The Brooke Rifle

So, another request, the Brooke Rifle. I don't think much about Confederate things, even less about pirate stuff, and tried to brush this off with; I'm only doing Naval pices, not fortifican or shore emplacements. But these guns were used in several Confederate ironclads, so I guess they fit the theme.

I wasn't surprised by now, with having difficulty finding usable data to model these guns, and especially their carriages. There's a few mock-ups, replicas, models, and restorations; but no two seem to be alike, and period photos are typically of shore emplacements with a different sort of carriage. I found one profile image of a single-banded Brooke on a carriage for casemate ironclads, and modeled it with a two-band gun on it. Then, in my continuing to look, found what at first I though was a better resolution version of the same image, but turned out to be a two-banded gun and a different carriage.

There's no plan, fore, or aft views with these images, so I sized everything to the guns, and photos of a reproduction online.

Over on Facebook's Civil War Navies group, a series of photos came up for discussion, one well-known image in this series is the "Powder Monkey," a colorized version shown here... The other images of the series have various sailors posing next to this same gun, and one, a sailor with a telescope that's more around the rear of the piece, showing some additional details. Yet another is a sailor leaning on a IX inch Dahlgren, with this Parrott in the background.
I noticed in the last image there's a difference in height evident between the Parrott's and Dahlgren's carriages showing the Parrott's Marsilly carriage was fitted to it.

Until now, I always figured the gun was a 30# Parrott, but when I put my 3Dmodel of the 30# Parrott on my Marsilly carriage, it didn't match the pictures. Here I thought I could easily knock out another gun for this project, but it wasn't gonna be that easy.

Next, I tried putting the 100# tube on, and that was too big. Knowing the images were taken on board the New Hampshire, I looked into her, learning she was armed, in addition to her broadside battery, with 4 100# Parrotts. More digging showed she received 60# Parrotts in addition to, or to replace the 100 pounders.

So I went looking for data on the 60# gun. I didn't get as lucky as I did with the 20# and 30# guns, but I found a photo of a piece of a similar document from the same original source, and despite the distortion, I could read the measurements. They also had a profile view of a Marsilly type carriage with it, but the drawing of the carriage didn't match the photos, and I don't know the original source of that drawing.

I added the 60# Parrott to my collection, and modeled my 60# Parrott on a Marsilly carriage.

When the Civil War broke out the Navy Yard at Gosport Virginia was abandoned and everything that couldn't leave, was burned, including ships like the 120 gun Pennsylvania, the frigate Merrimack, and others. The sloop of war Cumberland was towed out by a pair of tugs, and escaped. Sent to Boston for repairs, her aft 10 inch Dahlgren pivot was replaced with a 60# Parrott on a pivot carriage. Some reading suggests Buchanan, commanding the former Merrimack, now the Virginia, targeted the Cumberland, specifically because she was known to be armed with a rifled gun.

I found a reference to that gun in this commemorative item on an auction site.

That item aside, I have no clue precisely what her pivot carriage looked like, so I used the carriage from my model of the IX Dahlgren pivot, altered a little to fit the very skinny Parrott rifle, so here's my take on the Cumberland's famous aft pivot.

I went looking for the dimentions for a 10 inch Dahlgren and the best I could find was the maximum diameter was 29.1 inches. I basically scaled the 11 inch tube I already made down to this diamter and compared it to Dahlgrens drawing. I then used the Traversing carriage diagram to make the carriage, and took the slide from my 10" shell-gun pivot, and adjusted it to Dahlgrens drawing which was shorter, but the same in all other details. Spencer Tucker in his Arming the Fleet says the carriage was the same as that for for the Columbiads (the Traversing Carriage shown), but widened to accommodate the larger Dahlgren gun body. So this is the model so far...

While I work on this gun, I'm wondering about Constellation. She was armed with two "10 inch guns on pivot carriages." The Mississippi plan, dated June 23 1855 shows a 10" gun of 86cwt (8600 pounds). The restoration folks presume that Constellation got the same thing because they looked for a 10" pivot gun at the Archives, and that's the plan they found. Constellation was launched on August 26 1854, and commissioned on July 28 1855.
Dahlgren's drawing, on-the-other-hand, is from 5 July 31 1850, 5 years prior, and refers to the pivot gun simply as a "10 inch gun on pivot carriage." I'm beginning to question which 10" pivot gun Constellation was actually armed with.
Furthermore, a 10 inch Dahlgren tube weighed 12,000 pounds, 3,400 pounds more than the Mississippi gun. When the ship was leaving for the African Station on July 15 1859, her captain felt the pivot guns we too heavy too high, and made the ship "crank," so had them taken off. I can't help but think that would be a concern regarding 2 12,000 pound guns over 2 8,600 pound guns. So, I'm trying to find out where any records regarding what guns were issued to what ships would be, and if I can access them, but I'm personally leaning toward replacing the pivot guns on the model with 10 inch Dahlgren pivots.

The guns I've printed for my Constellation display so far, got some paint, including her new 10 inch Dahlgrens and the Armstrong's tube.

Constellation's 1870's Gun-deck Pivots: A bit more has been done on the iron carriage XI inch Dahlgren, but there's still details I have to figure out to complete it. The pics show the 3D models of the Dahlgren and the 100# Parrott Constellation carried on her gun-deck in the 1870's and the drawing of how they were arranged.

I found a drawing of the carriage and slide for the 110# Armstrong BLR at the National Maritime Museum web site, that's basically what the Warrior's pivots have, and started making a 3D model to go with the Armstrong tube I made.