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Ok, I'm back with my next project, a scratch built 1:48th scale Flower class corvette, in wood and metal This will be a big model, over 4ft long and 9 inch beam. The case alone is probably my modelling allowance for the year! This is not a project for the faint hearted, the etching work will cost £100's. I estimate 18 months, but I could be wildly wrong. I may squeeze in some other small projects along the way, who knows? I have lots of ideas.... Still, I think I have one large model left in me, and what could be more perfect than a flower. Most importantly, I have a place to put it where it will fill the space and look impressive. The work on this project really started a couple of years ago with research and most importantly, deciding which flower and at what period? When you start to study the class, there are innumerable differences in type, period, duty colour scheme, armament etc that make choosing one extremely difficult. At this scale, every detail matters, each rivet etc. So, I needed a boat that had sufficient information to achieve the level of detail I like and the level of accuracy I aim for. I like the early short foc's'le vessels (really I like ships to be close to originally envisaged rather than later developments) but it has to have the radar so it will have to be post a refit, but not a long foc's'le refit. Getting quite specific now. I also need some very good quality pictures of the vessel at exact period and drawings, lots of drawings. Meeting all these criteria, I ended up with just one out of the nearly 300 built, HMS Alisma. Originally ordered for the French navy she was taken over after France fell and commissioning into the Royal Navy in early 1941 taking the pennant number K185. She survived the war, became a Greek tramp steamer and sunk in 1954, probably due to poor maintenance. The IWM collection has some outstanding pictures of her after her first 1943 refit with the radar and a type B bridge (more of flower bridge type later). Lambert prepared outline drawings of her at this stage (and the other two key stages) which I have and which are reproduced I various books. So, a lot of my criteria are met. I hope this will not be just another flower build. The plan is a wood planked hull, with copper bulwarks, deck and deck houses. The hull will be plated in aluminium with as close as I can get to the right rivet detail and plating joints (flowers used both butt and lap joints depending on position). I have, so far, accumulated nearly 400 relevant files, that will only go up as the build progresses. Most importantly, over 60 pictures of areas of the deck, without even going close to Sackville... A couple of moths ago, I visited the Brass Foundry here in London and viewed their drawings of Alisma and Abelia, her sister ship (see @robgizlu excellent model HMS Abelia). I photographed the docking plan and Abelia's GA and purchased the rigging plan for Alisma. This latter is an incredible drawing, showing each and every rope and its type and size, gold dust... I have it on my plan wall @ 1:48th scale, the size is a little daunting and its only a waterline drawing. I've purchased all the normal reference books. Note, don't buy Man o' war 7 and Ensign 3, they are the same book, very naughty Detail from the rigging plan, what a wonderful resource. However, the IWM collection only contains "as-build" drawings, not post-refit. I may reach out to the Harland and Wolf archivist to see if they can help and the bridge details I need are in outline only and give rise to many questions. I will have to do my own drawings of the type b bridge a non IWM copyright picture of the post-refit vessel I intend to build, April 1943 This is going to be great.... The lines were taken from the anatomy of the ship for Agassiz, however, they needed modifying for the rounded stern, Agassiz had the squarish stern profile while Alisma has a more curving stern. The lines were then turned into frames and a keel profile. The construction will used my normal deckhouse box concept, where the deckhouse assembly is build separately and fits into a box shaped hollow in the hull. The planking will use 1.8 mm thick Obechi timber which sands so nicely, a mix of 10 mm and 6 mm wide planks, lots of them. This boat could easily be made into a working model, but I no longer do that. Here is the frame drawing, after around 100 hours of drawing and working out how to build it, so many check and cross checks. There are 22 frames, set at 4 frame centres and 8 in the centre section where it is relatively parallel The xtool has a capacity of 450 mm so the keel and deckhouse floor are in multiple pieces that lock together. Here they are all cut out, this is what a hull kit would look like when unboxing Let the fun begin Cheers Steve

I apply Rule #3. In the year one I began to make this model. The old model of Dragon requires realization of repair.