1/72 Steam yacht turned fast patrol boat - the 'Bloody Lance', pt. 9

[cataphractarius]

Steam yacht turned fast patrol boat - the Shikari, pt. 1.

Shh, it's me, mate. Farquarson of the 106th. I need help, right away! The lad has gone utterly funny in the head and dug up this dreadfully damaged bucket o'plastic. It's nothing but a bit of junk which would disgrace even the scruffiest jumble market.

But the lad is utterly excited! He is fantazising away about "scale-o-rama-ing", whatever that means, and eyes hacksaw and moto-tool with demonic lust. I fear the worst! Please, ple-

...

Shut up, Farquarson, you croaker! If you don't stop croaking I'll set you adrift in this nice little boat that was left over from the French fisherboat I recently built!



Though he is actually right about the hull and my intentions (although I won't use the moto-tool for this one). I have a big - well, not really a big one, rather a slightly-above-average-sized - box with both parts from ship kits and battered built ones that I collected over the years mostly from a fairly well-known online auction site.

Now, just the other day I found an old Cutty Sark model - it's the old Revell 1/220 one - which I had got myself mainly for the masts and spars, which have already been used for other projects. I remember considering throwing the hull away back then, but somehow in the end decided against it - a good decision, it turned out.

So this hull is the starting point, and it certainly does look pretty gruesome.



The quality of the build left room for improvement in the first place, and years of neglect left their mark, with much of the - actually fairly intricate - detail either broken off or covered in a gooey combination of dust and glue (I wonder how that came about).

Well, as I said the other day it somehow landed in my hand, and I thought "Would it be possible to do something creative with it?" The rules we're going to use distinguish between 6 classes of vessels - small screw steamers, paddle wheelers, sailing ships, pinnaces, torpedo boats and (small) cruisers. With the Sinagot nearing completion, the yacht and the pinnaces on the way I thought there may be an opportunity for getting an example of another class.

And then this idea came up of turning it into a very small, extremely fast steam yacht built more or less like a torpedo boat. Vessels like this did actually exist, the US Herreshoff yard being particularly famous for these race yachts, though they were fairly rare, given the very high running costs and the comparative lack of amenities compared to more stately - and larger! - vessels.

One could therefore imagine that an enterprising citizen full of patriotic zeal - or perhaps a group of them - might easily buy such a yacht which had just been completed for a foreign industrialist in a British shipyard, turn it into a patrol boat by adding something with a slightly heftier punch than your average Gardner machine gun and offer its services to the Admiralty.

And so the "Shikari" was born. Originally built for an overseas customer, the yacht was acquired by a London temperance society to which a well-known Victorian general of North-West Frontier, Balaclava, Mutiny, Peking and Abyssinia fame had graciously conceded to give his patronage, provided the society would "prove useful" in the case of a national emergency. With war with France a virtual certainty and the fear of small torpedo boats raising hell all along the coast, the society bought the yacht early in 1888 and had it equipped as a patrol boat. On the suggestion of their patron the society decided to name the vessel "Shikari". Originally built in a famous Thames dockyard, the Shikari was ordered to operate in the Wash and off the coast of East Anglia, where the Royal Navy was particularly thin on the ground.

So that was the idea. How to put it into practice? First of all it was necessary to chop off the lower hull, which resulted in a fairly nice, waterlined hull.



Obviously, the layout of the deck was useless. Instead, I cut off everything sticking out, resulting in an even more sorry state of affairs.



Let's see how we can progress from here.

[Gunbird]

I'm pretty certain your drydock skills will bring back her former glory.

[cataphractarius]

Steam yacht turned fast patrol boat - the Shikari, pt. 2.

The general plan was putting a totally new deck atop the bulwarks. This actually increased - at least visually - the swept lines of the hull, resulting in something that looks as if it was built for speed. I then added a rudimentary superstructure which is partly built up from plastic sheet and partly from two bits that came from the stand of a weird 1/550 Titanic kit (a direct copy of the classic Revell 1/570 one, or so it seems to me) - yes, I know, but the two bits had nicely rounded edges and about the right shape, and I have no ambition whatsoever to build this kit anywaay; I can't even remember how I got it in the first place. So I might just as well use it for something useful. The funnel also came from that kit, with other pieces courtesy of the spares box. The result is to some extent pleasing, at least to my eyes.



The big blockish piece of superstructure behind the engine room is the main cabin (and I only very late in building this realized that I had simply forgotten to grind away the "RMS Titanic" - talk about a really senior moment...); some further detailing is needed here. Having such a cabin is a nice thing - lots of room on top of it, giving the opportunity to mount something mean and multi-barreled...



