Schreiber Steamship Sirius

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Here are some pictures of my current build. It's the Shreiber-Bogen Dampfschiff Sirius. The scale is 1:100, the model is about 2' long. The Sirius was a German Baltic freighter built in 1868. Unlike most of the ship models here, this one will have nary a cannon.

I photographed the front of the parts book so you can see what the completed ship is supposed to look like. As was common in this era, the ship has auxiliary sail power. The sails are rather poor, dingy brown on one side and gray on the other. I plan to model her under bare poles or with sails furled. Those paper railings and ladders aren't going to cut it at this scale either. I have ordered, and promptly received photoetch railing (HO scale, but close enough), brass chains and lead ladders from Blue Jacket Ship Crafters in Maine.

 

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Here is a photo the plans (sorry, a little hard to see). A few words of German here and there, but basically it's all diagrams. 8 parts sheets, but at 1:100, these are big parts. Total parts count goes only to 92, so this is a fairly simple build.

There is also a nice rigging diagram. I anticipate that the sailing ship rigging will take as much time (or more), than the paper portion of the build. Fortunately, there are only two masts, a simple forecourse/topsail combination up front, and gaff-rigged aft.

 

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I ordered the ship from Paper Models International. Included is a small paper from PMI with a few tips in English. One of them is, Yellow color = reinforce to one millimeter. You can see here the yellow formers and boxes which brace the lower levels of the deck.

 

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Another view of the egg carton structure.

 

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Strips are glued to the formers to facilitate the attachment of the lower hull plates.

 

[jrts]

Hi Steve

Makes a nice change, one without shooters :lol:
The fly boys are going to think they are drowning!!!
Realy looking forward to this.

More ASAP please, and loads of photos :roll:

Regards

Rob

 

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Next, the decks are attached. Oddly, Schreiber says nothing about the need to reinforce the decks. Doing it by the book, I attached the first deck portion unreinforced, and was rewarded with a case of "floppy deck syndrome". :shock: I added strips after the fact to shore things up, braced all the rest and things came out okay.

 

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Another deck view forward.

 

[barry]

Hi Steve

Makes a good change, look forward to watching, must say I am surprised by the non doubling of the deck glad you could fix it

barry

 

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Another tip offered by the PMI instructions is to build in sequence in numerical order. That's logical, but there are places on the build where this will lead to trouble. In this case, building in order has you building up the cargo hatches prior to the attaching the hull. Anticipating a lot of handling involved with doing the hull, which could smash these structures, I will proceed instead directly to the hull assembly and do the hatches later.

Now we start the hull plates, starting aft and working forward. They attach closely to the strips on the formers, but not precisely so. There is overlap from one hull plate to the next, but great care must be taken not to overlap too much, or you'll run out of hull plate at the front. Don't ask me how I know this.

 

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And the completed lower hull.

 

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And the upper hull forward. Cue the Jaws theme.

 

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And the other bow piece (coaming ?) attached.

 

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Now for an overall view with main sections of the hull in place. The ship is an odd mixture of the old and new. The iron hull looks relatively modern, even more so for lack of a bowsprit. That's surprising for a ship of this era, but perhaps the designer has modeled her after some refit during later years. Yet it's all wood topside, and there is no bridge amidships, it appears that the ship is controlled from the poop, as in the sailing days of old.

As can be seen, the stern hull sections are the last to be attached and I should finish these tomorrow.

 

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One parting shot forward, and that will conclude the pictures for a few days.

 

[Kugelfang]

Very nice. I'm oddly attracted to these 19th century ships. Looking forward to seeing how she turns out.

--jeff

 

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Hi Steve

Makes a nice change, one without shooters :lol:
The fly boys are going to think they are drowning!!!
Realy looking forward to this.

More ASAP please, and loads of photos :roll:

Regards

Rob

Thanks, Rob. Your magnificent Yamato could sink her handily without even using the main battery though. :lol:

The flyboys ? LOL, they'll have to crank up the production or recruit some new blood. The more build threads of any sort, the better, I say.

 

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A shot of the unfinished stern.

 

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And as completed. Part #53 wraps around in the middle, with saw-tooth tabs, and then strips # 52 and 54 are glued to it above and below. As you can see, formers are minimal in this part of the ship, so I doubled up #53 to give it more strength to hold its rounded shape as I glued to the other pieces to it.

 

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Now for the ladders which are mounted to the fore deck. I have placed the paper ladders and railings provided in the kit next to the lead ladders. The railings I made out of brass wire.