R/C Naval Combat

Besides the PUMA build thread, is there a recommendable "how-to" website or thread that a beginner could follow in building a ship?

I mean from detailed side and top views. I have the "body plan"s as well. I want to build a USS Washington BB56. I got the images from http://www.usswashington.com/diag.htm#stats.

That's a good source, Don. There are many many sites to see how people built their ships. A few are:

One is my friend Peter Ellison's. Real cool guy who can REALLY build a freaking ship :) I have great respect for him.
http://workspace.wamnet.com/~pellison/MWC/DMKEllison.html

Another is Steve Reichenbach's shipyard page. He has a tips and stuff as well.
http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/Falls/9795/index.html

Last one is the nitty gritty of how I and Brian K built a pair of twin Vanguard class battleships.
http://chemistry1.che.georgiasouthern.edu/bkoehler/myships/vanguard/construction/index.html


Good starting points, I'm sure that other people will post their favorites :) The plans on the USS Washington site are good to use, just remember to enlarge them on a copier so that they're the right size. Feel free to post questions in the General section, you'll get a lot of help.

http://www.bderc.com/howto/index.html

Tugboat-Those pages look to be great walk throughs on building a fiberglass hull. Is there much difference in framing a hull that will be covered in balsa? I have looked around and besides the PUMA build thread I have not seen a balsa ship construction walk through. No knocking those fiberglass ships. After you make your first hull, you can make spares faster than making spare balsa hulls.

Justin Scott-Bderc has very detailed instructions. The only problem is that there are no pictures. This too is a fiberglass build.

Thanks for the help!
Anthony

All 3 of those are about wooden-framed ships. True, on Steve's page, you have to dig for it, but his wooden-framed Scharnhorst is here: http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/Falls/9795/newgneis.htm

And to suggest that Vanguard isn't a wooden hull! I was blowing sawdust out of my nose for 3 months! :)

The only fiberglass on Vanguard (either of them) is covering the bottom of the ship, where it's allowed to be impenetrable. Most people who do wooden ships do that. If you make the bottom from balsa, your ship is going to have a diffcult life and lots of patching on the underside. That path leads to madness. Giving the bottom of the ship a fiberglass layer is easy and requires no special skills or tools, to do one NC class ship will cost probably $6 in Napa/Advance Auto/Etc fiberglass (they sell it in small quantities for fixing cars) and probably $30 in Lowe's/HomeDespot epoxy. If you start building your NC hull now, I promise I'll post a how-to on the forum here with lots of pictures (not condescending, I like lots of pictures myself in a howto).

Tugboat,

Is there a page three and beyond to that Vangard construction? It seems to end right after glassing the bottom hull.

Good point mike5334. That is what made me think the ship was to be glassed.

I'm eating lunch in a couple hours with the guy who made the Vanguard page, I'll bug him to expand it.

Are you looking for a tutorial on sheeting the finished hull with balsa? Or a hull construction tutorial? There's a big difference :)

At the moment, I'm looking for hull construction.

While the Vanguard one is incomplete, it takes you up to the point at which you'd be installing stuff and sheeting it. That stuff is beyond the "hull construction" stage. At that point, you can go to many many sites that show fitting out a hull, and for that, wood and fiberglass hulls are similar enough that it doesn't make much difference.