Hamburg port barge, 1:25

Not my typical design, but I was asked to design a barge for a friend, who builds larger ship models and wanted to have such barge. 

The original was built in 1928 at shipyard Johann Oelkers in Hamburg under the building numbers 470&471 as open barges. Original names “Kosmos XIV” and “Kosmos XV”. They were intended to be used by the Hamburg-Amerika-Line in South Amerika, west coast area. But they never found their way to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, they were used by company Lütgens & Reimers inside the Hamburg port (as many others) as lighter (to transport goods from sea going ships to the shore). For that reason, they were rebuilt to closed barges (with hatch covers), renamed as “L & R 234” and “L & R 235” and used as “Kastenschute”, that means a closed barge for transport and stowage of goods under customs seal. Being overall 22,5m long and 5.5m wide with a maximum draught of 2m and a depth of 2.12m, they could carry up to 153t cargo.

The model was printed on FDM-printer in matt PLA with quite fine layer height of 0.08mm to get the overhangs printed without supports and to have a smooth upper deck despite the sheer and camber. Nozzle was 0.4mm. As stated, parts are printed without support, except the forward part, having a raised bottom forward, here a little support is needed. The rudder and the bollards are printed in two pieces and glued together – smooth PEI-plate for printing these parts is strongly recommended. 

The hull consists of four parts (fore, fore-mid, aft-mid and aft), that should be printable on any printer with 256x256 building plate. The aft part exists in two versions, with and without rudder, as many barges didn’t have rudders.

The bottom design has pockets to glue in two 550mm long steel flat bars of 60x6 or 50x5. This would add 2-3kg weight to the barge, creating a realistic light ship draught. Originally this was intended also to give the hull a strong backbone, but it turned out to be not needed, so the steel bars were just laid in and covered by inner bottom.

The final model was painted using acrylic paint.

Hope you have fun with this design… Happy printing and building!

Please note the license:
My design is published under the CC BY-NC-SA license, which means that you can freely use this model for any non-commercial purpose and may remix this model freely as long as you provide attribution and share with the same creative commons license. Feel free to contact me if any questions.