Not gray, no sails. The first containership.

I have two more 'Glasgows' in the closet. I might even build one of them as a tanker! T-2s were modified for many of the early 1960s container ships. For such an old mold the kit goes together pretty well. I see three major flaws in the model. It doesn't show the pronounced camber in the decks of the midship house that T-2s had. The engineroom skylight or fidley is oversized, and the area around the stern aperture looks crude. I didn't try to change any of this.

 If you are using PE railings the big job is to hack off the plastic molded-on rails. This takes a little thought as the rails around the main deck are designed to position the deck on the hull. I found the best thing was to cut those rails off with a verticle cut, thus allowing the deck to sit down flush with the edge of the hull. The rails around the superstructure should be cut off horizontally.

Fred

Nice Job!  Glad to see a merchie build for a change.  I'm building the UNREP tanker version of the T-2, the Mission Capistrano.

Great! Let's see her when you are done. Is that a C-3 in your avatar?

For a real interesting account of the birth of containerization, (some might say the death of good looking merchant ships) go here:

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=5026&t=leadership

Very nice kit bash ! Installing the raised deck, and building all the containers must have taken ...some...time!

Pete

Thanks again all. Pete, the containers aren't all separate units. The ones on the main deck are two blocks. I cut outlines of the separate boxes with a razor saw. On the foredeck there are 6 separate blocks of wood, which make 2 groups of 4 across and 4 groups of 3 across. Then I just drew pencil lines on the side to suggest the corrugated look of containers.

Building up the spar deck out of styrene strips wasn't as tedious as it looks.

The biggest problem I had with this was getting good reference material. I found only 4 pictures of this ship on the internet. Luckily 2 were in color. I was in the middle of constuction, having applied a lot of educated guesswork, when I came into possession of a treasure trove of old photos. A friend of mine who is a retired SeaLand captain found old company newsletters in his attic. Great. I had to tear up a lot of what I had done because of this new info.

Some of those pictures are going to keep me busy for the next few years!

I'd like to start a model of the S.S. Anchorage, the first cargo ship to call in the Port of Anchorage in the winter. It busted through the ice in 1964. It was a weird looking thing, half T-2, half C-2, with hatches for containers, break bulk hatches, and a jumbo heavy lift boom. I'm thinking a base with ice flows will be cool.

Fred  

onyxman wrote:

Great! Let's see her when you are done. Is that a C-3 in your avatar? For a real interesting account of the birth of containerization, (some might say the death of good looking merchant ships) go here: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=5026&t=leadership

Yep, that the SS James Lykes, a C3 break bulk that was stretched with an additional dedicated container hold.  I sailed on her in '77-'78.

kp80 wrote:

Yep, that the SS James Lykes, a C3 break bulk that was stretched with an additional dedicated container hold.  I sailed on her in '77-'78.

That could be a good project for kit bashing a Revell 'Hawaiian Pilot' C-3. I have a friend who is converting that kit into a Pacific Mail ship he was on as a Third Mate.

Fred

Thanks Duke.

The uprights are Evergreen .060 I beam pieces. I cut a load of them to .25 in. and glued them in a line down the deck. The cross pieces are .010 x .030 strips. I didn't cut them to size first, just cut them to a length thats easy to handle. The 'channel' in the I beam positions the bottom of the X. I glued all of them slanting one way, like this /, then all slanting the other way, like this \. Then when the glue was good and dry I nipped the excess off the top.  It was way easier than I thought it was going to be. In fact I started with several rows of supports but realized only the outer ones would be visible, so that's all I did.

Then on top of the supports the deck is just sheet styrene. On the pictures of the real ship it seems to be made of pretty thin metal, so I used .010 in thick sheet.

Some wartime T-2s had spar decks similar to this where they carried big bulky cargo like landing craft and aircraft. That might make an interesting kit bash too.

Here is an "in progress" pic that might show the I beams better. The containers have yet to receive their 'corrugation' .    Thanks again for the interest.

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OK Duke, you asked for it. Here is the S.S. Anchorage approaching the dock on the first winter trip in.

and here is the Ideal X from above. I took the flying bridge detail from this one.

and here is mine:

You might get more detail off these if I email them to you. I have several more, including a good shot of the S.S. Maxton, which was another T-2 conversion, but slightly different from the Ideal X.