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1:48 scale Fairmile B


Steve D

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I am a new member today after a mate pointed out your ML 211. 

I am building ML167 in 1:20 scale. I know the scale is odd but it will be full rc with a twist. (4 ft long)  My Grandfather served on ML167 and left a memoir with some good info but the 'Cinderella of the Fleet' book and drawings therein is the key and virtually only reliable source I have found for dimensions. However I have scraped up a few dozen B&W photos, mostly from my grandfather's album. 

The twist is that I am also modelling the INSIDE by making the deck removable to reveal the contents of the forecastle and head, the magazine, engine room complete with the 2 main and aux engines, the galley, wardroom and finally the officer quarters.   I have some photos or images of all these areas but of course they are incomplete, but enough to guess the rest.  Further images to help complete the work wold be wonderful.

 

The 2 brushless motors (with cooling fans)  are inside the 2 dummy engines while  battery, esc's, radio gear and control for cooling fans are all in the midships fuel and water tank area.  This will be better organised once I have managed sea trials but there is too much 'wiring' at present. I have tested in on water an it will sail OK.

 

What I need next is information about the Hotchkiss 3lb quickfire high angle gun. My photos of it show that it is much more complex than the more typical mounting shown on your gun. I can see that at least a few boats have this gun but I can find no other information to help with construction.

 

I was so excited, I rushed in to post this but now need to figure out how to upload photos as well and will do that next. 

 

 

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Making models is easy compared to uploading photos.

I have looked at One Drive and Dropbox as options but neither worked.

I tried the process outlined in the FAQ (upload photos - available services) for One Drive and it failed on the first instruction to select the photo!

Both modelling and uploading will be limited by being 73  (with bad eyes and failing hands) but I manage most other stuff on the screen here.

I will keep trying but it may take a while.  Mind you it may be a bit of an anticlimax as my phone photos leave a lot to be desired compared to most of the great pics on the site!   : ((

I still want to know about the Hotchkiss gun if you have any info!   

Standby.

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HI Bill

 

Good luck with your model, the nly source I had was the one you are using, the drawing is very usable and accurate, if a little small.  I think  it will make a great working boat...

 

Building a 3pdr Hotchkiss at 1:20th scale is a model project in its own right, almost large enough to work...I have a ton of pictures of the hotchkiss and of course there are John Lambert's excellent drawings to use.  I'm interested in the added complexity you refer to, please send me that picture so I can understand and help.  For pictures, I use my fickr account and just copy/paste the links into the post, quite simple really

 

You may have all these pictures, but in case not, here are a few of the ones I found when building the model (the first not mounting a hotchkiss, think that's a vickers gun

 

10208050114_027758d268_o

 

7278775808_c539e069d1_o

 

7278695550_6da84955b2_o

 

7278695162_e887fa0b35_o

 

166_001

 

13_pounder_gun_lg

 

9a_3-lg

 

I'll post some more later

 

Cheers

 

Steve

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These are the interior shots I have

 

Bridge

 

WW1Memoir_MLp31L-lg

 

Engines

 

SAE_1917_2-lg

 

??

 

p05_n7_lg

 

Ratings mess deck?

 

p05_n4_lg

 

Love this one, bread and jam for tea...

 

p05_n1_lg

 

Officers cabin

 

officers_cabin-lg

 

Engine room

 

engine_room-lg

 

Looking back through my picture archive (I was quite  a few years ago...) I see the gun you are referring to

 

It's in a high angle mounting with a top mounted recoil cylinder (not side mounted...)

 

WW1Memoir-MLp03L

 

WW1Memoir_MLp23L-lg

 

I think this is a 3pdr Vickers not a Hotchkiss.  Friedman's Naval Weapons of WW1 says the Vickers were also supplied with a high angle mounting but has no illustrations unfortunately.  This is the only picture I can find (poor quality) which certainly has a similar mounting but is lacking the prominent recoil cylinder..

 

QF3pounderVickersMkI1918

 

I also found this weird gun mounted on an ML, it says its a Hotchkiss, but the mounting is very odd indeed.  Could be an attempt to make the Hotchkiss high angle

 

217971471_Gun-enhanced.jpg.44ce310a1697c9dd94186914e8514578

 

Sorry I could not be more definitive, perhaps others have more idea....

 

Cheers

 

Steve

 

 

 

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Thanks a lot Steve,   

The first boat is unusual because it has no ID number on the stern!

I have all the internal shots except the last of the engine room which I think is a postwar conversion because they have removed the central companionway and moved the switchboard to the middle. 

I have modeled virtually everything you can see in all the photos (drawers work and there are racks in the galley oven etc) but my accuracy of detail is more 'close-up standoff' than high precision.   

The biggest problem is trying to decide what is out of sight in the photos. eg the outboard sides of the engines have complex external valve gear but no photos but luckily I found a manual for the engines from Standard Motor company. Another example is the starboard interior of the wheelhouse where I suspect there is a rack of signal flags.  Another problem is the choice of colours although my grandfather referred to some skippers managing to obtain white paint to make their boats smarter than the others so maybe colour can be a little variable. 

 

The Hotchkiss gun comes in lots of variants but the one I need is the last photo with the posed sailor and caption.  That photo is from my grandfather's boat and it from his photo album! I think I can represent it all but to make it convincing I need to understand the parts on the left side of the gun (aiming and firing apparatus) and what might be on the other side as the support plates either side are quite wide apart (set by the mounting structure) and yet there is no sign of recoil cylinders commonly seen on other versions.

 

I will try to set up a Flickr account tomorrow so more standing by!

