PLANS

[Dave Stevens (Lumberyard)]

Every once in a while, there will be a post where do i get ships plans? good question but to general to answer, Ship plans come in a variety of forms like original shipyard drawings, modeling plans, plank on frame plans, plank on bulkhead plans, plans from kits and plans out of books. Here is a small sample of where to find plans, museums all over the world will have a collection of plans as well as historical societies and private collections.

American Ship Building

Way back in the 1980s i was a volunteer at the Inland Seas Maritime Museum and had access to areas off limits to the public. Up in the attic there was a room full of rolls of ship drawings. I would spend entire afternoons unrolling and looking at these hand drawn pen and ink ship plans. The...

shipsofscale.com

Where to order HAMMS plans?

With the Smithsonian closed due to US government shutdown, are there any other sources to order plansets from the The Historic American Merchant Marine Survey? Preferably physical copies?

shipsofscale.com

Category:Ship plans of the Royal Museums Greenwich - Wikimedia Commons

commons.wikimedia.org

Research & Collections | Wisconsin Maritime Museum

www.wisconsinmaritime.org

https://taubmansonline.com/

Plans

Model Expo Online

www.modelexpo-online.com

Historical Collections of the Great Lakes

The main purpose of the Historical Collections of the Great Lakes (HCGL) is to collect, preserve, and make available historical materials documenting the Great Lakes

www.bgsu.edu

sometimes ships are built "by the numbers" yes math is a big part of building ships.



the numbers are used to create patterns for the carpenters out in the yard, the guy in the middle holding the papers might be calling out numbers like bingo or the master shipwright checking the work being done.

 

[Dave Stevens (Lumberyard)]

some plans provide very little information while others such as this one from the Bowling Green collection will provide a lot of details

 

[Dave Stevens (Lumberyard)]

Then you have plans such as this one, there is nothing to tell you what the stern looked like, what the figurehead was, nothing on the deck layout, no construction detail as to framing or timber sizes the plan is just the shape of the hull. To build a model from such plans you need to use other sources such as the "establishments" which is a document giving general timber sizes but not things like deck layout.