The plans that were available were old blueprints – actually blue! And the lines for the hull were hard to discern so I converted the images to black and white and tweaked the hue and contrast so it was a little easier to see things:īefore I go any further, I want to mention that for creating ships in Fusion360 I use the metric system since the 3D printer that I use is basically a metric system machine with movements in fractions of millimeters and a nozzle size of 0.4mm so that particular dimension (0.4mm) is somewhat of a constraint in the design process (i.e. I cannot print something that's only 0.2mm wide) I also downloaded every photo I could find from the Navy History and Heritage archives which is a good supplement to the library of Congress and the National Archives. I was lucky enough to find a series of drawings that included the hull lines on the Baltimore in either the library of Congress of the National Archives (I can’t remember which – since I grabbed them about 2 years ago). Here's a few details of the USS Baltimore:įirst thing I do gather as much information on the ship – photos are of great importance since a lot of the detail areas of the ship you won’t find in drawings that are available. As a side note it seems the plans for the Baltimore were originally drafted by Armstrong for bid on work for the Spanish Navy who eventually turned down Armstrong's design in favor of one from JG Thompson - who produced a ship for Spain which was christened the "Reina Regente" which tragically sunk with all 420 hands after 7 years in service. During the Spanish American war Baltimore was second in line behind USS Olympia during the Battle of Manila Bay. The Baltimore was one of the ships involved in a diplomatic crisis between the US and Chile during the Chilean civil war. It was laid down in 1887 and was one of the first US Navy ships with the more powerful and efficient, and at the same time it did away completely with sails which were still often provisioned on other ships of it's time. Baltimore was an improvement on it's predecessor (USS Charleston). It's also a pretty historic ship - built domestically in the US using plans bought from Armstrong-Witworth. The Baltimore is a nice mix of areas that are easy and some harder spots so it's a good example to use. I'm going to be starting the USS Baltimore (C-3) so I thought I'd create a thread where I can share some techniques on using Fusion 360 for creating a model of a ship and the design considerations for 3D printing that I've developed over a couple years as I progress through the design.
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