 

Bill

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Haha!    I think I mentioned my failing eyes!  

I have finally got a selection of model and source photos on Flickr and will try to load them here.

You will see that photography on my battered phone is not a strong skill - in fact I am rubbish and I don't know anyone with the skill and gear so this will have to do.

As I said before my goal is to represent the boat as accurately as I can (old eyes and fingers) so that primarily my family but any interest person can see what these boats did and how the crew had to struggle to make it happen.

A 6 day sortie onto the Irish Sea in winter, staying close to to a dangerous coast and spending a lot of time drifting, rocking, rolling over and over was a horrible experience. My grandfather liked being in the ill-ventilated engine room which was always full of exhaust fumes!  It was amazing he made it to 80!

I have been on this project for 5 years and suspect I have another 2 years to go before I have completed all the details I would like to see!

One aspect of rc modelling is that everything in the boat must be able to be lifted out to effect repairs!

Anyway here are the pics of my current project.

    

SCANNED PLANS

 

View model from Bow

 

I will try to do the rest by URL as I suspect embedding is not preferred by administrators!

This is a problem Houston.   When I put the short version of the URL from Flickr (which works when embedding as above) into the box on the right here, the box turns pink and will not do anything!

In the FAQ's there is a note I should delete everything before the 2nd https and after the .jpg.  There is no .jpg so I am stranded!

Any golden advice as a Flickr user?

 

Bill

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 This is what happens if I use the BBCode setting in Flickr and then trim off everything before the 2nd htpps!

 

I don't know if there is a difference for the site between pasting the URL into the text as I did above or using the 'Insert image from URL' function as I did here.

It is a pity it does not bring across the label and text with the photo but I will add it here.

 

spacer.png

Port aft end of the engine room showing the aux engine (power, compressed ait bilge and fire pumping) .Also the telegraph, water manifold, engine silencer and he port engine. I am annoyed I did not see the floor plates are displaced to starboard but you get the idea.

 

spacer.png

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

General view of the engine room with the compressed starting air cylinders on the right.  I have the brushless motors and cooling fans in the crank cases and the geometry resulted in a reduction of the space between the engines. Grrr.   The boxes bottom left are the batteries.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

spacer.pngView from the bow.   The gum is a paper mock up as I try to figure how it works.

The frame on the right will support the deck when it is removed to view the interior.

There are drawers in the charthouse with navigation instruments and later on, with charts.  The anchor is wrong for ML167. I have a photo with an admiralty pattern anchor which I have just made. I have to also make a thinner and tighter rope for the anchor and that one is too thick.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

spacer.png

View from aft. The boat is made of pressed metal (ref my grandfather memoir) so the hull mus be thin. I used 2 layers of tissue paper and CNA glue and the result is great although it was a messy task. 

What colour should WW1 cordage be?  Here I have used black but it does not look right and photos suggest a lighter colour.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

spacer.png

The compass binnacle has a real working compass and light! The non-scale screws are required for practical operation/maintenance - Don't look at them!  : ))

Photos show the port side interior but I am still looking for starboard side detail. I do not know for sure if they carried a full set of signal flags but I think they must have.  Later boats like yours have them on the starboard side.  The signal lamp on ML167 seems to be on the top centre of the roof but there is no sign of internal operation. It would be a pain to operatspacer.pnge but I stayed with the photo.

 

RIGHT is the Forecastle and magazine.  The detail for this area is from some pencil sketches done by an ML skipper. Note there was no place for a fixed ladder down from the hatch so I assumed it would swing up to the deckhead!

There is substantial structure to support the gun which I had to split at those 2 white pads but you can see the brackets and 2of the 4 support columns

6-8 men in here for 6 days of winter seas does not bear thinking about!

 

 

 

 

spacer.png

 

 

 

This is one of tI havehe 2 sketches of the forecastle that were so useful.

 

 

 

I have photos of the galley,wardroom and Officer digs as well but it is dinner time!  I hope this has not broken any photo rules here.

 

Bill

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I know this site is mainly for static models and high detail but I thought there may be members who knew about the details I seek like the gun, the colour of ropes and the like.

 

Bill

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It's a very cool model Bill, you should be very proud, I love the engine room, outstanding work.  Don't waste it in the tail end of my thread, you should start your own so others will get a chance to see your work

 

My first fully scratch built model was HMS Medea, a WW1 M class destroyer that my grandfather served in from 1915 to 1919, so I know how personal these things are.  That one also took me 4 years to complete.  When I get the current house refurbishment complete, I'll be able to get it out of storage and post some pictures on an RFI thread

 

Cheers

 

Steve

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Thank you for your kind comments.

So my own thread is my next challenge!   I have spent 2 days getting stuff on this site so far. 

My intuition is obviously digitally incompatible with these complex sites so I have to brute force my way in but it is a bit clearer now.

Hopefully it will catch the attention ofWW1 small boat naval specialists who can answer my many questions as I go along.

Can you see my Flickr account as I will only use it for boats and it is all public.  I have put up a video of my other signature boat which is a bit different as well.

 

Bill

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OK guys - I have been crawling all over this site and have yet to find HOW TO START MY OWN THREAD!

I must be a bit dim but the magic door eludes me.

Any suggestions - Clarity of instruction is valued!

Thanks in anticipation.

 

Bill

 

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OK guys - Advice taken and finally have posted a thread under  'WW1 Coastal Patrol Boats – ML167' in  'Work in Progress - Maritime'.

Now I lie in wait for someone who knows a lot about the details I seek!

Thanks for your help.  Keep up your good work.

Bill

 

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