1/300 Battleship Duilio

[Robert Woolley]

I would like to present a model that I have actually finished, except for some rigging. It is the Italian battleship Duilio.
The Duilio was built in 1876 and was the largest, fastest and most powerful battleship in the world for a while. It had 17.72 inch muzzle loading guns. The guns had to be returned to a certain position and the guns lowered to holes in the deck so the next shell could be rammed up the barrel from below. They could shoot a round every 15 minutes so there is a big question as to their usefulness if they had gone to war. The British built the HMS Inflexible as a response to the Duilio, and both ships ended up being built over a protracted period of time as each navy looked at what the other was doing and copied or modified their design to try and keep one up.
This model was a joy to build. I think the maker is Kel, and it is 1/300 scale. It is beautifully printed, although I wish they had printed the deck a more realistic colour. Also I would have preferred everything between the deck and the flying bridge to have been white, but never mind. I used all of the pieces provided, except for the lifeboat davits at the stern. For some of the types I was able to delaminate the cardboard to make it easier to roll. The instructions were just a drawing with numbers, and not every part was indicated, so there was a bit of head scratching and referring to the pictures on the internet, but more usefully other models of the Duilio. I like the pictures of the real thing, each model was different. I was not able to find a picture of this particular kit built.
There are several pictures of the Duilio on the internet, and it is slightly different in each one. It seems it was a work in progress for much of its life. This model represents it as newly finished.

[Tim Crowe]

Great looking model

Tim

[Don Boose]

Nice work on this historic warship.

Don

[shipbuild]

Beautiful work on interesting subject

[AgaPablo]

Very nice build, everything fits precisely and cleanly.
KEL models are cheap but very rewarding; but I agree, the greenish colour in the deck is a bit weird..

[Michael Mash]

Nice work with your Duilio Robert.
This ship fills in some of the gaps between the monitors and the battleships.
It shows the race to add more turrets and more guns was underway.
Mike

[darter]

Any model ship is good, but even more so when build as well as yours.

I like the deck colour personally.

Please don't tell me that the forward stack is angled to allow a projectile to pass either side.
If so I hope they had a fail safe system of indexing.
Nah, probably just lined up two chalk marks.

Nice work Robert.

Clive.

[Robert Woolley]

Thank you Tim, Don, Shipbuild, AgaPablo, Mike and Colin for your interest.
In response to Colin's thoughts, I wasn't able to find the reason for the off-set front funnel. Its position would allow both guns on the starboard turret and the outboard gun on the port turret to fire forward at the same time. I don't know if they ever did this in practice. The HMS Inflexible was similar in layout, but with all the superstructure on the centre line. It could fire one gun on each side forward, but it was found to cause significant blast damage. The Inflexible got to fire its guns in action, firing 88 shells. It took a couple of hits, but suffered more damage from the blast of its own guns to its boats and flying deck.
The turrets on the Duilio had fixed points for aiming. I'm not sure how they fine tuned the aim. On my model and in early pictures the boats are mounted on the turrets. They were later moved to the back. I suspect they were damaged from the blast of the guns early on.
This was really a golden age of experimentation and engineering, and although they got a lot wrong, the Duilio's designer, Benedetto Brin and his peers layed the groundwork for all the battleships that followed.

[Pat_craft]

Really nice model !

[southwestforests]

Interesting time in Naval history. and for some reason I can't pin words on, the look of these things is quite appealing.