Civilian Victory ship from Revell Montrose

Ha! I figured somebody would leap to the defense of okra. Doesn't it start out as green muscilagenous goo? But seriously, I too have known certain southern cooks who could win me over,  even to okra.

My Glaswegian grandfather loved tripe, a taste I never aquired.

You got somethin' against okra, boy?!?!?!?!?!?

I grew up in the South, but then, Mom was the only person I ever knew who could make a lot of the odd things we eat down there taste good. I feel your pain at being confronted with okra that is just boiled until it's green muscilagenous goo.

There were many food items that I saw on ships that I never saw anywhere before or since. 'Eggs and brains', okra, tripe, oxtail, etc. And vegetables are not cooked until they boil for a few hours, so you can't pick them up with a fork. Yes, Lykes was notorious.

The SL7s were a bit before my time too. It took a lot of seniority to get a berth on those. They are still around aren't they? I think the government still has them. They were one of Malcolm McLean's ideas that didn't pan out, but who would have thought fuel would be more than $3 a barrel? 

Could have been Pacesetters.  I never sailed on one, but went aboard one once to see a buddy and it was much nicer than the Prides.  Funny you mention the food, because Lykes ships were notoriously bad feeders.   On the Sheldon, the chief cook was a guy named Snake who had a diamond in his front tooth.  Rumor had it he was wanted for murder in Jamaica.  Every day it was something like ox tail or tongue on the menu...horrible!  I had to raid the pantry every night for cold cuts and peanut butter.  We carried a few passengers and I would always catch them doing the same thing.  But no one dared complain about the food, who knows what we would have been eating. 

Fred did you ever sail on an SL7 with SeaLand?  Talk about built for speed, I wonder what it must have been like making 35 knots on a containership.

Hmm, well if these are supposed to be C-3s, they don't look too much like the Hawaiian Pilot  hull. They all seem to have the raised up fo'c'sle deck like the Victorys. A look at the plans might be revealing.

Could that other class be Pacesetter? Seems like the Lykes guys, when they weren't complaining about the food, , were always talking about Pacesetters. Or it could have been Pacers.

I recall sitting at anchor on a Sea-Land ship in Kaoshiung, Taiwan, and watching an old Lykes 'stick ship' come in for scrapping. Very sad, but they just couldn't compete with the containerships.

Check out this link http://www.wellandcanal.ca/salties/lykes/lykes.htm.  There are several photos here of the old Lykes fleet.  I made trips on the James (my avatar), Sheldon and Almeria.  The Sheldon pictured on this site was not the one I was on.  I think the old Sheldon transferred to the U.S. govt. and became one of the Cape ships, and then Lykes acquired a former German containership and renamed her Sheldon Lykes.  As I recall the James and old Sheldon were part of the Pride Class, and several of this class were stretched to add a container hatch added just forward of the house.  The James had this hatch, the Sheldon did not.  There was another class that came after that, I think was called the Pacer class.  The Velma Lykes was one of this newer class.

Sounds like a general arrangement plan is in order if I'm going to do this right.  I'll shoot you a PM with my address.  I appreciate your help..thanks

Lykes had a huge fleet in their heyday, no doubt there was an Elizabeth Lykes. There was a class of ship Lykes had, I don't know what they called it, that had a small hatch right in the middle of the superstructure. Very pretty.

There is an old story, maybe apocryphal, that Lykes started as a cattle transport outfit, herding cattle onto barges along the Mississippi River. There has been some suggestion that the actual ownership of some of those cows may have been in doubt. :)

Back in the 70's-80's I worked in the northernmost hirise on the waterfront and watched ships all day. No internet to surf LOL. I tore the maritime traffic report out of the paper every week and kept it handy, along with a stack colors guide.

I seem to remember the Elizabeth Lykes?

Ha! We must be on the same page. This morning I thought to look through my catalogue of the Smithsonian Collection of MARAD plans. I recalled seeing some Lykes ships in there. I'm not sure if they are Pride class. The ones listed are designated C3-S-37a, the James, Joseph, Zoella, John, Thompson, Solon, Nancy, Jean and Leslie Lykes. Apparently built by Ingalls 1960-62. If that seems helpful to you, PM or email your address and I'll copy the page from the catalogue and an order form. The General Arrangement  plan is $30. 

( I never worked for Lykes, but many friends did. I love the names, Zoella Lykes ! ) They all seem familiar to me from seeing them chalked on the board at the hiring hall in Galveston. They were always off to some exotic place too, compared to the ships that I worked on, coastwise tankers and containerships, which were usually bound for someplace like Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Thanks KP and Dreadnaught. Rich, I was hoping to inspire you to try a model of that Lykes ship.

