More Parrotts

I visited the Constellation years back to get information for my model of the ship. They showed me a copy of a drawing from the National Archives for a pivot carriage for a 30# Parrott rifle. During the Civil War the ships was armed with a 20# pivot aft, and a 30# pivot forward, which apparently had a carriage designed specifically. I was modeling the ship at an earlier time than they said they were retoring the ship too, so didn't figure I needed these plans, but, just just out of interest, I took some pictures of them.

It took a while to find them on my hard drive, though they were right where I thought I put them, I just had a hard time picking them out of the ground-clutter of everything else in that folder. Find them I did, and used, them, I did, to build and print the 30# Parrott pivot gun Constellation carried on her bow during the Civil War, as did the Harriett Lane.
I have yet to find any image of a 30# Parrott on a pivot carriage, except for the bow gun of the Confederate gunboat Teaser which was mounted on a hacked boat-gun sled with a carronade-type lug welded to it's underside instead of trunnions, ie, this was not the Parrott I was looking for.

That completed the battery of guns needed for the Harriett Lane and I packed them up and mailed them off to her builder.

That mile stone reached; I worked on making the STL files ready for the guns 3D modeled so far and uploaded them to Thingiverse.

I had modeled the 32 pounder and printed it earlier, and then modeled the 8 inch shell gun, but hadn't printed it. I also needed to print the 100# Parrott. I did get the 8 inch shell-gun printed, though the tube was a bit melted looking next to the cascable and will need to be reprinted. None-the-less, I have 4 of the guns for my project printed.

Some of Constellation's fiberglass replica 8 inch shell guns.

After posting some of the guns modeled so far on Thingiverse, I got a request there for this British gun. I looked into it and found it interesting, so decided to make it. I dug around the Internet and eventually found a good drawing with measurements, and photos of existing guns and replicas, such as the one on HMS Warrior. This gun has a breech mechanism that unscrews allowing a vent-plug to be removed to let the round and the charge to be loaded from the back (hense, breech-loading). The plug is replaced, the screw-breech tightened down on it, the primer set in the plug, and the piece is fired. There's actually a YouTube ideo of the process on an original piece in that helped me understand that breech mechamism better for modeling it.

None of the guns so far were made functional in any way, but as muzzle-loaders, there's not much function to model. I would have liked to model a working screw-breech, mechanism, and I did make a removable breech plug, but there was a bit of a hurry for this one and getting the details of a threaded breech modeled so they work would have taken me some time. I did just have to print one for myself to see how it came out, and I was really pleased with the result. Still, that spinning breech screw would have been a great fidget-spinner. I didn't make a carriage for it, but I think I'll make the sort-of Marsilly carriage they have on some of the Warrior's BLR's.

Howitzers: One other gun on my list is the boat howitzer. I tweeked the 3D model some to fix some inverted faces and add some details, then printed it. This time I put the gun on the field carriage

With my mind on the boat-gun, it occured to me the field carriage with wooden wheels was probably more correct for Constellation in 1856 than the iron wheeled one; so, I made a set of wooden wheels for the field carriage and printed it without the tube for Constellation.

The Susquehanna model needs 2 150# Parrots, 12 IX Dahlgrens, 1 24# howitzer, and 2 12# boat howitzers. I worked on the 24# howitzer some more to make it scale better, and printed two of them in 1:72 scale with no problems.

I also printed a pair of 150# Parrotts, but they didn't print well and need to be redone.