My N Scale Ships

[pnolan48]

Dave Schneider suggested that I post more images and info about my ships. N-Scale Magazine has published a "fleet review" in the July/August issue, and will publish the second part, about construction tips, in September/October. (I do urge folks to support the N scale publications and ezine--or they won't be with us after a while.)

So here goes. This will be bloggish--I'll post occasionally on various aspects of my shipbuilding. As I straighten out my photos (four computers in five locations caused a mess), I'll post both old and new materials.

I'll start with the USGS McLane, a 125-foot Active class cutter that served from 1927 to 1968, with others in the class serving weil into the 1970s..

Here's a start with a carved mahogany hull, a styrene deck with L-shaped styrene water escape (forgotten the term shunwater) and the beginnings of the superstructure.



The ship is 9.375 inches long. A few hours later, it's beginning to look more like a functioning ship. The bollards were purchased (Bluejacket ShipCrafters--BJSC), but everything else is just styrene, dowels or tubing.



The "finished" ship, with dented handrails. The purchased parts are the handrails (Gold Metal Models 1/200 Yamato set). doors and anchors (BJSC) and ladders (GMM, Plastruct).



The rear 3/4s view shows more scratchbuilding. The curved railing at the stern was heated and slowly curved into shape. The resin lifeboats were purchased from the man in Florida who was selling medium sized freighters, since under new ownership (SavonArts?). The davits are bent tubing with just a slight amount of taper--I sanded the copper tubing to minimal thickness.



These photos were not meant for publication: straightening the handrails would have taken a few seconds.

I will swear that I used photos (from Navsource.org) of the McLane that showed two posts and booms amidships! That was perhaps a mistake, as my eyesight isn't very good.

Finally, in port, in an incorrect color scheme for the late 1950s. I like this scene because it combines mostly scratchbuilt ships, bridges, buildings, and a photo backdrop. The lighthouse was purchased for about $10. The water is EnviroTex over a dark purple paint--I should have used black.



This ship was built from many photos from Navsource.Org. I had enough profile and plan views to draw my own set of plans.

All for now . . .

[SleeperN06]

Oh wow, that is fantastic!  Oh man, are you good. Have you ever thought about selling them on eBay? 

[up1950s]

Very nice , ever thought about making and selling flat car sized boats of various eras ?

[asarge]

I love your ships Pete!!!

[Bendtracker1]

Awesome!

[pnolan48]

Oh wow, that is fantastic!  Oh man, are you good. Have you ever thought about selling them on eBay? 

I've thought about it long and hard. And I'm exploring ways to make it possible without me working for $1/hour. See the Silhouette Cutter discussion on the Scratchingbuilding, Weathering, etc forum here for what I've found about cutting hulls from styrene.

As I see it, the problem is the maximum price point for model ships. What would the market pay for my kind of small ship model? What would it pay for a 500-foot freighter? My modeling level is nowhere near that of Fine Art Models (brass, about $4-8K per ship) or even the Russian or Hong Kong imports (mostly resin, $1K-3K per ship, realistically).

I believe the price point for a 450-foot freighter or 380-foot destroyer is about $350 for my level of quality. I could probably make more money custom-building ships for wealthy modelers at about $1500-2000 a ship.

I've gotten this far:

(1) I've found a local source to machine carve hulls out of mahogany (or other suitable hardwood) at a very reasonable price.

(2) I can cut accurate superstructure parts out of .020 styrene with an inexpensive cutter (not the Silhouette, but one price level up).

(3) I can resin cast turrets, ventilators, doors, bollards, K-guns, depth charges and lifeboats from my masters, along with other bits and pieces.

(4) I can mass produce winches and windlasses by methods I may describe later. Or may not.

So I'm about 1/1000th of the way to making ships for profit.

As for flatcar loads, Richie, I can't see getting more than $10-20 per boat. What's the width limit for rail shipments? I know 737 fuselages are shipped by rail.

