'Q' ship reissue

I finished the spacer on the fore deck. With judicious bending of the Evergreen sheet, I can get it to curve around the turn of the bilge for a full hull. Both fore and aft, it's a simple curve, not a compound curve. This morning I dry fitted the deck house and half the stack with the stern part out at the proper spacing. This silly novelty looks almost pretty! The proportions now match up. I measured what I estimated would be a deep draft and calculated it using the 1/295 scale, and it came to 21 ft. Only now do I see that 21 ft is just what is listed as deep draft for the Carolyn.

Dang it, I need to be working on my Liberty ship, but this is fun.

Fred

Pics later

One last research topic. I found this page at the USN Naval Historical Center:

Q-ships during World War II

Here she is with the spacing. I ended up adding 48mm to each end. 

Nice.  Looks good.  Can't wait to see her with the 3 or 4 inchers in the hidden redoubts.

That looks pretty darn well done.

Here's my effort to correct the openings.

Bear in mind my cut outs include the areas that will have the quarter round fillets. I'll add those back in with thin sheet.

onyxman

Probably coincidental, but it's odd that this new length we have figured out is EXACTLY the length of the box.

 Thus "box scale" is born

Here it is with a light coat of primer to see where I still need to sand. I found anchors in my spares. I want to do this entirely from my spares, if possible.

I think this tread should be renamed "silk purse out of a sow's ear" Great Stuff!

At the beginning everyone thought this kit was $$()( but this now stands as an example of

A) the fun we had building any kit in the old daze

B) Sometimes the hobby is just fun and that is realy important.

Hi.  

I had seen a copy of this model at my local hobby store but wasn't sure if I should buy it.  However, looking over what some posters here have shown and from some other pictures of the model on the web I decided to go ahead and get a copy for myself.   I'm more interested in the hull as just an example of an early 20th century merchant ship than necessarily as a Q-ship, so if it doesn't match any real life known vessel its not a real big deal to me.  I can't decide though whether to try and model the ship just as a Tramp steamer or to maybe try and do some sort of WWI era dazzle camouflage, though.

Also, I haven't decided whether to try and complete the ship mostly as-is out of the box, with perhaps some photo-etched rails and such, or if I should try and make some more extensive changes.  One thing that I have noted is that the deck heights and such seem more or less reasonable for the 1/390th scale listed for the vessel (1in = 32.5ft or each deck equals some where around 1/4in)  but as others have noted in this thread previously the hull width seems kind of high.  However, in looking around the internet I noticed some information on wooden steam ships that were built by the US in this era which were only about 282ft long (www.cocatrez.net/.../FerrisShips.html) but appeared to have similar length to beam ratios and hull depth to length ratios as the model does.  

So, an alternative might be to try and make this ship look more or less roughly like one of those wooden vessels (or something very similar) instead.  I'd have to rescale the ship to be about 1/288th scale or so, and would have to redo the deck houses, but that might be an interesting alternative.

Anyway, I'm really excited to see how the ships that the posters Onyxman and GMorrison are building turn out, and hopefully may try and post some pictures of my own (though I doubt mine will turn out anywhere as nice looking as what they have posted so far :) ).

Happy new year,

Pat

By all means join in the fun, Pat. That link is a great resource.

Fred

Hi,

I had a chance to download some of the plans from the Ferris Ship site and scale them to about the right size for the Q ship model.  Below are a couple images from the site with parts of the Q ship laid ontop for comparison.

Overall everything looks pretty good, with the Poop deck looking about the right length but I think that if I will need to trim back the Foc'sle and mid deck house a bit.    Since the existing decks have some small chocks molded in them and they seem to scale pretty well to the chocks on the Ferris ship drawings, I may try and re use some of the deck structure, but I think that everything above the deck I'll have to do from scratch, in order to get the scale right.  At about 1/288th scale, once inch will be 24 ft or 1/16 inch will be 1.5ft, so a deck height of about 6/16th (3/8th) an inch (plus or minus) would probably be reasonable and that should hopefully maybe allow me to use some standard Styrene strip sizes to try and build up a deck house.  

Other than that the foc'sle height looks OK, but I may have to raise the poop deck just a little.

Can't wait to start.

Pat

PS. I think I decided to go for a dazzle paint job, but haven't decided on a specif scheme yet.  Fortunately there appears to be some good sites on the internet for that info too, like this one - http://dazzle.risd.edu/

Hi,

I went ahead and taped off a rough main deck line on one side of the ship so I could pencil in the new cut outs for the bulwarks on my lengthened fore and aft main decks, using a cutout of the drawing for the Parent Hull I selected as a guide, as shown in the image below.

After that I taped the two sides of the hull together (outer shell to outer shell) so I could try and make the cuts on each side similar, as shown below.

So far the two halves of the hull look pretty good, but I still need to do a little cleaning up.  After that though I went ahead and started to cut up the existing deck and superstructure to try and come close to matching my revised layout.  I decided to try and reuse as much of the existing structure as a I can so I did a lot of chopping to try and get everything close to the shape that I want.  In the end though I'm going to likely end up needing to add a fair bit of new plastic in the deck house, especially since the deck heights for my ship will be higher than that in the original design, since I'm trying to model a ship about 1/288th scale instead of 1/390th scale.  As such, I'm thinking of maybe using the existing "plastic" to serve as a framework for the lower deck or two of the superstructure, but then cover over much of it with thin sheets of styrene and/or putty to help cover any defects and to make it look nicer.