Just to show the possibilities I have put a Gardner on top of the cabin. The plan is actually to mount something, uhm, bigger - and, given that this is a vessel equipped through private initiative, non-standard, but I have as yet to build this.

Of course, with the vessel there, Farquarson and his chums from the 106th couldn't help but get aboard and get their grubby hands onto the hardware.



Two further detail shots show the engine room casing and the steering position in the stern.



While some of the deck detail is already in place (a small skylight and coal scuttles), the deck needs further attention.



The steering position also needs further attention - a steering wheel would be nice, for starter!

Currently the Shikari is waiting for some areas where puttying was necessary to dry out - rather late in glueing things onto the hull I found out that there were a good number of, ehm, holes in it; another senior moment... The next step will be slapping paint onto it. Which raises the question of how to paint it - the obvious choices would be classical Victorian livery, though I'm somewhat tempted to do something more on the wild side, like painting the hull red.

Well, we'll see.

[cataphractarius]

Steam yacht turned fast patrol boat - the Shikari, pt. 3.

Only a small update today - I managed to sand the puttied parts and get the top of the cabin smooth. Also, portholes were added to the latter, significantly improving the looks of it all.



Then I added a small magnet to the top of the cabin, so as to be able to put different things on top of it.



Further detailing was done.



The steering position is basically complete.



The hatch/entrance to the cabin needs more detailing, as does the engine room casing. Also, the deck needs a little bit more attention, but we're slowly getting there.

[philp]

Got to say this looks like a fun little project.

[cataphractarius]

Thanks for the comment - it certainly is; I find the contrast between the "original scale" and the new one quite funny.

Again only a small update today.

Steam yacht turned fast patrol boat - the Shikari, pt. 4.

A final round of detailing before the first bucket of paint is emptied over it. First, the engine room casing and the forecastle with more details, mostly coming from the spares box.



Then the stern - some rudimentary detailing to the entrance/hatch leading down into the cabin. I'm still not very satisfied by how it looks, but it is too late into the build to actually pull it apart again, so it'll stay pretty much the way it is right now.



The 'Shikari' in all her glory. You may note the plastic sticking out from underneath the ship - although I had made a mental note to do this early into a project, I conveniently forgot about it, so it's a late addition. Ah well, there is always something.



Of course, Farquarson and his buddies once again stormed the ship, having a look at the progress.



Perhaps I should make a general remark here. Using ships in wargames is usually challenging due to the need of fitting figures to something that, if it were a proper model, would hardly have the space for it. As a result, many wargamers adopt a figure-centric approach and use ships that are hugely simplified and usually severly distorted in order to comfortably fit a suitable number of figures. Personally, I'm always slightly saddened at seeing tables with superbly painted figures and lavishly built terrain pieces - and a sampan, gunboat, dow or whatever that sticks out like a sore thumb, at least to the eyes of the navy-minded. Which is why I try to get the ships as realistic as possible, even if that means I have to make compromises with the figures (and that will certainly be the case with the pinnaces).

[warburton]

Looking good man.

[cataphractarius]

Steam yacht turned fast patrol boat - the Shikari, pt. 5.

Colours! Well, one colour. Or actually, not really a colour, depending on your definition of what a colour actually is.

Anyway, while I had briefly thought about a wild scheme (like a red or a yellow hull), I then considered a classic Victorian one (black-white-yellow), before thinking that something with a low visibility would be more suitable. So in the end I opted for an all-black scheme, with a sand-coloured deck and - it is a yacht after all - a narrow white stripe on the hull.

Before that, some last cutting and sanding was necessary to produce this result:



And then I poured black all over it...



For comparison, one of the pinnaces beside the "Shikari":



She comes out at about 80-90ft or so, which is about the length of HMS Lightning, the first Royal Navy torpedo boat.

The next step will be the painting the deck and all sorts of details; bulleyes will be brass, a couple of other fittings too. The screen around the steering position is canvas, so will get some slightly yellowish off-white. That should add a little bit of visual interest to an otherwise pretty, well, black ship.

[PortCharmers]

Looking good!

There is some story developing in my head: she used to be a fancy, colourful thing, but being pressganged into war service, she received a makeshift low-visibility cloak, which would be expected to be slopped on rather quickly and carelessly, without much regard to detail (quite often I see paint-jobs on real ships that - if reproduced correctly on a model - would be regarded as a terrible botch-up by non ship-savvy modelling collegues).

[Barbe Rouge]

I saw this steam yacht in Malta in June.

