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Sail Ho!!!!!! Of the larboard bow


JRutman

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Excellent!  I can smell the tar and hear the canvas flapping!

 

I have the 1/96th Constitution buried in my stash...I have designs on doing the HMS President with it someday, but not yet....

 

Tim W.

   Cool!!!  But I would go with the USS United States as I believe it was the better built of the class.  But then again,I may have gotten those two mixed up,as I usually and frequently do.

Thanks for the kind words BTW,

J

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Thank you for that cool post Tony. It reminds me of why I love the UK.  Even if the Lionheart didn't have a pint at that establishment the fact that the place was around when Richard was King is astounding to me and thoroughly awesome.

J

J

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Cool!!!  But I would go with the USS United States as I believe it was the better built of the class.  But then again,I may have gotten those two mixed up,as I usually and frequently do.

 

Looking great!!!

 

There is a great deal of misinformation about the 44s out there. The President is often stated as having lower freeboard and being faster than the others due to lighter construction, but there is no documentary evidence to support this. She was certainly a good sailer, that cannot be denied, but how much was due to construction and how much was due to how her captains fitted her out and masted her is open to debate. Certainly, her lines as taken off by the Royal Navy after her capture show no great or obvious deviations from the Humphreys/Doughty plans, so many surmise that for whatever reason she was masted properly as per her plans, and not overmasted nor overgunned, like Constitution and United States and sailed as designed.

 

United States carried 42 pound carronades instead of the nominal 32 pounders, so she carried a great deal of extra top weight. She also supposedly carried a built up quarterdeck roundhouse, but no plans of it are known to exist. She doesn't seem to have been built any differently than the others, especially as her actual builder was Joshua Humphreys, the man who designed her. There's no great reason why her designer would have deviated from her plans. She was a slower sailer than the rest early in her career, to be sure, possibly as a result of her having a bent keel, reportedly, during a launching accident. However, in the 1840s when Herman Melville sailed aboard her, she won sailing race after sailing race, so whatever had affected her years earlier, had obviously been cured; a forty-plus year old heavy frigate was beating ships decades younger. 

 

I love the 44s, and wish the other six original frigates had been built to this design. The follow on ships, like USS Gurrierre and USS Java where essentially copies of the 1794 design with a few refinements, proving the basic truth of the design.

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Cool!!!  But I would go with the USS United States as I believe it was the better built of the class.  But then again,I may have gotten those two mixed up,as I usually and frequently do.

 

Looking great!!!

 

There is a great deal of misinformation about the 44s out there. The President is often stated as having lower freeboard and being faster than the others due to lighter construction, but there is no documentary evidence to support this. She was certainly a good sailer, that cannot be denied, but how much was due to construction and how much was due to how her captains fitted her out and masted her is open to debate. Certainly, her lines as taken off by the Royal Navy after her capture show no great or obvious deviations from the Humphreys/Doughty plans, so many surmise that for whatever reason she was masted properly as per her plans, and not overmasted nor overgunned, like Constitution and United States and sailed as designed.

 

United States carried 42 pound carronades instead of the nominal 32 pounders, so she carried a great deal of extra top weight. She also supposedly carried a built up quarterdeck roundhouse, but no plans of it are known to exist. She doesn't seem to have been built any differently than the others, especially as her actual builder was Joshua Humphreys, the man who designed her. There's no great reason why her designer would have deviated from her plans. She was a slower sailer than the rest early in her career, to be sure, possibly as a result of her having a bent keel, reportedly, during a launching accident. However, in the 1840s when Herman Melville sailed aboard her, she won sailing race after sailing race, so whatever had affected her years earlier, had obviously been cured; a forty-plus year old heavy frigate was beating ships decades younger. 

 

I love the 44s, and wish the other six original frigates had been built to this design. The follow on ships, like USS Gurrierre and USS Java where essentially copies of the 1794 design with a few refinements, proving the basic truth of the design.

   Yes!! You are correct of course. It has been a long time since I read my copy of the "Six Frigates". Great design and great ships,not always so great Captains. Over gunned and over masted as you say. We in the modern age usually don't know how much leeway and authority was given to the Captains when outfitting their ships.

  This topic is special to me as I live fairly close to the old Philadelphia Navy Yard.

J

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   Thanks Bob,

  I did all the colors on this model using a large set of drawings from the Smithsonian Museum. I don't remember how I got them. I think a fellow modeler in Fayetteville gave them to me..

  It gave interesting colors for the ships' boats,etc and yes,most of the time she had the ochre stripe,but not always!! Also,sometimes the gun stripe went all the way forward to the tip of her prow. It was at the whim of the Captain.

J

J

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