The convoy ship Wappen von Hamburg 1669 - Corel SM28, scale 1:50
Hi everybody,
I'll guess I'm going to attempt to build a Dutchmen, which is a first time. Some folks may read "Hamburg" in the title and think (Dutch?), Hamburg lies in Germany and not in The Netherlands. And you are absolutely 100% right, however this ship has been built by a Dutch master shipbuilder is by Dutch design. So welcome to my buildlog of this imposing Frigate and kit.
The punk kid story...
I remembered when I was a little kid, my parents took my sister and me out for shopping for clothes and stuff in the city of Rotterdam - The Netherlands. Living outside the city, my father always seem to parked his car just outside the shopping area, which means my sister and I had to walk a couple of blocks to reach the area where all the shops were. Passing certain streets and shops, one always grabbed my attention. It was a very small and old school wooden ship modeling shop. That means that the shop itself only sold wooden ship model kits and accessories for wooden ship modeling. When you entered the shop, the smell of woodworking was always around and the lighting was dimmed a bit. On the shop's window the name of the shop was painted with a classical font and behind that the most beautiful historic ship models were displayed. Always 3 or more completely built models were displayed with one big model in the middle. The centerpiece so to say! My eyes rolled over the many decks and guns and couldn't get enough of it. The owner was a very pleasant and friendly "old" guy and was building the models himself in the back corner of the shop. It apparently made some "big" impression on me. My mother told me, that I was a bit young for building models like that, but perhaps when I'm older and still be interested, I could have a go with it. She was absolutely right!
One day, passing the shop a new centerpiece ship was placed in the shop's window. It was the Wappen of Hamburg. An imposing vessel, big, lot's of guns, figurines on the stern and with removable decks. Can you believe that, I mean, I'm talking about the mid / end '80's of the last century, that was unheard of in a kit! I was hooked and my parents had to drag me away from the window. I could stay there all day long imagining, dreaming building that model. I was 8 years old.
The kit from Corel
There is one wooden kit from the Wappen of Hamburg from 1667 - 1669 and that's Corel SM28 before Movo Milano. It's one of Corel's flagship kits and is a very luxurious edition. Corel stated that a lot of research went into designing this kit and that some of the unique selling points of this kit is it's historical accuracy, the high quality figures and ornaments, the choice of having removable decks, gratings and with a lot of shown interior features, all cannons are on carriages on all decks. That means full decks on all levels with real gun ports and lids.
Size and measurements
Length: 43 inches or 1100mm
Width: 18 inches or 460mm
Height: 36 inches or 910mm
Scale: 1:50
On the box scale 1:40 is mentioned but all the drawings are in 1:50 scale which is the correct scale for this kit.
The box and it's content
When newly purchased and untouched, the box and it contents are displayed in the pictures below. As been said, it's a luxurious kit with a lot of high quality "walnut" wood and die-cast ornaments and figures. The die-cast metal ornaments are really beautiful and detailed. It's really impressive to see how good they are looking.
The history of the ship and her destiny
At the end of the Hanseatic trading period, which was a military trade group by origin, the Hanseatic city of Hamburg did not have its own warships. These ships were actually needed to protect the merchant fleet against the ongoing and growing threat of pirates and competitors. The idea of having own warships to protect the fleet, arose in 1663. These ships would be built by a Dutch master shipbuilder and according to Dutch designs. At that time, the Dutch were the most dominant trading nation in the world which prospers the shipbuilding activities. The plan was to start with two ships, so called sister ships called the Leopoldus Primus and the Wappen von Hamburg. However it appeared that there was a lot of disagreement over financing responsibilities and after a long period of debate the Hamburg Admiralty finally decided in 1667 to start construction of these two ships. Both ships were commissioned in 1669.
The construction of both ships was carried out under the supervision of the Hamburg Admiralty under the direction of an unknown Dutch shipbuilder. The flagship of Lieutenant-Admiral Maarten Tromp which was a famous Dutch admiral, called
Aemelia from 1632
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aemilia_(flagship) is mentioned in professional literature as an example and model for both ships.
The Wapen von Hamburg is the first of four convoy ships to bear this name. She was built at the Theerhof shipyard in Hamburg. The ship was not allowed to have excessive draft, otherwise it would have problems safely passing the shallow parts of the River Elbe, and especially the Altona sand. Because the shipbuilder knew, based on the knowledge available at the time, that a wide ship with low masts had more stiffness and strength to keep itself upright in a turbulent sea, and a narrow ship with high masts, on the other hand, sailed faster, the Wappen von Hamburg opted for a combination of both properties. This gave it a good compromise between stability and sailing speed and could pass the Elbe river.
