OK, getting brave here. Some many people were helpful when I had questions about programs and how to use them that I am continuing on with a Civil War ironclad project.
Here are my first two parts of my CSS Wilmington. The main deck will get the dead lights punched out of it and then will be glued to the under deck. I plan on using a small piece of transparent tape over the blue color, so when it is sandwiched together, it will look like heay glass counter sunck well into the thick wooden deck. I got the idia from how some of you do the insterment panels on open cockpit models. The little disks are the dead light cover assembly These may be too complicated at this small scale. Right now the consist of a small disc for the reccesed part to fit into the deadlight deck hole, a larger disk fotr the iron cover and a smaller disk for the top senter that would have contained some sort of folding handle. These things would have been heavy, the dead lights on the blue print look to be about a yard in diameter.
I am not real happy about how the colors and details translated from Sketchup to Gimp. I guess that I need a lot more work on that. My problemnow is sizing-scaling. I want to run this in 1:250 scale. It is printing out at 1:316.25 scale. I see in gimp that you can change the scale by percent, but I just need to figure out the math.
There will be a third part tothe deck, the iron rim that will be raised slightly around the outer edge, and a raised iron disc that covered the rudder gear in the stern. I may blacket the hold hatch area on the sub deck piece and cut out the white areas on the deck, so when the raised hatch covers are assembled and grated, there wil be a real 3-d effect.
Now on to the deck fixtures. Any one know the size of the ancher for a ship that was 224 feet long back then?
I will have more soon.
CT