[cataphractarius]

@Barbe Rouge

Thanks for these lovely pictures! That's actually quite a famous small steam yacht - the "Amazon" - for which see here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(yacht)

She was an important inspiration for my 1/72 steam yacht "Elspeth", which would have about the same size (though being based on a cargo sailing ship hull means "Elspeth" is not nearly as elegant as "Amazon"):

http://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=78918.0

[cataphractarius]

After some interruption it was time again to return to the Shikari - this time for getting some purpose into it, so it's Shikari, pt. 6!

This was the current state of affairs - the ship is fundamentally complete, with only a couple of details missing, and the first basic coats of paint have been put onto it.



A couple of touchups are necessary, then further details, railings and some detail painting. This will all come later - today is the day when the Shikari gets what in the eyes of her daring skipper is her main armament! The whitish bit of plastic lying forlorn on the cutting map is going to play an important part in this endeavour...



... as one of Farquarson's buddies from the 106th can observe. After some preparation we have these eight parts (excluding the three small magnets in the upper half of the picture)...



... which, put together, result in this. You probably already know where this will eventually lead to - a spar torpedo!



The business end of the spar torpedo (it doesn't look quite as gruesome in reality, I have to say) and part of the gear needed for operating it.



Now, as I wanted to be able to depict the boat either with the spar torpedo in stowed configuration or ready for combat, I added a magnet to the deck; it can barely be made out among the gluey mess in the lower central bit of the picture. Once this is all sanded smooth and painted up, it will - hopefully - be hardly noticeable.



The magnet makes it possible to add either a deployed spar torpedo, as in this picture (note the small magnet in the bit of gear needed for raising the spar).



So we can have Shikari either with the torpedo in stowed configuration, as in this picture - stowed spar torpedo is on board, the deployed one in front of it...



... or with the torpedo deployed, as in this picture - stowed torpedo in front of the ship. I should add that the spar torpedo setup is only an approximation of a real spar torpedo gear - for example, I'm leaving out most of the rigging involved - as it should still be "playable" in some way.

And that's it for now. Currently, Shikari is armed with a spar torpedo and a Gardner gun, but that may actually change - I'm looking into something slightly more hefty than a Gardner, even if that means a reduction in overall speed.

[cataphractarius]

After a long hiatus finally some progress in the shipyard.

This is how the Shikari looks at the moment (sorry for the slightly blurry picture):



As the overall scenario calls for the little vessel to be employed on near-constant patrol duty, I went for a weathered look; I'll have to tone it done a little bit in places, but on the whole she really begins to look like a makeshift torpedo boat.

Here is a closeup of her business end:



Note that there are still a couple of smaller details missing - and I'm still trying to find a way to add at least some sort of wiring to the spar torpedo.

And a closeup of her stern. Again some minor details still missing - and the closeup reveals some really shoddy paintwork! Have to address that...



At least the end is in sight now - I won't add too much deck clutter as the ship would then be unable to accomodate any figures (the plan is to have a deck crew of up to ten, two or three around the cockpit area, two or three manning the QF or machine gun and another three deckhands), so she should be ready for action soon.

[cataphractarius]

To bring this thread up to date - this is where the Shikari (which has been renamed "Bloody Lance") is right now, or rather was three days ago (by the way, that is a horrible picture; in reality, it looks slightly better):



For a test game (see here: http://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=87688.msg1081816) I needed a couple of crewmen, sporting a badly executed - and unfinished - paintjob; they are based on small bits of sheet metal, which we found lends the figure the right amount of weight not to topple over without taking up too much space. You might notice that I cut off the foremast; it was pointed out to me that it would have been much too heavy for such a small vessel, so I decided to go only with the smaller one, which got a spar to allow for the fixing of flag lines (after all, we need some means of communication).

As I was not entirely happy with that layout, however, I repositioned the mast, which is now more or less right behind the funnel. I have yet to take a picture of the new setup, which I think is quite an improvement. I'm also thinking about repositioning the gun, as the roof of the cabin may not be the best place for such a heavy implement.

[cataphractarius]

Another very small update. The new mast has been fitted, and I have started with the rigging (which proved to be slightly fiddly as the railings have already been fitted...).



"Bloody Lance" in all its present glory. Personally I think it looks now slightly more like a torpedo boat, which is good.



The boat will be fitted with Victorian state-of-the-art ship-to-ship communications technology - flag lines, that is... I'm still wondering which signal I'll hoist; not enough space for that Nelsonian touch, I fear - and in any case that might rather be something for Captain Stormer's flagship rather than for the auxiliary torpedo boat under Lieutenant Smythe-Fythleswyth.



Well, progress in miniscule steps, but I'm slowly getting where I eventually want to be. The next step is going to be a fun one: I'll add a battle flag.