In the evening hours of the 10th of October 1683, a fire broke out for unknown reasons in the lower room of the ship's forecastle. This expanded rapidly and, despite all efforts, could no longer be adequately accommodated by the resources on board. The crew tried to get to safety in the lifeboats, but was ordered by Admiral Karpfanger to return to the fire and to try to extinguish it. At the same time, signal shots were fired to signal surrounding ships to send emergency firefighting teams. When the fire spread through the deck to the foremast and immediately set fire to the rigging and sails due to an unfavorable wind, the rowing helpers kept a safe distance for fear of an explosion of the gunpowder room. Karpfanger had his son, who was traveling with him, taken off board, who had earlier appealed to his father to leave the ship with him to keep both lives safe. However, Karpfanger did not want to consider the loss of the ship just yet. It was suggested that they shoot a puncture in the hull and allow the ship to fill with water and sink to the seabed - but Karpfanger refused. Finally, he agreed to try to beach the ship and had the ship's anchor ropes cut so that the ship could run aground near the shore. Abandoning ship was in any case out of the question for Karpfanger: he saw himself bound by the oath he had taken on the 14th of July 1674 before the Senate of Hamburg, which instructed him to "stand manfully in defense of the fleet entrusted to him and rather to to use good and blood, to sacrifice life and limb than to abandon her and his ship.
As the convoy ship slowly drifted towards the coast, the fire below deck moved increasingly towards the stern, where the gunpowder room was also located. Towards midnight the fire reached some of the guns at the stern, which ignited themselves and fired volleys. At the same time, some grenades on board also ignited.
An hour after midnight, after the ship had burned for five hours and Admiral Karpfanger, true to his oath, was still the last man on board, the fire reached the gunpowder room, which eventually exploded. The back of the ship, which was broken in the middle, flew into the air, the front lay on its side and began to sink. Debris rained down from a great height. The accident resulted in 65 deaths: 22 soldiers and 42 ships men, as well as Admiral Karpfanger were killed. His body was found floating in the water on an anchor line of an English ship in the harbor of Cadiz on October 11, 1683.
On the picture below the Wappen von Hamburg (left) and the Leopoldus Primus (right) is displayed.
Luxurious but notorious
This kit is famous and notorious at the same time. The quality of all the components are superb and the features of this ship excellent. However when you look at the "building" aspect of this kit and the way the modeler is being "guided" by the help of the construction manual and the dozen drawings does has it's challenges. It's an old kit. developed in the late 70's and never updated as far as I can tell. Corel expects that the builder of this kit knows all the basic things to make a model ships and to craft all the items needed, Little or none step by step pictures are added with this kit. The drawings are of good quality but it shows only parts of the ship, not the complete process on how to actually build her. That means that a lot of questions will arise for the modeler. Perhaps that's why so few finished buildlogs there are on the internet. People strand a lot during the build of this giant, and it's developed a reputation of a hard to build ship. When a modeler decides to pick a new project and looks at the variety of ship kits and compare the prices of these kits, the Wappen von Hamburg is at the very top of the range. With the bad building reputation it has, a high purchase price and the abundant choice of other kits, it's lost her glance and popularity. I think this is a sad conclusion and hopefully with this buildlog I can inspire other to build this unique and magnificent ship.
A picture below shows the inscription on one of the cast metal parts. This was cast in '78 by Movo!
The drawings and instruction manual are shown below. Although the drawings are of high quality, only the end result of a product to craft is shown. Then the modeler should somewhat guess where the crafted item should go on the model because the drawings are not always clear on that part. The written text in the instruction manual isn't always helping either so I think that there is a lot to win by Corel if these instructions and drawings are updated and brought to standards of today. I'm sure this will benefit the sales and popularity of this kit.
"Dutch Ebay" and plan A
On the "Dutch Ebay" called marktplaats (translation is marketplace) a second hand kit of WvH was offered. I wasn't really looking for this particular kit, but it came up and somehow I was triggered. I guess my childhood memories and sentiment took over. I reached out to the seller and apparently the hull was already completely built. He showed me a few pictures and at the beginning I hesitated to go on with the purchase. I have this principle that I love to rescue kits from Ebay that otherwise been thrown away, however the kit should be in pristine condition, unbuilt and "untouched" so to say. It's just that I don't like to continue other men's work with respect to the previous builder, I just want to start from the beginning to have the full experience. Call me weird, I don't mind...
So the hull was built and again with respect to the builder, it didn't fit my expectations....take a look. Below a few pictures of the way it was built with a lot of gaps and cracks.
The kit was complete and everything was there. I was pretty honest that it lost most of it's value due to the fact that the complete hull was already done. The owner almost gave it away due to the fact he inherit the kit and hull and was in his way due to a lot of storage it took. So I decided to purchase the kit and had the idea to carefully demolish the hull, order new wood and simply start over! Hold that idea, it turned out a bit differently....
Arriving back home with the kit and the hull, (The Netherlands is a small country, so it was easy to drive to the seller and pick up the kit) I opened the box and inspected all the items inside. Beneath a few items I found some glue tubes which were almost empty. Epoxy glue, some UHU hard glue and the last one was CA glue.... Alarm bells went off inside my head! I could only think, "please don't let this hull being glued with this stuff"....boy was I in for a treat.....you probably are going to guess what's next?
The first try to get one of the hull planks of the bulkheads resulted in a mess. The glue residue was like glass and it was used all over in a very abundance of amount. I think the previous modeler must have thought that it should be glued together forever...I don't know but the carefully "take it apart" approach ended into a total demolish and destruction of the hull.
