Pivot Guns

This begins with needing to make a pair of pivot guns for the spar deck of my 1:36 scale model of the sloop of war, Constellation; a ship commissioned in August of 1855 and armed with 16 8" shell-guns, 4 32 pounder guns, and 2 10" shell-guns on pivot carriages. Being an RC sailing model that was meant to sail in the Chesapeake Bay and it's tributaries, I thought it best not to model the ship's gun deck, so I only needed to make the two pivot guns. These were based on plans for the pivot guns meant for the side-wheel frigate Mississippi from Record Group 74 at the National Archives in College Park Maryland.

Using wood from the louvers of a broken shutter, I began building the carriage and slide, while Dan, a friend from the RCGroups forums, turned a gun tube for me, which I accessorized with trunnions, sight mass, and cascable. I was planning on learning to do my own photo-etched brass parts to detail the guns, but things didn't go that way.

At the same time, a played with making 3D models of the gun in Anim8or, which I had used to make 3D model aircraft for a flight sim some years earlier. 3D printing wasn't a thing yet, so the model wasn't anything more than some basic shapes.

Then I got a 3D printer, specifically for printing parts for Constellation and my other model ships; and with it I begand adding details to my 3D model of the pivot gun with the intention to 3D print it. It took several failed tries, but I eventually got it to print in one piece. I didn't care for the faceted appearance on the gun tube, so I made a smoother one, and printed a second gun.

Eventually these were painted and installed on the model. I now regretted not modeling the gun deck and it's battery of 20 guns, but that fantasy will be played out on the Macedonian model with it's 50 guns to be printed.

Being able to to 3D print things for my models, I got brave and started modeling a light 12 pounder boat howitzer for Constellation's launch. After digging around the Internet for images, and to figure out the measurements, I basically based my model on an original in Fairfax Virginia that had iron wheels.
Thinking about it now, it probably would have been more correct for Constellation's timeframe to use the one with wooden wheels, which I can still do.

This little gun was fun to model, and though it took three tries to get it to printed, it's an amazing little model once I got it right.

I was going to print the gun's pivot point parts for the launches rail, but since the launch actually needed a rail, I modeled the entire rail with the pivot points attached and installed it on the boat.