CSS Arkansas

[Knife]

Next was the officer quarters. Still needs some fine tweeking.

[Knife]

Finished up the officer's quarters with a mess table, and built up the external stairs. The beams with the gray tops will be glued to the ceiling piece. Evil kitty is eying his next potential paper-model treat.

[Papercut]

One of my favorite CSS vessels, 1/72 and a full hull w/interior. I believe you got a winner here and I just love the different gun types you have included. Hope to see this made available by you for others. I have wanted the resin version for some time, but the prices is a tad steep for the kit.

Look forward to more from you and this wonderful design/build thread.

[Knife]

I've been under the weather for the past couple of days, but started on the midship section anyway. I have the boilers and engines designed and built.

[Knife]

Here's my second version of the engine room. I shrunk the boilers from a scale 14' length to a scale 10' length. This gives room for the stokers to swing their shovels in front of the boilers and room for an engineer's station at the back. The plans I'm working from have the engines covered by a deck, but that doesn't seem very practical to me so I opened up the entire area. I'm going to do a third version with better designed coal bunkers before I finalize this area.

Just keeping count, so far I have printed out over 100 sheets of cardstock and ate 30 TV dinners (for the cardboard cartons) for this project. Also refilled my printer with color ink twice. At this rate, those $300 resin models are beginning to look practical after all.

[Knife]

I've gone back and tweaked the formers, and started finalizing the parts sheets. I'm removing alot of the excess color parts to minimize the amount of ink used, and redesigning some of the parts for easier assembly. The hull design is complete, but I still need to design the hull sides and the casemate. During the design stage, I worked from the rudder forward. For the (hopefully) final beta build, I'm building from the keel upward.

[Knife]

I've added center posts and interior walls to the lowest deck. Also added the prop shafts and stuffing boxes.

I'm building a virtual model with pieces from the parts page, then when I'm happy with the fit I print out the pieces to make an actual model.

I'm working the parts sheets at the 600 ppi resolution, so if anybody wants to enlarge it to 1/33 scale the resolution should still be O.K.

[jmr248]

So Knife, if we do enlarge this to 1/33 scale, how many inches in length will that be and how many tv dinners and sheets of card stock will we be looking at if 1/72 scale is 100 sheets of cardstock and 30 TV dinners?

[Knife]

It will have the same number of sheets, but they will have to be 9 time larger (geometric expansion). So instead of requiring 30 TV dinners, you will need 30 refrigerator cartons.

Just beginning to build to outer hull. It seems like I keep redoing the same parts and I'm starting to get burnt out out them. Hopefully I can make real progress soon so you all can see what it looks like above the waterline. I'm thinking I should whip out a 1/250 scale model just to get something out there.

[redhorse]

I just started looking at the forum again recently and hadn't come across this thread yet. Wow! This is excellent work!