Hello everyone... this will be my first posts on a public forum with pics of projects.
A little history.. I am building the USS Hartford as for the family that owns the company I have a full time job with. It is a gift, and I have not told them I am doing this. The family are descendants of Admiral David Farragut, the first Admiral of the US Navy. He is known for the Battle of New Orleans, but most famous for the Battle of Mobile Bay, where the immortal line "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" was spoken.
I have decided for ease of scale and lets be honest a little shock and awe value for the size... Overall she will be 42" X 12 "X 27".
So.. I'll try to be brief...
One day a few years ago I got the idea of finding a copy of the blue prints for the Hartford as a gift, and this is where the story gets interesting... there is no real info to be found! I thought as the ship the first Admiral had commanded that like the USS Constitution it would be well documented. The ship was built in 1859, and sent to the Orient. Only when the US Civil war broke out was she recalled. I have much more history on the ship, but it would take a long time to cover all that and typing is not my strong point..The end goes like this though.. Unlike the USS Constitution, she no longer exists. After a complete restoration ordered by President Roosevelt, she was sunk in a hurricane in 1954, afterwords it was decided not to rebuild her, so the remains were towed to a shallow reef and burned. Horrible way for any ship to go...
So when I contacted the US Navy Historical society, I was surprised to find that for this ship's connection to history there were no real records on it. Same at the Naval Academy archives, the Smithsonian, and on and on. Through an internet search I found that Aurora, famous for its models of Frankenstein, the Mummy, etc, had also made a model of the Hartford in the 50's. So I of course went to Ebay, but could never find the model. I did however find someone selling "plans" of the ship. I bought these plans, and they were a copy of articles written by Capt E. Armitage McCann in 1934 for Popular Science Magazine, and were published from January-May of that year. The pictures were hard to really see details from, and I found later that he had built the Hartford in it's 1880 refit, which looked different then how it appeared during the Civil War. It was a pretty good start, so I found the original magazine issues on Ebay and bought them.
I was referred by the Naval Academy to an older gentleman that had built a model for them. When I contacted him, he told he that he had the same issue when he had built a model of the Hartford in 1964. At that time however he lived near the Smithsonian and was allowed to go through what he called an "Indian Jones style warehouse" of information that they had but had not been cataloged at that time on the Civil War era. After 2 months, he found a single page of the original blueprint of the Hartford and several other blueprints with mods for the 1880 and 1895 refits and upgrades. These would later prove some help, but the original blueprint was the key. He sent me copies of all he had, and I printed them up in full scale. The cover page of the Hartford was 82" inches long when printed!!
From this I decided to have it actually printed up as a blueprint and aged it to look exactly as the original with all the tears, damage, folds and missing parts and present it as a gift at Christmas. Finding people that still go blueprinting is real hard since CAD is used everywhere, but that is another side story. This is when I thought "how cool would it be to build this!!"
And so I began, from a single original blueprint and a smattering of info and old articles...
First, I will post some pics of the original blueprint....
Thanks,
Connor McLeod
Southlake, TX USA (near the north end of DFW Airport, halfway between Dallas and Ft. Worth Texas)
