A week ago I returned from my most recent trip to Gettysburg.  This time I went with my writing group on our yearly Altered Fluid writing retreat.  We rented two amazing houses approximately six miles east south-east of the battlefield.

I found myself making multiple trips to the battlefield for my own research, and every day I’d take a group of writers out and give them my own version of a tour of the battlefield.  No one dozed off on me, so I’ll consider that a success.

This is the first time I’ve visited Gettysburg while writing about the battle. It is an amazing but humbling experience to spend an evening reading and researching about men of the 19th Indiana Regiment, and then walk the National Cemetery the next day and see the names of some of those very same men etched in the stones that fan out along the ground.

Overall, I didn’t get as much writing done over our five days as I would have liked, but it was still a great time, both because of the location and the company.

Everyone knows that art is subjective.  In the scale modeling world that has never been truer.  Discussions as to whether building models is to be considered “art” or merely kit-assembly are as old as the hobby itself.  Add into these discussions the variables of what materials were used, how much of the piece was scratch built by the modeler, the skill apparent in the final product, and one can see how this discussion can end in no single satisfactory answer.

But, perhaps, a fitting answer to the question can be found if the said models end up in a museum.  This past weekend I was fortunate enough to attend the opening of the latest exhibit at the Belskie Museum of Art & Science, in Closter, NJ, and see two of my pieces on public display (the Mobile Bay and Monitor dioramas).  The exhibit is “The Best of the Belskie Museum from 2001-2008”, showcasing the most popular exhibits from the time frame.  Approximately two years ago my friend Gary Kingzett orchestrated a ship model exhibit that went over really well.  He approached me to donate models for this exhibit.

Along with two dozen or so ship models they also have paintings, photographs, soft materials and sculpture.  So, while I’m still not convinced my models are to be considered art, it’s gratifying to see them displayed amidst so much of it.  A highly recommended exhibit in a small but very cool museum.  More photos HERE.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that ‘all men are created equal.’

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow, this ground—The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here.

It is rather for us, the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us —that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “Nicolay Copy”, one of five surviving hand-written copies of the Address, and the one Lincoln read from at the dedication.

This past week I returned to Gettysburg and spent four days there and at Antietam taking tours, talking to historians, guides and rangers, and doing general research.  I stayed at my usual hotel on the site of General Lee’s headquarters during the battle.  Its proximity to the first day’s field on the west of town is very convenient since that’s the focus of my research.  To be within walking distance on a battlefield that is approximately 25 square miles is a huge bonus. This was my first real summer visit to the area, and I highly recommend it even though it was hot and humid.  The various summer programs going on throughout Gettysburg will keep anyone busy.  I was there four days and there were at least another four days worth of activities I wish I could have stayed around for. The tour guides and rangers were of great help while I was there, especially Joanne Lewis, who came in on her day off to give me a tour of the Gettysburg Day 1 field, Gerry Eak, who gave me a great tour of the town of Gettysburg itself, and Mannie Gentile, who gives a wonderful no-nonsense tour of the Antietam field.

I’ve posted some photos here.  Yeah, more sunset photos.  No matter where I go in the world it seems my camera ends up focusing on sunsets and clouds.

After a year and a half of work (granted, off-and-on, many breaks taken) I’ve finished the USS Weehawken model. I have to say I’m damn pleased with the results. I took more time than usual with the basics this time around and paid particular attention to eliminating seams, making sure the paint was smooth, and quadruple-checking alignments. I also did a lot more scratchbuilding on this model in the form of adding an interior (that’s unfortunately very hard to see) and adding small details that are visible in this large scale.

I’ll be doing a full article on the construction of Weehawken, but that will take some time. Over the course of this project I took over 350 photos of this model, so I’ve got some sorting to do.

In the meantime, I have more photos of the completed ship here.