Outstanding build!  Once again you've built an interesting and not often seen subject, the post-WWII merchant ship.  You really get your mileage out of those old Revell kits for sure!

mfsob wrote:

onyxman, I don't mean to be picky (But I'm gonna be), are you sure the ventilators on top of the kingposts are square?  I dug through my pictures of the American Victory and the ones on the aft kingposts are round. I don't know if that's stock or a postwar modification, but I looked at my 1/700 victory ship model and all of those vents are round as well.

 You know it is quite Ironic that you meantion the name American Victory. There is a old WWII Freighter that still is sailing around the Saint Mary's river. As I saw her before her old owners OlgelBay Norton sold her to some other shipping company her name was MV Middletown now with the new company she was renamed American Victory. In her time in the Merchant Marines in the PTO in WWII her hull number was AO-71 and at the end of the war she ammassed a whopping 5 Battle Stars having been damaged 5 times by Val dive bombers during her carreer.

Gee, those comments coming from you two..I really am honored. Thanks!

Two words - Brav-O!

To take that old dog of a kit and turn it into the showpiece you ended up with is something you can be proud of, and which will stand as a lasting achievement. 

For what it's worth, this is one of the most remarkable projects I've bumped into in the years I've been participating in this Forum.  A downright inspirational combination of an unusual - but important - subject, an obviously thorough understanding of the prototype, and first-rate modeling techiques to produce a beautiful model.  It's hard to believe it's based on that old Revell kit.

This model should serve as a demonstration to anybody with even a faint interest in the subject that twentieth-century merchant ships are an excellent, and all-too-seldom recognized, source of great modeling subjects.

Here she is. As you can see, I decided not to have the booms topped because, well, enough is enough.

The rigging is plenty busy as it is. It's mostly 6/0 fly tying thread. The main stays to the masts are .010 brass wire attached to the heads of sewing needles. They look reasonably like the big turnbuckles that standing rigging uses.

I ended up using spares from a Trumpeter Liberty (the heavy lift booms ), the lifeboats from Revell's Savannah, vent cowls from an Airfix Mauretania, and even some parts from a Revell 1/570 Titanic, which provided the wheelhouse windows. PE is from Tom's, both 1/400 and some from the Liberty 1/350 set.

The after deck house is always a good out of the way place to store things like old dunnage and oil drums.

I had a hard time with the home-made decals. The blue color on the stack kept running. I think because the decal had to make a pretty tight bend around the stack. I finally tried puting the curve into the decal paper before spraying on the fixative. that seemed to work better.

By the way, there were two ships named Garden State. This is the second one. The first was a C-2.

Fred

The Evergreen styrene seems to be more flexible than the plastic in a kit. For a Trumpy Liberty for instance, the booms seem to be stiff enough to take a lot of rigging. 

Thanks, I have a pretty good diagram already. You can see how much rigging that is if I want to represent it all, and in this scale I guess I would.

I'd call that thing a collar. Most freighters had the option of stowing the booms vertically. You'd only do that if you had some deck cargo which would interfere with putting them down in the cradles.

The only time you'd see the booms "topped", ie at an angle over the hatch, is if the ship was at or near port. Any kind of rolling would put too much stress on all that rigging at sea. Often I see  models of  ships shown in an "at sea" situation, like in a convoy,  with the booms topped. That isn't really correct. Normally the crew topped the booms as soon as they were in sheltered water. Then at the dock the inshore boom just has to be swung out over the pier.

onyxman, I'm afraid you're right about 0.040 plastic rod, unless you model them stowed. I got a piece out and played with it a bit; it seems to have a lot of spring to it.  You would have to be quite careful with the rigging tension, or use something like rigid steel fuse wire, to avoid having the booms pulled in different directions.

As a thought for some variety, you could show some of the booms collared to the top of a kingpost. I know the Victory ships had that stowage option, a ring-looking thing sticking out of the top of the cross trees, at right angles to them. Darned if I know what that's called, though.

Oh, another thought (must be my morning for them or something) - I have a .pdf file with a very good general rigging diagram for cargo booms and all manner of other merchant ship gear if you want a copy. PM me your address and I'll forward it. 

jtilley, Really, the lengths we have to go to get a decent merchant ship model! Except for liners, of course, but even they are under represented. I always thought a marketing angle for the companies would be to produce models of ships which were classic immigrant carriers from the late 19th, early 20th centuries. There must be a million customers who would want a model of the ship great granddad came over on. We have plenty of Titanic kits of course, but she didn't deliver all that many immigrants, did she?

