The Vermont watchman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1883-1911, 1894-01-10
The Model of a Ship.

great sh1p-a modern wonder of the
sea like the Paris or the Camperdown
is built as a woman makes dress or
q tailor cuts out suit of clothes2 That
Is the fact. Ships nowadays are built
from patterns, and those patterns do not
greatly differ in appearance or in fact
from those which enable American wo-
men to copy the fashion in dress. To
be sure, a tailor's and dressmaker's pat
terms are made of paper and are laid
upon cloth or dress goods, while a ship
builders patterns are Of wood, and steel
and iron are made to follow them. That
is perhaps the greatest difference be-
tween the methods of high grade tailor
ing and high grade shipbuilding, so far
as their first steps go.
The English have only lately begun
to value the model as the basis Of ship
building. A famous American ship
builder says that the model of the yacht
America was the first model he ever
saw in England. That accounts for thel
absence of beauty in English ships, !
which even TO this day possess varying
degrees of ugliness, but no beauty. For,
though they make models today, the
mere making of them does not suffice.
The art and appreciation of model max
ing must be instructive.
The French and Spanish from the
earliest times made beautiful ships and
models, and when one of these ships
fell into the hands of the English they
adopted and used her if possible, or if
she was too much damaged they took
her apart, piece by piece, and built
new ship like her by copying the exact
shape of each part of her in new mate
rial. Curiously enough, we Americans
have always made beautiful ships-well
proportional, artistic in every line,
while satisfactory in an equal degree
for all practical purposes.
A model is made in way that seems
queer to the average layman, who doubt
less suspected that it was whitfield into
shape out of block of wood, as we boys
used to whlttle our blocks at the age
when all of us were shipbuilders It
is not done so. After an order has been
received for certain kind of ship the
plans of it are drawn upon paper. Mr..
Lewis Nixon, the famous constructor
for the Cramps, tells me that very early
in the process he ma a picture of the
ship as he wants it to look, but though
he does so others may not consider it
essential.
At all events. apart from any draw
ing, the needed dimensions and lines are
developed upon paper, and then the
model is made, and the president of the
company begins to take very active in
terest in the work. The model is made
in the shape of BLOCK, formed of
number of pieces of wood glued togeth-
er. These pieces represent the different
curves of one side of the ship, from the
keel to the gunwale-the different wa
ter lines is how the builders express it.
To understand this the reader must i'm
agine a ship made of solid wood. I'm
agine that cut in half lengthwise, and
then imagine one half laid on its side
and cut into slices.
The pen and ink calculations and
plans produce the shape of the ship, and
from these it is possible to obtain the
outline and dimensions of every slice or
plane between the bottom and the top.
Each plane is measured and drawn in
outline on a board, and the outline is
denied or cut in the board with sharp
tool. All the boards or pieces of wood
are then glued together, and simple
looking block is made-a block that
shows nothing of its true nature except
that the top of it bears the craven out
line of the top deck or gunwale line of
ship. Out of that simple square block
will come the egg which is to hatch
the splendid ship that is to be.
That block, made up of Slices each
with its dented outline of different
plane of the ship, is now cut away,
much as we boys used to cut our block,
but with this difference: Each board is
cut exactly to the dented or craven
line upon its surface. The shape the
block will have when all the superfu
GUS wood is cut away will be the model
of the ship that was designed by the en-
gineer on paper to fill the requirements
of the customers order, but will that
model stand? Will the master builder
be satisfied with its lines?
Will it do to be enlarged in steel and
sent around the world as an example of
what the Cramps consider the most
beautiful and artistic and useful shape
such ship should have? No. Such
first model next to never suits the mod
eler, who in this case is Mr.. Charles II.
Cramp He hacks into it with fervor.
He tapers the bow. He digs away the
stern. He shaves the whole model with
the nice and dainty touches of sculp
tor at work upon a statue on which is
to rest his boast that he is true artist.
The fate of the wooden block alters
the figures of the engineers plans. Per-
haps the alteration is such that new
drawings and new model follow.
Thus, by borrowing and lending, the
two soon agree, and upon the two-the
model and the plans-the ship will he
built. Sometimes a model is on the
scale of a quarter of an inch to each
foot of the ship, but the scale differs
with the different builders.-Harper's
Weekly.