Anyway, the image below shows my 1st attempts at chopping up the existing main deck and superstructure along these lines.

From this picture you can kind of see where I'm going to have to add a fair bit of plastic on the main deck near where the cargo holds will be, as well as the start of a framework for the 1st superstructure level.

Very good!  I'm scratch building everything except the hull. Work will resume soon after the holiday clean up.

Hi,

I can't wait to see how your model & GMorrison's model turn out.  It's kind of fun to see all the stuff different people do with the same basic starting point.  [And to tell the truth, since the base model isn't too over detailed or complex, it actually makes it a little bit more fun & easier to me to go ahead and try out different ideas :) ]

PJ welcome aboard. Your subject looks to be pretty close. And this'll certainly be a couple-three "pretty close" type models. I'm building a civilian too. Guessing you are too, Fred?

I'm scratchbuilding everything except the hull.

I've discovered the hard way that the plastic isn't too glue friendly, and the hull half mating surfaces were inadequate. It's come apart at the seams, kind of like the real Atik did.

I'm leaving it that way for now as I'm not too happy with the way it looks so far and it needs some reshaping.

Your back-to-back thing to match the cut outs is a great tip.

Since yours is wood, I assume you are smoothing over all the plating?

I would have even though mine is steel, because the molded in patterns are really weird. But since its going to be flat black, it wont hopefully be too noticeable.

But i am scrapping the decks for that reason.

And to answer an earlier question, Fred, I am going to model the upper deck houses and boat decks, bridges etc. as though they were all wood, which is probably the case.

Subject for another discussion- World War 1 concrete ships. There's one grounded in shallow water near where we are, and I think there's one off a beach in Virginia or NC?

EDIT: Cape May New Jersey

Hi,

I've sanded down most of the detail off the decks, except for the chocks (though I accidentally crushed one of those, so I'll have to figure out how to repair or replace it).  I'll probably will sand the hull down later.  One thing I haven't decided on yet though is whether I should try and add a knuckle at the stern like in this image

PS.  With regards to gluing the plastic parts together, I'v been using styrene channels, I beams and angles to reinforce alot of the joints, like shown on the bottom side of some of the pieces I've been modifying below 

One hand, two hand three hand bunch!

I need to look at the pics too because I need those ports.

charlesmccain.com/.../u-247

Interesting photo just down the page.

Found it while researching something else.

Indeed, there are some interesting photos there. Speaking of walking off a sinking ship into the water, I heard a story from a Capt Crawford when I was studying for my Chief Mate's exam. He was a young Third Mate on a small frieghter in the Gulf of Mexico when a torpedo hit. He left his stateroom, climbed into a lifeboat and released the gripes and falls as the ship sank out from under him. He remarked that the torpedo probably cost more than the old rust bucket was worth.

This one shows the side ports the best, probably because the hull isn't black:

Wow, look at that. Learn something new every day.

I wonder if those were a part of the Q ship scheme?

Imagine the surprise of our U boat commander when the door opens and he's staring down the barrel of a 75mm pack howitzer????

Hmm. I did not consider if those side ports could be part of the Q-ship re-fit. I'll have to take a closer look at the pre-war photos to see if they are visible then. But I still like the idea of a line of longshoremen loading bananas by hand! Those were the days!

I looked through my pictures for the side ports. Here's my opinion.

SS Carolyn/ USS Atik had them at least on the port side before and after conversion. I can't find any starboard views of her.

SS Evelyn/ USS Asterion did not have them on her starboard side both before and after conversion. I can't find any port views of her.

And I'm less than sure about the accuracy of the labels on either in wartime configuration. But I feel pretty certain that my prewar Evelyn pictures are correctly identified (I can see the name of the ship on both the stern and the bridge.)

So there's four possible combinations here.

Since I'm building Evelyn, I have half of the answer. And so would the Carolyn builder.

Is it possible that they were the same design and both had side ports on the port side only? Would that make sense? I'm leaning that way.

I would go with them being sister ships and being identical. Whether they had them on only the port side is possible. If you are going to use them, just dock portside to. But I think they'd at best be just some scribbing and not very visible on the black hull, unless you had them open! There is some kind of horizontal bar there too. Not sure what that is.

I wonder if those horizontal bars are spars for tying up boats/lighters? That would make sense near the side ports, though it's more common on old warships than on a merchant ship.

Which bars are those? I'm looking at your pic of Carolyn.

There's a number of verticals on the hull that look like rub rails, and the side ports have an overhang. Then the doors themselves I can't tell what's going on. There look to be a double set of man doors with view slots, and some other blank area with a bunch of indeciferable detail.

They'd be humping sacks of sugar up the gang planks I think.

How many and where? A guy could go a little nits. But I think it's a great period detail. I'll draft something up and show you before I cut any styrene.

I never noticed this for the reasons stated earlier.