3/8/2024


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Some folks on a ship modeling forum were discussing the armament of the Harriett Lane in regards to a kit one of them was building. Seems the latest research gives the ship a different armament than the kit supplies. Another person posted a diagram giving a possible arrangement of the battery the ship was said to have had, and a quote of one Phillip Tucker who was on the ship, and who was published in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly in 1918. as saying:
Her batteries were strengthened as follows: one four-inch rifled Parrot gun as pivot on the forecastle deck; one nine-inch Dahlgren gun on pivot forward of the foremast; two eight-inch Dahlgren Columbiads [sic] and two twenty-four-pound brass howitzers on ship carriages, aft...
No one pointed out that Tucker said the Dahlgren pivot gun was an IX inch gun, while they're diagram showed a X inch gun.

I decided to model and print these guns, since there were only four types, and six guns total, all in 1:96 scale. What caught my eye was that Constellation had, later in her carreer, carried IX Dahlgrens, and a 30pdr Parrott on a pivot carriage; and I got for a side project I'll go into in more detail later.

For the Lane, I'd need to model the IX Dahlgren on a Marsilly carriage; a IX Dahlgren on a pivot Carriage; a 30pdr Parrott Rifle on a pivot Carriage; and a 24 pdr Dahlgren Howitzer. To start, I had to find the specifications and hopefully drawings of these gun, andtheir mountings. That was more difficult than I thought it would be. Where Dahlgren guns are concerned, everyone that models them seem to simply take the carriage and slide for the XI inch gun and just scale it to fit; but I found what must be the only photo of a IX gun on a pivot mount every taken during the Civil War on the gunboat Mendota and while the slide may be the same as that for the XI inch, the carriage is not.

I made the IX tube while I searched for the details of the carriage obscured by the Mendota's crew and deck furniture. I never did find anything difinitive, but in the mean time I had the tube, and plenty of information on the Marsilly carriage, and so cranked that one out in a day, and printed 4 of them for the Lnae.

I wound up conjecturing the parts of the IX pivot carriage I couldn't see, finished the model, and printed it in 1:96 scale.

The next gun for the Lane was the 24 pounder Dahlgren howitzer. I started this by rescaling the tube of my boat howitzer up to the size of the 24pdr - which I knew the length of from my boat-gun data; and to build the carriage, useed a photo of David Porter with a rifled version on a similar carriage, as well as a photo of two such guns on the Vermont.


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