I’m still plugging away on the USS Weehawken, my deadline of March 7th looming larger and larger every day. I wanted to post these shots, though, of the XV-inch and XI-inch Dahlgren cannons. I’m really happy with the way they came out. While the full-sized cannons were massive, deadly, and ugly, these little facsimiles could be considered cute.

Kristen and I visited Gettysburg in early October. I’ve been putting off posting these photos since then, trying to think of something intelligent to write about that place.

The truth is I can’t. I don’t understand how the men there stood in lines and exchanged gunfire with no cover, can’t understand how others charged fortified positions, can’t understand what made them do it. Has the selfless part of me that believed in higher causes dulled in the past decade or so – it must have been there at one point, otherwise why would I have volunteered for the Navy? And whether that is truly the cause or not, how could I correlate my life with the lives of those men of a different age and understand them?

Maybe that’s what draws me to that place. To history. I’m trying to understand that which I can not, hoping to find something in that dirt and in the intervening century-and-a-half to help me understand. And that is really all I have to say on the subject. For now. I just wanted an excuse to post a few of these photos.

After some time away from the work bench I have returned to the USS Weehawken. After weeks of looking at it, sitting there, mocking me as I mulled over ways to approach the armor plating on the deck, I finally decided to just dive in.

I worked off of what few photos could be found on the internet of the actual monitor, photos of other monitor kits, and photos of models that others have built. I decided the brick-like layout that is most commonly depicted is probably the best bet, as there is little evidence against it. I started by drawing laying a pencil line down the center of the deck. Fortunately that was easy, as every line on the deck is either parallel or perpendicular to this line, so it had to be straight. I then marked off the perpendicular lines, continually checking them with dividers and a square. I decided the distance between them again by photo guesstimates, and by the fact that I have a ruler that is darn close to being as wide as measurements that I came up with.

Next came out the scribing tool. I’ve never scribed anything on this scale before and it was daunting. I used a special tool that Squadron Hobbies produces (it looks like a particularly nasty dental scraper). It removes a fine ribbon of material on each pass, and after three passes on each line with the smaller head, it was done. The resin on this kit has more tiny airbubbles than I would like to see, and at points the tool did dig into pockets of them and cause irregular edges, but for the final “used” look I want for this model it wasn’t a deal-breaker.

After scribing those lines, out came the pencil and the straightedge and I began drawing in the alternating lines parallel to centerline, that run fore and aft. I continually checked my work with dividers to make sure I kept every resulting rectangle the same size. I’m almost positive this symmetry was not present on the real ships, but with nothing else to go on to contradict the pattern, I kept it as it adds a nice visual effect.

I went with the assumption that the armor plates terminated at the very edge of the hull. They did this on the original Monitor, so why not? This meant I needed a line the thickness of the plates on the side of the hull. The blue tape is Dynamo label tape, from those old plastic label makers. It’s thick enough to provide a solid edge for the scribing tool to run along. I measured off the thickness of the plates to something that looks good and applied the tape. I don’t like to leave it on the model too long as it has a tendency to pull the primer from some of those air bubble areas on the hull, so I lay it down, scribe the line, and remove it.

Quite a bit of progress for only a weeks work, off and on. Now I have to figure out how to replicate the flush-faced rivets that are needed on the sides of the hull.

With my final paper of the semester turned in, I’ve decided to clean up some stories to send out (sent out two this very day) and work on some models. I’m still at it with the USS Weehawken. It seems like I’m just not making any progress. This part of a build always seems like that. You fill, prime, sand, repeat. And repeat. And repeat. One interesting thing that I found was the visual effect in the first photo. The last time I primed I got lazy and just hit the areas I had sanded. The contrast of old and new primer gives a great textured effect. It’s something I’ll be repeating — in a more controlled manner — when I do the final painting, so it’s great to see a preview of what can be accomplished. Now it’s time for me to scribe all of the armor plating lines onto the deck. That will be quite an undertaking, and one I’ve been putting off.