Thanks for the padeye tips. I actually did a few with loops of fine wire on the deck, but my wire wasn't as thin as i would have liked. The ones I'm doing with sewing needles are supposed to be on top of the solid bulwark along the main deck. That bulwark is only 2 mm high by .5 mm wide so I was doubtful if I could secure anything to it very easily. I messed up by not doing this before I painted the hull. I'm frightened by the possibility of dripping a trail of CA down over my paintjob!

The needles go into the deck inboard of the bulwark, the eyes just clearing the top. From the inside they could pass as bulwark stiffeners, I guess. This is where the stays for the booms will secure. Each boom will need a block and tackle rig, used to manhandle the booms around, and a wire preventer. Most secure right on top of that bulwark.

Really, I am tempted to just chuck the idea of topping the booms because that at least quadruples the rigging job. If I stow them down in cradles all I need is the topping lift wire, which on this ship is just a single strand. We'll see how it goes.

Bringing me to your suggestion MFSOB. You are correct about the diameter. I figure 1 mm is about right. .040 in. In plastic I'm afraid that will be too flexible to withstand all the rigging. But if I end up putting the booms down I'll certainly use plastic.

onyxman, I don't have the plans like you do, but if memory serves the booms were about 1 foot in diameter (at least) at the thickest part - why not use some Evergreen 0.035 or 0.040 plastic rod, or even some of their round tubing, to aid in getting the correct tapered shape at each end of the boom?

But then what the heck do I know, I'm not even close to your league! Which is one advantage to building in 1/700, at that scale such details are so small even an anal retentive modeler like me can ignore them with a clear conscience. 

I've got a couple of suggestions about padeyes.

One - if you've got a good hobby shop within driving distance, you may be able to find some excellent photo-etched metal eyebolts in the model railroad department.  (Grandt Line and Detail Associates both make beautiful, extremely small ones in plastic, but don't bother with them for this purpose; they look great, but snap when any strain is put on a line tied to them.)

Two - it's ludicrously easy to make your own eyebolts from wire.  A good, cheap source for the wire itself is stranded electrical wire.  A quick trip to Radio Shack will get you a spool of some stuff that, separated into its individual strands, will be plenty fine enough - and will last the rest of your life.  (For really, really fine copper wire, buy a pair of cheap , Walkman-type earphones and strip the wires from them.  That stuff probably will be too thin for your purposes.)  Use a small drill bit (#80, maybe) as a mandrel; clamp it in a vise and twist a piece of wire around it, like a pigtail.  Drill a hole in the deck (or bulkhead, or whatever), superglue the pigtail into the hole, and you're in business.  If you've got access to the underside of the deck, spread the ends of the pigtail apart underneath and glue them to the bottom.  That will eliminate any chance that the eyebolt will ever come loose.

I've got a soft spot in my heart for this particular kit.  My father was a junior officer on board a Haskell-class APA in 1945; I vividly remember the day back in the fifties when the family made a pilgrimage to the hobby shop and bought the then-new Revell Randall.  (My brother, who's seven years older than me, was entrusted with the task of building it.)  When I saw this thread get started my first thought was that onyxman was commiting a minor form of sacrilege.  But this is turning into a beautiful, ingeniously-executed model of an important class of ship, and I'm eagerly waiting each new step in its progress.

I wish Revell had modified the kit into "civilian" format.  The under-representation of merchant ships is a major gap in the plastic kit industry.

Rich,

Booms will be topped, I hope, unless the rigging totally drives me bats.

Today I experimented with drilling tiny holes in the deck and inserting the smallest available sewing needles up to the eye. Makes passable padeyes. I found the rigging goes better if I plan for where the strands will be secured. The booms themselves will be brass rod. I had good luck with the masts and kingposts, which were styrene. I put the rod in a Dremel and spun it at slowest speed, using sandpaper to make the "telescoped" effect.

I've run off a couple of brass booms in the same way, to make them tapered, but I haven't found anything that cuts the brass very well. Tried sandpaper, small files. Emery cloth works the best, but it's still slow going.

Anybody have a suggestion?

Onyxman,

Very nice lettering job on the hull!  This is looking good.  Are the booms going to be up or down? 

I tried the lettering on the port side. It came out pretty close to the photos I have.

I need to decide soon just which ship this will be, as there are some minor differences. I have it narrowed down to S.S. GARDEN STATE, BEAVER STATE, or GREEN MOUNTAIN STATE. That last may be too long when it comes time to make decals.

Take your pick, Mikeym. When it comes to PE, personally I prefer to use the smaller, 1/400 in this case.

Fred