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(More customer reviews)David Brown provides the reader with a wealth of insight on the workings of wooden ships. He emphasizes wooden warships. An extensive bibliography is provided for further reading.
Brown focuses on the works of Sir Robert Seppings, an early 19th century shipwright who wrote about the deficiencies of wooden shipbuilding. This eventually led to the use of diagonal planking. In an appendix, Brown compares wooden and iron ships: "In a wooden ship, it was the distortion of the sides of the hull which was the major problem. Seppings' analogy of a five-bar gate without the diagonal bar is a good one. Resistance to this change of shape came from friction between the planks which, up to a point, could be increased by hard caulking. Seppings' diagonal trusses were a great improvement but the rows of gun ports still weakened the side structure." (p. 204). Owing to the working of planking, it was impossible to incorporate effective watertight bulkheads (p. 74).
The labor requirements (man-days) for wooden ship construction are provided (p. 170). Brown also gives us statistics on various wooden ships (length, beam, draught, depths, armament, armor, speed, length/beam ratio, mid-section coefficient, prismatic coefficient, etc.) He also includes a graph of bare-hull weight as a function of the ship's dimensions and type (pp. 194-195). The reader may be amazed about how much wood went into wooden ships!
Click Here to see more reviews about: Before the Ironclad: The Development of Ship Design, Propulsion, and Armament in the Royal Navy, 1815-60
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