Free Ship Plan: Gokstad Viking Longboat

Plan of Gokstad Viking Longship from Ancient and Modern Ships

For generations, the sight of a Viking longship sail on the horizon sent chills of fear down the spines of Medieval Europeans. However, Viking longships were used by Scandinavian mariners for everything from commerce to exploration in addition to warfare. Vikings used them to discover new lands to settle in Iceland and Greenland, and it appears they reached the shores of North America hundreds of years before Christopher Columbus.

Our Viking longship plan comes from Ancient and Modern Ships by Sir George Charles Vincent Holmes, published in 1906. Holmes Took from Transactions of the Institution of Naval Architects, Vol. xxii, from a paper by noted naval architect Colin Archer. This particular smaller Viking longship was discovered in 1880 in a grave at Gokstad near Sandefjord at the entrance of the Fjord of Christiana. Built entirely of oak, she was 77 ft. 11 inches in length, extreme breadth 16 ft. 7 inches, depth from top of keel to gunwale 5 ft 9 inches.

Free Ship Plan: 77-foot North River Schooner

Another interesting free ship plan from Wooden Ship Building by Charles Desmond is the North River Schooner.  The plans are a little rough, as the pages are yellowed and the ink faded, but the missing bulwark lines can be recreated using a coffee stir as a batten. Hold it on edge and bend it to match the existing lines on either side of the missing portion. The wood will give you an accurate curve to trace with a pencil to fill in where the lines are too faint to see.

Sail Plan for a 77 foot North River Schooner

Section, Sheer, and Waterline Plans of North River Schooner

This 77-footer is typical of the shoal draft centerboard sailboats used on the Hudson River to haul bulk cargo in the  19th Century. When it was extended, the centerboard acted as a keel, giving the boat stability when tacking to windward, keeping it from "crabbing" - moving sideways rather than forward. When retracted, it allowed the boat to get into shallow waters common along the river, or even be beached for unloading where a harbor wharf wasn't available.

From The Sloops of the Hudson, by By William E. Verplanck and Moses W. Collyer (The Knickerbocker Press 1908):

 The North River schooner was built on somewhat the same plan as the sloop, having a center board, and her bowsprit carried out almost horizontal, and one head-sail, the single jib, attached to a jib-boom, as with the sloop.* (A few of the later schooners carried a flying-jib.---W.E.V.)  She carried not foretopmast. The skippers contented themselves with a maintopsail only and set it like the sloop’s. The foresail was of good size compared with the mainsail and not a mere “ribbon” such as the racing schooner yacht now carries.  The quarter-deck was replaced in the later schooners by a trunk cabin, lighted from the side and end, affording smaller and less pleasant accommodations than those below the quarter-decks of the old packet sloops with their large windows for light and air at the stern.

The schooners were not as good in windward work as the sloop, but with a fair or beam wind they were faster.  The rig, however, soon commended itself for the sloop with her long boom, tall mast, and heavy mainsail was difficult to handle at all times and especially in a blow and required a crew of six men to the schooner’s four. The first of the schooners were converted sloops. From which many of the larger ones were changes to save expense of operation. Late, about 1865 there was built  a new type of schooner for the Hudson which though rigged the same was a wider and shallower boat thus giving her greater carrying capacity and permitting all the cargo to be placed on deck for expedition in loading and unloading. She was quite sharp forward, which—with other good points in her model—made her good sailer.

Free Ship Plan 19th Century Steam Fishing Trawler

Steam-powered 19th Century fishing trawler designed by W.E. Redway

These plans, from the University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, are of a late 19th Century steam-powered auxiliary fishing trawler of about 80 feet in length, designed by W.E. Redway.

Deck and inboard profile view of 19th Century Great Lakes
steam-powered fishing trawler designed by W.E. Redway

W. E. Redway was a Great Lakes shipbuilder in the late 1800s. 

Born in England, his father was also a shipbuilder. Redway served an apprenticeship in the Chatam dock yard in England, followed by positions in various shipyards "on the northeast coast of England and on the (River) Clyde," according to an 1897 profile in The Globe newspaper in Toronto. The River Clyde, flowing through Scotland's industrial city of Glasgow, was a major shipbuilding center during the Industrial Revolution.

Redway moved to Toronto, Canada in 1886.

Body, Sheer, and waterline plans of 19th Century Great Lakes
steam-powered fishing trawler designed by W.E. Redway

According to The Globe newspaper profile, Redway "up to June 1897, planned and constructed eleven steam vessels. These were the Imperial, the Mayflower, the Primrose, the Garden City, the Mascotte, the Mistassini, the Medora and others. He also framed the Gooderham yachts Cleopatra and Oriole. Hearing of some of his good work, the managers of the Union shipyards at Buffalo sent for Mr. Redway, and he was there second in charge of the building of the steamer Ramapo, being occupied for six months of the year of 1895 at that work."

New Illustrations in Shipbuilding Terms pages

We've been adding illustrations from vintage shipbuilding books to our Glossary of Shipbuilding Terms pages. Check them out:

Types of Rabbets, illustration fromThe Elements of Wood Ship Construction by William H. Curtis

Ship Plan of an Early British Steamship

Browsing through an old out-of-copyright book The Theory and Design of British Shipbuilding, I found this ship plan for an early British "Screw Steamer," a propeller-driven steamship (as opposed to paddle wheel).

While there is no superstructure detail, this would make a good freelance cargo ship project with deck details pulled from google image searches of early 20th Century British steamships.  This vessel is 320 feet long with a beam of 45 feet and a molded depth of 23 feet.

Clicking on the reduced size image here will bring up the original size document. Just right click and choose "save image as" to download this free ship plan.

320-foot early 20th Century British steamship hull

Plans for a U.S. Coast Guard Cutter

By request, here are free ship plans for a World War II era ex-Navy 133-foot United States Coast Guard Cutter.

Coast Guard Cutter White Sumac

 In addition to the plans presented here, we also have a number of detail plans, including one showing the difference between when the vessel was commissioned in the U.S. Navy and its service as a Coast Guard Cutter.

The U.S. Coast Guard cutter White Sumac was originally constructed as a yard lighter (YF416) for the United States Navy in 1943. This class of vessel provided logistical support to naval operations during World War II. Following the War, the Coast Guard acquired eight of these vessels to use as buoy tenders. The vessel was documented as part of a National Park Service program that documents historically significant engineering, industrial, and maritime sites in the U.S. These plans are maintained by the Library of Congress.

The Model Shipwright offers these ship plans to members FREE as high-resoultion TIFF files, or, we can send you prints of the plans for $10 per 24" x 36" sheet, plus postage. For more information, use our Contact Page to let us know of your interest.

U.S. Coast Guard Cutter White Sumac Deck Plan

U.S. Coast Guard Cutter White Sumac Sections Plan

U.S. Coast Guard Cutter White Sumac Body Plan

U.S. Coast Guard Cutter White Sumac Shell Plating Plan

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.