I tried everything from using heat, chemicals like acetone, white spirit, hot water, glue remover etc. nothing worked!
With pain in my heart I had no choice and had to throw away all the nice hardwood used for this ship. The bulkheads that appeared underneath the hull planks were poorly placed and faired wrong. Also the bulkheads were beyond repair due to all the glue residue and wrongly fairing. These need to be replaced as well...
While closing the lid of the bin, I realized I also discarded plan A which lies with all the broken pieces of wood inside the bin.
Woodglue!
I would like to reach out to all my fellow modelers and advice to please use woodglue like the normal white woodglue. The stuff is made for this purpose and it's great. Sure, the people living in the USA also have an abundance variety of wood glue's and the easy access to yellow wood glue like Titebond. Both are great and more important easy to repair with afterwards.
By applying heat, the white and yellow wood glue becomes soft and so you can easily make repairs or redo parts afterwards. Normal white wood glue dries fast, has great strength and dries up transparent and glue residue can easily removed with a damp cloth. The brand I use is a local brand called Bison. After it had dried it holds some of flexibility, so when humidity let the wood of your model shrink or expand a little bit, the glue can cope with this and doesn't crack or let the wood crack.
CA glue can help, sure. I use it as a liquid nail on certain difficult spots, so to say but very sparingly. Sure, you can't glue metal parts with wood glue and perhaps an epoxy glue or CA gel would be best, not for wood on wood. Hell, I even use diluted wood glue with a syringe to apply it to knots on my rigging work. Works great! I'm just saying, I love my white wood glue.
Out of frustration I forgot to take pictures of the before stage of the hull....I'm sorry!
After the demolishment, I was just left with al lot of parts...
Plan B:
Because I left Plan A, it's time for plan B. I had this idea to remodel all the bulkheads from the plans and use new plywood for the bulkheads. Then I would replace the lost Walnut with swiss pear! Sounds like a plan to me and so I took a short trip to my nearest modeling shop and returned with all the needed plywood and some pear veneer.
I redrew all the bulkheads on paper. Apparently I was out of white paper and "borrowed" some pink and green paper from my kids stash. They wouldn't mind I guess....and again they were in bed sleeping at the time.
The cutting list
I made a list of all the missing strips of walnut to replace them with pearwood. On my Proxxon tablesaw I cut all the needed strips. It took me a while to work trough the entire list.
Let's say I made a lot of dust and the Admiral wisely said to do this outdoors instead in the living room. I guess I didn't need to push the limits here. Call me a wimp!
While working out this plan I had more and more doubts. I did not completely agree with the shape of the bulkheads and the lines of the ship. Besides I saw all kind of points for improvement to make the ship look “more Dutch”. In addition, replicating all the gun ports as Corel had designed would be a hell of a job with my limited resources. I eventually decided to throw this plan in the proverbial trash bin as well, which was already starting to become quite full... Because I was momentarily without inspiration, I decided to put the project on ice and think things over. Eventually I decided to completely left the project and started focusing on something else....
The rise and development of plan C
While working on my previous project (Xebec 1750) and I was already in the preparations (research) of a new project, the Wappen von Hamburg kept nagging at my head. Somehow I couldn't quite let go of the project and started searching the internet for some inspiration. During this research I came across a booklet by Wolfgang Quinger about the Wappen von Hamburg and ordered it out of curiosity. After a few days the doorbell rang and I received the booklet. It is an old book, pages completely yellowed and fragile, it even smells old and according to the publisher it was published in the former GDR, East Germany, in the early 1980s.
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It was of course written in German and to my knowledge has not been published in any other language. In addition to a wealth of information, the booklet contained a completely different treasure, namely two large drawings printed on both sides with, yes, a complete plan of all the frames on a scale of 1:75. Quinger himself describes in his book that he has consulted many sources, mentions and praises them all. Some well known sources are N. Witsen, C. van Ijck, R. Hoeckel, H. Winter, W. Mondfeld, F.H. Chapman, R.C. Anderson. He himself says that the reconstructions of some well-known ships liken the Friedrich W. Zu Pferde, Derfflinger and Roter Löwe, among others, designed by Hoeckel quickly gained name and fame, but that the very thorough research of Mr. Friedrich Jorbergs led to more than 80 adjustments to Hoeckel's earlier reconstructions. One of these adjustments was that Hoeckel used the Amsterdam dimensions (Amsterdam foot) and Jorbergs the Rotterdam dimensions (Rotterdam foot). Later in this report I will explain why this is important and is essential for the lines plan and proportions of the ship!
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Quinger made a new reconstruction of the lines plan based on all the information he gathered. With his plan he explains that he had made a compromise between Hoeckel's plan based on Amsterdam dimensions and Witsen's. It is a shape that could well have suited this ship and is therefore more truthful than the shape that Corel has chosen for the WvH. The more I immersed myself in the design, the more it started to appeal to me. Slowly a new plan formed in my head….Plan C!
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