The second photo is of an interior space. I’m opening up the hatches on Weehawken, so I go to the plans and see what’s under these hatches. The after-most lists it as “engineering” and nothing more. Going off of a paper model of the original USS Monitor, I knocked out this quick bit of plastic gibberish. Once it’s painted, weathered, and viewed through the small 1″ X 1″ opening in the deck, it’ll look just fine.

I’m replacing certain parts of the Weehawken kit. This shot is a before and after (well, an in-progress). The turret roof is supplied in a circle of perforated resin. I’m putting a lot of detail in this turret, so I’ll be replacing it with a clear piece of plastic. I’ve used double-sided tape to attach the plastic replacement to the resin original, and now I’m drilling through the resin perforations, using it to transfer the pattern over to the clear part. Tedious.

And finally, this green guy. It’s a white-metal Dungeons and Dragons gaming figure, about 1.5″ tall, and still very much in-progress. I found him while cleaning up a few weeks back and figured he’s a good piece to practice with the Vallejo paints I’ve recently started using (they rock), and it’s a piece I can finish in a relative short period of time. Sometimes it’s good to just finish something, even if it isn’t that big of an undertaking — I guess that’s why I write short stories as well.

So, I continually try to figure out why I write what I write and why I build the models that I build. And recently, more often than not, I’m finding out that whatever the subject, my interests in the two mediums are often closely related.

My current modeling project is a 1/96^th scale resin kit of the USS Weehawken. She was an American Civil War monitor. I’ll get more into her history later as I talk about building the kit. But for now all you need to know is she was one of the most powerful warships of the period and she sank. She did not sink to enemy fire, but to weather and waves many would not consider rough. During an ammunition onload someone failed to properly distribute the heavy iron shot, leaving her out of trim and down by the head. On 6 December 1863 she sank in “choppy” water. She took a few waves over the bow and went down within minutes. Between 24 and 30 men of her 70+ crew drowned in water so shallow that nearly one-quarter of her stack was reportedly sticking above the waves after she settled on bottom.

I’ve always been intrigued by this story. I guess it’s a fairly common one of technology being overcome by nature, but it pulled me in so much that I started writing my own fictionalized version of the sinking. Who was responsible for not stowing the ammunition properly? Even with that, was there someone asleep at the pumps that could have stopped the disaster? (Actually they couldn’t have. An engineering “feature” of these ships had all of the pumps aft in the engine room; useless in Weehawken’s bow-down attitude.) I began conjuring images of a man tormented by the heat of these steel ships in Southern waters, the thud of enemy cannon balls striking the hull, the thick smoky air. And, what the hell, maybe he thought there were mermaids just through the thin hull beckoning him out into the cool waters. I wrote a few paragraphs.

The words lead to a desire to build a kit of the ship.  I got luck, someone actually made a kit. That’s always a plus. I have little room to scratch-build at this time. And I found it cheap on eBay! Another plus. I could have built this model as any of the other ships of the Passaic class, even ones that survived into the 20^th century, but I chose Weehawken. I started cleaning up the hull and planning the build as I worked on the story. With work and school I have to share time between building and writing, so some evenings I sit with my laptop, others I fill the house with the smell of resin dust and primer. When I build a model I do a lot of research, and I do the same when I write about a historical subject. Now I was killing two birds, so to speak, and I was all about Weehawken. The darkness of her demise and the oddity of it pulled me to her.

The building progressed, but then I lost interest in the story. It wasn’t going anywhere after those initial few pages and I had recently written two war themed pieces. Another one seemed a little much at the time.  But as I found my interest in the words on the wane, my interest in the model was growing.

I’m currently more than half-way through the build, and now that I can lay my hands upon an approximation of her hull, see where the water came in, and imagine the death rattle of steel and equipment subsiding into gurgling seawater.  The story starts to come back to me. No one has ever accused me of being drawn to cheerful stories, and the model, a solid material focus, makes the images I conjure in my mind more real.  Solid.

One day I’ll come back to my story of the Weehawken. Until then, the subject continues in a different medium, for the time being.