Later--

[pnolan48]

Ships No. 2

To understand how far I've come in ship modeling (and also model train photography) this image shows the original version of the Liberty-ship class Naomi Beth, my first attempt at N scale ships back in 2003.



This was the first shot I took in the train room with my then-new Nikon 12-24mm zoom on a D100 DSLR. It has to be late 2003 as the background was shot with the same lens in Alaska in August 2003, and Photoshopped in.  The white wall helped out for cutting in the background.

The hull is a mahogany plank, with the forecastle, poop deck and mid-ship houses made from scrap pieces of wood. I had no plans and built this from photos. There were not many plans or even good photos on the Internet in 2003. So this became a generic C-2 (400-500 feet long) freighter.

Remember, I knew nothing about freighters at the time.

I used I-beams for posts, with some contraption beneath representing winches, and a contraption on top representing who knows what. There are no railings, and the bulwarks are supported by braces about 10 feet apart. The davits are pieces of I-beam, although the launching rails are pretty accurate. There's not much rigging, and the entire ship has about 20 light coats of auto primer gray.

Some of the details would be accurate on other ships, at other times.

So I tore the ship down to the hull and started rebuilding with proper posts, booms, winches, davits, ventilators and other details such as fire hoses (along the starboard bulwark) and boom rests.. And I repainted her--not an easy task once all the details were on board. This shows her before she was rigged, just about ready to leave the harbor with her booms locked down and riding fairly low in the water.



The windows are printed on photo paper, dulled with dull-coat. The winches were gang assembled out of micro-grommets and bits of dowel and wood blocks. The boom-to-post connectors are centers trimmed down from old Rapido trucks.

The half rigged ship was damaged heavily in transport between Albuquerque and my new home in Ohio. I'll try to take a new photo tomorrow and edit the post accordingly.

[up1950s]

The 727,37,57 share the same fuselage , so Wiki states , 12 foot od . But I would think a 9.5 or 10 footer beam would sell better for a boat on a model RR .

[SleeperN06]

Selling price is everything. I you price it so it’s affordable, you’ll sell a lot of them. Priced too high and your limited by who’s able to purchase them. You can actually make more money by lowering your profit and selling a lot of them.

I was part owner of a Hot Tub store many years ago. We were buying redwood tubs for $750 apiece and selling them for $1200. Of course there were other things that went along with it that raised up the total sale price, but we were only selling 2 a month. Our store rent and utilities were $2000 a month which didn’t make us much.

Then we found someone that would sell us 100 mahogany tubs for $250 each and we had to pick them up at the docks. So we decided to take a chance and bought them only we had no place to store them. We stacked them up in the parking lot and had a sale for $300 each. We sold all 100 of them in one weekend. That was $5000 profit just for the tubs add that to the heater, pump and installation of $1500 per tub and we were making a lot of money. And it only got beter than that as we were selling 200 tubs a month.

We knew that we would eventually flood the market so we gave ourselves two years, but the fiberglass spas took over just short of our 2 year expectation and we went on to something else.   

[pnolan48]

The 727,37,57 share the same fuselage , so Wiki states , 12 foot od . But I would think a 9.5 or 10 footer beam would sell better for a boat on a model RR .

Thanks, Richie. I think I saw that the extended versions are shipped on two special cars.

A boat with a 10-foot beam would be 70 feet long, max, and probably shorter. That's into the one-or two-piece resin casting realm. With height restrictions, you're into the large pleasure craft world. I'm not too interested in that. I think most boats that size are just floated and towed (or moved under their own power, or built in place.) I've seen pictures of some fairly big ships moved over land, usually by special rig. And I did witness the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque move a B-52 off of Kirtland AFB.  I think the far larger market is for 1:192 ships, sold to ex-crewmen. Hate to abandon N Scale, but the market just isn't there.

