Modelmaking Misadventures: The Ascenscion Island Chronicles.

[Spinal Tap]

Whilst there are some excellent scratchbuilders on LAF I think.you are in a different league.

[Andy in Germany]

Whilst there are some excellent scratchbuilders on LAF I think.you are in a different league.

I'm a member of a couple of model railway forums, and the models they scratchbuild make are in another league. I'm a kid who never grew out of making stuff from cereal boxes. Thank you though.

[Andy in Germany]

One of the reasons why water transport has historically been popular, is that moving big heavy things over water is a lot easier than say, dragging it over fields or rock outcrops. This is because water moves around and supports your load, meaning it can be moved with comparatively little effort.

Unfortunately this comes back to bite you at the end of the day when you go to park your ship: instead of staying where you put it, it can drift off whichever way the wind or the water happens to be going with results that can be embarrassing at best and quite catastrophic at worst.

Of course, when you are next to land this is fairly easy to resolve: you tie your boat to something immobile and preferably inanimate, and retire for the night.

Out at sea though, you need an anchor, which essentially is a very heavy hook shaped object on the end of an equally heavy chain. When you want to stop for the night you chuck this overboard, it sinks, hooks the bottom, and there you are, or rather there you stay.



Of course, the important part of that last paragraph is “heavy”, meaning that the next day you are going to need a way of getting it back up again. Enter the anchor windlass. This provides the power to pull up the chain, and dumps it in the “chain locker” which is essentially a hole under the windlass where the chain it will sit out of the way until it is needed again.

So I needed a windlass, and this of course is where any sensitive engineers should look away. I’ve been hanging around a lot of tabletop gamers, and have been enjoying their adventures making things out of old bits of junk. I’d been looking for a chance to try this out in my own strange world, and this seemed the perfect moment to use some parts from a broken printer at work. Before someone makes comment, yes it was certainly broken. I know it was broken: anything would be broken after falling that far.



Anyway, some of the cogs lurking in the now exposed printer’s inner workings were just asking to be part of a piece of industrial machinery, so I put those in the centre and added bits and pieces until it looked right.

By the way, having wandered far too far down a rabbit hole marked “types of anchor” I can tell you these are Stockless anchors, which are apparently designed with a hinge to dig into the seabed and hold the ship. As an added advantage, they can be folded against the outside of the ship in the way shown, thus neatly saving storage space. These are also bought in: I could have made them from card, but I’d already inhaled far too much superglue for this project.

[marianas_gamer]

Not being an engineer, I think that this is a triumph 

[Michi]

It looks perfectly plausible to me, although I have no idea what the real thing would look like. Sea water constanrly dashing and washing over the bow will make some poor crew member more often  than just frequently have to thoroughly cover the  exposed cogs with huge lumps of grease, however…

[Andy in Germany]

With all this work on the tramp steamer it’s worth pointing out that the point of a cargo ship, when you get down to it, essentially, is to, well, carry stuff.

You’re welcome. This is the sort of high level technical analysis that draws people to this thread.



Any cargo also needs to be kept safe from seawater or rain, and in the case of expeditions to capture tentacled creatures from the dungeon dimensions, stop them escaping. It’s also considered good practice not to allow crew members to fall in the hold every time the ship moves unpredictably, so as well as a hold, the ship needs a good solid hold cover.

You’d think this would be a quick and easy project, but no. Read on to find what happens when you don’t plan ahead, the limits of the internet for historical research, and why measuring carefully is only really useful when you are actually concentrating…



Having established the need for a hold cover, I had to confront another problem I’d been ignoring until this point. All these characters run about on a perspex base about 25mm (1?) in diameter, and I’d gone and made the walkway on each side of the hole a mere 20mm wide, or “a bit too small” in imperial measurements.



So, I came up with a cunning plan: firstly, I made a frame to go over the hole and make it about four millimetres smaller on each side. This gave me a bit of wiggle room, and I added slits in the bottom of the vertical part of the frame, so the bases can slip through…

After three drafts, this still description still doesn’t make sense. Just look at the pictures below:



The overhang also helps to hide the walls of the “hold” so it looks a bit more cavernous, which means I can pretend this wasn’t an improvised fix for my lack of planning, but instead was a carefully thought through optical illusion.

