Free Ship Plans U.S.S. Bolster

Salvage Vessel U.S.S. Bolster

The Last Remaining World War II Era Auxiliary Ship of Her Class

Ocean-going Tug Served 49 years in the U.S. Navy

U.S.S. Bolster sister ship Opportune (ARS-41), circa 1945

U.S.S. Bolster (ARS-38), now part of the Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet located in Solano County, California, is the last surviving member of her World War II era auxiliary ship class.

Built by Basalt Rock Company, Napa, California, U.S.S. Bolster's keel was laid on 20 July 1944. She was launched 23 December 1944 and commissioned 1 May 1945. Presently owned by the U.S. Maritime Administration, U.S.S. Bolster is a member of the inactive National Defense Reserve Fleet.

Our Free Ship Plans of U.S.S. Bolster include profile, deck, section, lines, and detail plans.

Free Ship Plans Brigantine Schooner Carlo

Free Ship Plans of Brigantine Schooner Carlo

Italian Cargo Vessel Built 1909

Brigantine Schooner Carlo

Built at the end of the age of sail, and the dawn of the 20th Century, our Free Ship Plans of the Brigantine Schooner Carlo demonstrate the pinnacle of sail design as naval architects attempted to use modern hull designs and materials with simplified rigs that needed fewer sailors to handle.
Even though the Age of Steam was upon them, many of these last sailing ships earned a living well into the first half of the 20th century.

Free Ship Plans of Fletcher-class World War II Destroyer USS Capps

Fletcher-class Destroyer U.S.S. Capps

Saw World War II Service in Atlantic and Pacific Theaters

Then Went on to Long Career in Spanish Navy as Lepanto

Fletcher-class destroyer USS Caps during service for Spain as Lepanto

U.S. Navy Fletcher-class destroyer U.S.S. Capps (DD-550), built by Gulf Shipbuilding Corp. in Chickasaw, Alabama, was launched in May 1942 and commissioned in June 1943.
A member of the Fletcher class, the largest class of destroyers built during World War II, she served in a number of operations in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters of operation during World War II including raids on German ports, escort duty, and the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
After being decommissioned by the U.S. Navy, she was transferred to the Spanish Navy, where she served until 1985 as Lepanto.
Our USS Capps Plans Page features plans of each of her decks, inboard and outboard profiles, sections, and body plans perfect for model ship construction.

Plates from Pâris Souvenirs de Marine Perfect Holiday Gift

Souvenirs de Marine by François-Edmond Pâris

One of Most Sought-after Source Books for Model Ship Builders and maritime history enthusiasts alike

Selected Plates from Souvenirs de Marine brings together 130 ship plans from Pâris's historic work.

Selected Plates from Souvenirs de Marine

Vice-Admiral François-Edmond Pâris was a French naval officer who is well known in his home country for his significant contributions to naval engineering during the transition from sail to steam and his leadership of the Musée national de la Marine, but now is mainly remembered outside of France for his detailed books on the subject of naval architecture.
Ship model builders and maritime history enthusiasts alike are constantly on the lookout for copies of his books, which can range into the thousands of dollars for vintage editions.
However, we have brought together Selected plates from Souvenirs de Marine, plates from "Souvenirs de Marine. Collection de plans ou dessins de navires et de bateaux anciens ou modernes existants ou disparus avec les éléments numériques nécessaores à leur construction" (A Record of Navy:  Collection of plans or drawings of vessels and of boats ancient or modern, existing or disappeared, with the numerical elements necessary for their construction.) for just $9.99 on Amazon.
Our edition features more than 90 plates from the first two volumes of this set, and feature more than 130 ship plans from vessels ranging from ancient triremes to late 19th Century warships. Vessels from across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the U.S. are included.  The plates are indexed by plate number, type of vessel, name of vessel, and the country region of the vessel.
We've also included a biography of Vice-Admiral François-Edmond Pâris and a bibliography of his works, and an article "How to Read a Ship Plan" that explains how the lines on a two-dimensional plan picture the shape of a three-dimensional ship.
Selected Plates from Souvenirs de Marine is a sure hit with the model ship builder or maritime history enthusiast on your holiday gift list!