[pnolan48]

Selling price is everything. I you price it so it’s affordable, you’ll sell a lot of them. Priced too high and your limited by who’s able to purchase them. You can actually make more money by lowering your profit and selling a lot of them.  . . .

For many years, the market for fine ships depended on cheap labor from other parts of the world. A US firm, for example, would cut perhaps 100 ships in kit form, and send them to Eastern Europe, Russia, and then Hong Kong for assembly by "independent contractors." Those "manufacturers" were paid about $200-$500 to craft a model that sold for $4,000-$10,000. Now, there was also considerable cost in producing these kits and all the details, so no one got filthy rich by any means. That arrangement seems to have broken down about six to ten years ago, as new fine scale ships are pretty rare these days.

The model ship market is vastly different from the model train market. In model ships, the non-powered, mass-produced kit is supreme, and usually in scales like 1:350 and 1:700. Building a radio-controlled ship is expensive, as the scale has to be larger than we are used to with model trains. A 1:160 scale model ship would have a tough time navigating in anything larger or rougher than a kiddie pool.

I know a good percentage of N Scalers would like a good-looking model ship on their layouts. Finding a way to make ships at a good price point at the correct skill level has been the ultimate challenge. My biggest problem so far is the cost of labor to build a decent ship. I'm hardly alone there. I believe even the established model makers, with far more sophisticated machines and decades of experience, are also scratching their heads, in many markets other than ships.

[jnevis]

The 727,37,57 share the same fuselage , so Wiki states , 12 foot od . But I would think a 9.5 or 10 footer beam would sell better for a boat on a model RR .

Not even close, except they are considered narrow body airframes, and have a similar diameter.  Narrow body are typically 5 across and wide body are 8-10.  The wing attach points and nose design is different.
727-100/200: 133/153ft
737-100/200/300-500/NG(600-900): 93/94/102-120/102-138ft
757-200/300: 155/178ft
On a side note the 757 shares flight deck and actually has similar characteristics in the air.  Actually looks like a 757 got blown up like a ballon.

I count rivets on airplanes like you guys do on trains    Been working in/on /around airplanes for 25 years (has it REALLY been THAT long???)

[pnolan48]

Not even close, except they are considered narrow body airframes, and have a similar diameter.  Narrow body are typically 5 across and wide body are 8-10. ...
On a side note the 757 shares flight deck and actually has similar characteristics in the air.  Actually looks like a 757 got blown up like a ballon.

I believe the 6 across is also considered a narrow body. Like the 727/37/57, and also the Airbus 300-320. I was there for the Airbus.

I think you mean the 767 is a 757 blown up like a balloon. I wrote about them in the early 1980s. Big selling point by Boeing was that a pilot qualified for a 757 was also automatically qualified for the 767 (I wrote part of the brochure back in my agency days).

Wasn't the 737-200 known as the Fat Guppy? Also the Fat Guppy Rocket, as its takeoff run was often under 20 seconds? I remember flying with a Boeing marketing rep, who timed a takeoff on his Rolex.

[jnevis]

Yes, I was typing to late and didn't proof read what I wrote.

Your ships are awesome BTW.  I would love to have the room to put a small container ship, even as part of the backdrop, but that will have to wait.

Not sure about the "guppy" moniker, I've been primarily military aviation (Navy Tailhooker actually) but have to ID civil stuff too.

[asarge]

Nowadays they are called single aisle/multiple aisle as well as narrow or wide body. Boeing used the same basic fuselage crossection for the 707/720/727/737 and the 757.  All 6 across and the fuselage frame was basically the same width, just a different length based on the aircraft version and sub class. Besides varying length, they also had different cockpits and the 727 had to have some modifications done as the engines were at the rear of the fuselage instead of under the wings.

Douglas/McDonnell Douglas used a narrower fuselage than Boeing and had 5 across. They also used the same fuselage crossection for both the DC8 and DC9 series and I beleive first of the MD80 series.