Finally, I was able to move on to the covers themselves. You may be surprised to hear that for once, I didn’t fall down the internet research rabbit hole; this is because there aren’t that many pictures of 1920’s cargo steamer cargo hold hatches for some reason.

Try to contain your disappointment.

Left to my own devices I decided to look at what other model makers were doing, and well, make
stuff up.

Thus it was that I found this thread by @frd

https://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=147600.0

Featuring a lovely metal framed hull cover filled with wooden panelling. I stole the idea made a variation on the design: wood is cheap, lightweight and durable; small hatches could be removed for inspections or access, and in the case of tentacled creatures, air holes. Of course, tentacled dungeon dimension creatures may not need air, but good Cryptozoologists always come prepared.



Finally, every project has at least one “learning experience”, and in this case I learned that there’s not much point measuring if you aren’t really concentrating. I’d been feeling very smug because both the large and small cover on the ship had the same size wooden hatches, until I placed the half finished cover on the small hold access…

And realised that it wouldn’t fit.



After some swearing, I made a smaller version. I’ll now try to build the original cover into another model in the future without anyone noticing. Watch this space…

[Pattus Magnus]

  That’s hilarious! Also a bit reassuring to hear that I am not the only one who builds things and then has to figure out afterwards how to correct the “features” I didn’t notice beforehand.

Can’t fault the final result, though, the hatches look very functional to me. I’m no marine architect, but they seem quite plausible.

[marianas_gamer]

The cargo hold cover was really what I was waiting for in this build and you did not dissapoint (except maybe yourself in the process). It came out well and I will definitely borrow portions of your design for my project.

[FifteensAway]

Historical research?  Say what?  Are you trying to say movies aren't the end all, be all of research?  How dare you confuse us!

 
 
 

[Cat]

Real Life As Seen In the Movies^tm, that's my goal!

[carlos marighela]

Great looking boat!

[snitcythedog]

Spectacular build!   

[Andy in Germany]

That’s hilarious! Also a bit reassuring to hear that I am not the only one who builds things and then has to figure out afterwards how to correct the “features” I didn’t notice beforehand.

Can’t fault the final result, though, the hatches look very functional to me. I’m no marine architect, but they seem quite plausible.

Thanks, and I'm glad you enjoyed the story as well.

The cargo hold cover was really what I was waiting for in this build and you did not dissapoint (except maybe yourself in the process). It came out well and I will definitely borrow portions of your design for my project.

Thank you, but I must gove credit where it is due: they're basically stolen from @Frd's lovely 15mm steamer model. Thread here:

https://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=147600.0

[Andy in Germany]

In the unlikely event any cargo reaches its destination in this ship, it will need to be unloaded. Obviously today this is done using containers and massive cranes, but on 1930’s tramp steamers, and in particular this tramp steamer, things are considerably more low-tech.

As far as I can tell, the system for loading and unloading in Ascension would be a very labour-intensive process, where a lot of men would each move boxes and sacks of cargo between ship and shore. Even with cranes, this must have been a very, very slow process.

Presumably the derrick would assist the shore cranes, or be used on even more remote places where there wasn’t a crane available, or where the ship would have to unload to a smaller boat alongside.



Anyway, I decided it would be interesting to try and make one, which shows I never learn.

After some dithering research, I contacted a member of a model railway forum who is a former merchant sailor and has built some very lovely ship models. He kindly gave me a full description of the working of a derrick with enough accompanying pictures that even I could understand it well enough to build a very rough copy.



I won’t pretend that the result is technically accurate. My goal was to make a moderately convincing and, importantly, fairly robust background for gaming, rather than a perfect copy of the original: it will likely get walloped a few times while we move little figures around.



Painting and weathering next, although probably not for a week or two, as I’ll be heading off to the UK to visit family with Beautiful Daughter…

[Sunjester]

That is looking superb, can't wait to see the final result.