What Are You Looking For?

Model ship building is more than a hobby, it's a quest for knowledge.

Model ship builders are always researching; a current project or a future project, there is always research to be done.

And, there are innumerable websites with information for model ship builders.  But "Search Engine Optimization," the skill of making a website rank high on internet search results, often leads to search results where sites that have the least amount of USEABLE ship modeling information (but whose creators know what Google is looking for) show up with the highest rank.

The converse is also, unfortunately, true: many of the best ship model building resources are obscure sites created for academics that already know of them, that are not optimized for internet, and are hard to find.

Search Engine Optimization has created a situation where the greatest trove of information in the known universe is like a superhighway so littered by billboards a user can't see the sign to the exit they need.

That's why we started The Model Shipwright. We are ship modelers who have already spent countless hours and hours pouring through low-ranking web pages looking for high-quality sources of ship plans, maritime history and other info for our shipbuilding projects. Now we want to bring those public-domain resources together in a place that's easy for model ship builders to find.

But, the public domain sources are so vast we can't post them all. We need to know what you want most. Use our Contact Page to give us your "wish list" of ship modeling information. 

Keep in mind we don't want to break copyright law, so we can't post plans from kits by existing manufacturers, or from recently-published books. It's also hard to find ship plans for a specific vessel. It's often much easier to find data on a ship type, along with information on how a specific ship differed from its sister ships.

Our own Search Engine Optimization skills can make this site easy to find, but only our members can make it useful. Let us help you find what you're looking for!

Free Downloadable Ship Plan

The Model Shipwright.com is offering a free downloadable ship plan for the 8,600 ton 1928 French cargo ship Le Mekong.

We're offering a number of plan sheets:

The Profile and Deck Plan, an 83" x 28.5" (size at 200 dpi) sheet showing the details of the ship's decks, superstructure, and deck hardware.

The Lines Plan a 123" x 27.5" (size at 200 dpi) sheet showing the sheer, body, and buttocks plans that are imperative for correctly shaping a model ship hull.

Take the TIFF files you download to a print shop that has a oversize-print capability, or you can downsize them in a photo editing program to print out at home. The lines plan is at 1/50 scale, you can easily scale it down to 1/100 and still have a sizable model.

If you'd like a full 15-sheet group of plans already printed, let us know through the contact page, and we'll send a price quote to ship them to you.

Free Book Download!

There's nothing like going back to the source material to learn about a subject, and TheModelShipwright.com is offering a free PDF download of The Elements of Wood Ship Construction, by William Henry Curtis, published in 1919 for the Education and Training Section of the Emergency Fleet Corporation. 

Click here to visitTheModelShipwright.com

"It is intended for the use of carpenters and others, who, though skilled in their work, lack the detail knowledge of ships necessary for the efficient performance of their work in the yard," according to the preface.

Beginning with Keels, stems and stern posts, the book moves through frames, inboard hull details, deck details, and explains planking, erections and joiner work with copious illustration.

When the U.S. entered World War I, the United States Shipping Board's Emergency Fleet Corporation realized the need for a quickly-built supply of cargo ships that could combat the Germans' uboat fleet predations on shipping by simply building them faster than they could sink them.

Illustration from The Elements
of Wood Ship Construction

With a large number of shipyards along the East Coast still building wooden boats, the EFC came up with a series of designs that could take advantage of the available technology to crank out wooden steamships. But there were not a sufficient number of trained shipwrights, so the EFC also developed a number of books to acclimate non-nautical carpenters, plumbers, and pipe-fitters to the specific needs of the shipbuilding industry.

The original books are long out of print, and usually can only be found in academic libraries, but Google and archive.org have digitized some of them so the knowledge they contain can still be available.  They are an invaluable resource to the model shipwright who wants to understand not only how prototype wooden ships were built, but why they were built that way.

Confused By All Those Lines on a Ship Plan?

Auxiliary Fishing Schooner Evelina M. Goulart, plan courtesy of The Historic American Engineering Record Maritime Recording Program, National Park Service, Delineated by Jairo Umana, 1999

Does this look like a spaghetti bowl of lines to you? Read our page How to Read a Ship Plan

"I Want to Build a Model Ship"

Sitting in a quaint seaside restaurant, you look up, and on a shelf above sits a beautiful, highly-detailed, fully-rigged model of a clipper ship, sails bent to an imaginary breeze as it rushes toward port, its cargo holds heavy with crates of tea from China. Your first thought is:

"I want to build a ship model just like that."

Then, you quickly think: "But I could never build a model ship that detailed."

Yes, you can.

And in this blog, I will show you how.

Ship modeling is a wonderful hobby to take your mind off the daily stresses, while at the same time exercising your mind by learning about the rich and varied history of maritime transportation.

Illustration from Chapelle's
History of American Sailing Ships

The best way to get started in ship modeling is to think about what you want to build. That three-masted clipper with a maze of rigging that piqued your interest is certain to make your mind race with possibilities, but it's also a very complicated project that will take an extraordinary amount of time to finish. It's probably a better idea to set your sights a little lower for your first project.

There are hundreds of types of ships, and thousands of variations of those types. There are a number of good books out there to help you sort through them. One of the best authors of these books (in regards to American sailing ships) is Howard Irving Chapelle.

A noted naval architect, Chapelle also served as curator of maritime history at the Smithsonian Institution. During the depression he worked on the Historic American Merchant Marine Survey, which documented the quickly disappearing U.S. merchant sailing fleet. Most of his books can be found used, or in libraries. The three most valuable at the beginning of your search are:

• American Small Sailing Craft ISBN 0393031438
• History of American Sailing Ships ISBN 0517023326
• History of the American Sailing Navy: The Ships and Their Development ISBN 0517004879

American Small Sailing Craft is mainly limited to boats of 40 feet or less (as one might infer from the title), and details the development of everything from rowboats to fairly large fishing vessels. The History of American Sailing Ships covers the development of the bigger ships not covered in the first volume, including an overview of naval vessels. History of the American Sailing Navy delves into much more detail of the development of naval vessels, and is probably only necessary if you decide after reading the first two that you MUST build a ship of war.

Chapelle's writing at first may seem dense with the unfamiliar arcana of wooden ships, but there is a secret to using these books as source material for model ship building: Start by just leafing through and looking at the illustrations! Put a bookmark at the illustration of each ship that piques your interest. Then, go back through and decide which you like the most. Once you have settled on a starting point, find where that ship is mentioned in the text. It should be within a page or two of the illustration. If all else fails, you can always resort to the index.

The great thing about Chapelle's writing is that you can pick any page of these books to start reading, and not be completely lost. You may find he references an type of boat from earlier in the book, but you can always go back to that one if you don't understand the comparison. Following this method, you will begin to develop an idea about what kind of ship model you would like to build, whether it's a Chesapeake Bay Skipjack, a Grand Banks fishing schooner, or a navy man-o-war. Just remember, your first model is not going to be your best, so you want to start with a project that's O.K. to learn on, and maybe make a few mistakes.

Once you have a pretty good idea what model ship you want to build, you can go online to see if it's available as a ship model kit, or if you would have tackle building from scratch. The good news is, there are a lot of different ship model kits out there to choose from. The bad news is, they can be pricey.

Next time: an overview of available ship model kits!