I have a Sterling American Scout waiting for restoration. The model is in 1/96 scale, as for their USS Missouri, because this is the scale of the avalaible plans of true ships. As far as I remember fiberglass hull was in "Sterling Scale". Consider that were built several and different lenght hull of C-2 ships. American Scout was an C-2 S AJ5 Hull. dimension are in meter
Tons: | 8228 |
DWT: | 10400 |
Length overall: | 139.9 |
LPP: | 132.6 |
Beam: | 19.2 |
Sterling plan is a little bit simplified to facilitate the building for stand off scale modeller. American Scout was built in 1946, scrapped in 1973. Here a little story:
From the "Letter Rip" column, May 1974 Flying Models Magazine:
Fate of "American Scout"
We recently received a very interesting letter from Ed Manulkin of Sterling Models that included the following correspondence that he received from Captain E.P. Shepherd of Peabody, Massachusetts, regarding the Sterling scale R/C model freighter American Scout.
"Since you manufacture the model of the American Scout, I thought you might be interested in what finally happened to the ship. In 1969 she was sold to Amercargo, Inc., along with twelve other former U.S. Lines C2's. She retained her same colors except that the blue part of her stack was painted red. In 1970 I became Chief Officer of the American Scout and stayed on her until she made her last voyage under the American flag. During this period she was chartered to the 'Military Sea Lift Command' carrying ammo to Vietnam. In early 1971 she was placed under the Panamanian flag by Amercargo and renamed Inter-Scout, since she could no longer compete profitably under the U.S. flag. They manned her with a Spanish crew except for one American engineer as an adviser since the Spanish crew was inexperienced with steam turbine ships.
"The next time I ran into her I was Captain of the S.S. Intercloud, another ship of the same company. The Scout had broken down about 300-miles from Yokohama while she was carrying a cargo of sulfur to that port. At the time I was proceeding to Yokohama for bunkers before going on to Taiwan. We connected a tow line and hauled her to Yokohama.
"After a couple more voyages, she obtained a charter as a lighter in Chittagong, Pakistan. She was being employed to offload grain from large tankers into the port since the tankers were loaded too deep to enter the harbor. While alongside one of the tankers she suddenly started listing. I don't actually know the cause of this, but it may have been due to rapid loading and putting too much grain on one side. When she had taken a 30-degree list, the crew abandoned her and went aboard the tanker. After a while, the Captain and some of the crew returned aboard her and attempted to beach her on a nearby sand bar. However, when she reached the sand bar, her list started increasing until she rolled right over on her side. No one was hurt and all hands got off all right. The ship now filled with mud and was considered a total loss. No plans were made for salvaging her. Amercargo is now out of business as they found it unprofitable to operate ships this old.
"As one of many people who have built the American Scout, I thought you might be interested in the last chapter of her history." —Capt. Edward P. Shepherd
regards Pit