Full-size Patterns to Scratchbuild a Revenue Cutter

Downloadable Patterns for 19th Century Revenue Cutter
And Instructions on Creating a Solid Hull Ship Model

19th Century Revenue Cutter

On our page Creating a Solid Hull Ship Model we have full size patterns for a 1/72 scale model of the 51 Ton revenue cutter illustrated in Howard I. Chapelle’s The History of American Sailing Ships.
We offer illustrated step-by-step instructions for using the patterns to cut the rough hull from a single block of basswood.
Finished model will be about 16 inches in length, and is a great starter project for scratch-built ship modeling.

Free Ship Plans Victory Ship U.S.S. Gage

U.S.S. Gage is the last of

more than 100 Attack Transports

created from the Victory Ship class

Victory Ship U.S.S. Gage

Toward of World War II, military planners requested that the U.S. Maritime Commission construct a new class of attack transport ships.Converting the recently designed Victory class ships into a troop transport, designers created the Haskell class.
Of 414 Victory ships built during the war, 117 were configured as attack transports. The U.S.S. Gage is the only remaining ship afloat in its original configuration.
We have her plans on our Victory Ship U.S.S. Gage page.

Free Ship Plan: Algerian Xebec Two-fer

Xebec with lateen sails

Not much put more fear in the heart of a Mediterranean seafarer than the triangular sails of a Barbary corsair appearing on the horizon.
The favorite vessel of these North African pirates was the xebec, a long, narrow ship descended from the rowed galleys of the ancient world. Able to sail close to the wind with its lateen sails - or to use oars if the wind failed - and able to navigate shoal waters due to its shallow draft, the xebec was the perfect ship for a pirate. It could catch most merchant vessels, and run away from warships that could reduce its lightly-built hull to splinters with a single broadside.
We found in the French Ministry of Defense archives a highly-detailed plan of the Algerian xebec captured in 1830 and placed in service by the French Navy as Le Boberach. She was used mainly as a dispatch ship, where she had a well-documented, albeit fairly uneventful career.

Algerian xebec Le Boberach, captured by the French in 1830

Lack of exciting engagements aside, she still has the exotic lines that would make an eye-catching model for the enterprising modelshipwright looking for something beyond the typical bathtub-hulled square rigger. Thanks to the French proclivity for record keeping, we also have a great deal of information about her service, too.
As an extra treat, we threw in the plans of an 18th Century Algerian xebec documented in Fredrik Henrik af Chapman’s Architectura Navalis Mercatoria.

Free Ship Plan: Sultan's Caique

Ottoman Sultan's Caique

Haven't had much time to research this oar-powered Ottoman imperial vessel, but from Wikipedia, we get:

 ... imperial caïques used by the Ottoman sultans and his suite for ceremonial and daily excursion purposes. The size and grandeur of this type, adorned with imperial armorials and floral scrolls, was a reflection of his royal power. Another feature of imperial caiques was the deck pavilion, a partition or a small kiosk for the Sultan. By reason of this feature they were also called the pavilion caïques.

Free Ship Plan: New York Pilot Schooner

New York Pilot Schooner lines plan from Desmond's Wooden Ship Building

This New York Pilot Schooner is another plan from Desmond's Wooden Ship Building. These boats share a lot in common with the Baltimore Clipper Schooner in hull shape. Especially in the "drag" of the keel: The ship sits much deeper at the stern than at the bow. One way in which they differ from their ancestor is the bow is much more plumb. Baltimore Clippers tended to have the outward curving bow of a cutter.

This would work up into a nice ship model. Because of the fairly small size of the prototype New York Pilot Boats, model ships can be built to a fairly large scale without resulting in a model too big for display in the average home.

The fore-aft rig of the schooner also simplifies the task of rigging this model ship, but still provides a very salty-looking result. Scratch-building a model of this ship is a good way to develop model shipbuilding skills needed for a larger project, such as a tea clipper of ship of the line, and allows the model builder to see results much more quickly.

Free Ship Plan: Ancient Trireme

While looking through the French Atlas of Marine Engineering I stumbled across this really cool plan for a trireme, the ancient rowed battleships of Greek and Roman empires. This would make a really cool ship model with a tiny bronze ram at the bow and a gazillion oars protruding from the sides.

Trireme oar-powered battleship of the ancient Mediterranean Sea

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.

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