal needs to be shorter than the other.  (For the Cutty Sark, Constitution, or Victory that won't be a problem.  For a fishing schooner it will.)

Ship model supply companies (e.g., Model Expo [ www.modelexpoonline.com ] and Bluejacket [ www.bluejacketinc.com ] sell pedestals made for the purpose.  They're more expensive than lamp finials, but if you've put months or years into a model you may well conclude that the expense is justified.

It's also, of course, possible to make your own pedestals if you've got the tools.  To make nice ones out of brass really requires a lathe.  But nothing says pedestals have to be metal.  The model I'm working on now has pedestals turned from cherry dowel, and I'm quite happy with them.  I turned them on my ancient Unimat, but it would be entirely possible to do such work by chucking the dowel into an electric drill. 

Pedestals mounted to the keel will be plenty strong enough to support the model if they're fastened securely to something inside the hull.  One approach is to shape a piece of wood roughly to the shape of the inside of the hull bottom, epoxy it into position, and run wood screws up through the baseboard and pedestal into the wood.  That will work well as long as you don't intend to take the screws out many times.  A more permanent and reliable method is to start by drilling the necessary holes in the hull bottom, then epoxy a nice, big nut over the hole and use a bolt to hold the pedestal in place.  Better yet, combine the two.  Glue a piece of wood into the hull, drill slightly oversized holes through it, and epoxy the nuts on top.  That gives the bolts plenty of leverage.

All this, of course, assumes that you pick the mounting method early in the construction process, while you have access to the inside of the hull.  If you're trying to devise a mounting system for an already-finished  hull, it probably would be better to provide some support other than on the centerline.  Some ships look nice sitting on keel blocks - a row of nicely-finished wood blocks suggesting the ones used in a drydock.  You can add a few supplementary props an inch or two outboard of the keel, to keep the hull from falling over.

You might want to check out some books on ship modeling to see how other people have done it, and get an eye for what looks best with particular hull forms.  It's worth taking some time to get it right.  The mounting of a model has a big effect on the overall impression it makes on the observer.