About me
My name is Evert-Jan Foeth (1975) and I work as an engineer/consultant/scientist at the Maritime Research Institute of the Netherlands. I have an MSc and Phd (fluid dynamics) from the Technical University of Delft and spent half a year at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I work with large ship models (>12 m/35ft!) professionally, mainly cruise; ferry, and navy vessels and I specialize on propeller design. My current projects focus on cavitation erosion, reduced acoustic signatures, designing shaft appendices for favorable inflow to the propellers and decreasing frictional resistance by air lubrication. It’s a wonderful job; I frequently visit other maritime research institutes, ship yards, universities, ship classification societies and conferences. My ship building hobby has little in common with my job though; most of my colleagues enjoy sailing more than naval history.
As you might have noticed, actually finishing the model isn’t that important; I enjoy finding drawings, images and information needed to build all the components of the model. I then need to find out how to actually make all these small parts by learning new construction techniques. I enjoy building parts that are more detailed and precise than most smaller-scale models and I can easily spend more time on a small gun, launch or rangefinder than some people spend on an entire model. The amount of time spent on the model increases drastically, so as a result the entire ship model is slowly going nowhere. And yet, I feel HMS Hood is now nearing completion, build wise. I have many parts and sub-assemblies lying ready or half done, more than published on this blog so far. Most importantly, I do not feel I need to replace the parts I already made.
Because this is the main reason the project has taken so long. When you start from a modeler building kits nearly straight out of the box and move toward a scratch builder suffering from perfectionism, you’ll notice that the parts you made earlier aren’t any good. There are still a few errors in the model and some parts could have been made better and smarter, but I’ll keep those. Well, I just trashed the old funnels, but that should be it. My next investment is probably a few sets of airbrushes and a compressor, so that I can experiment with painting random models before actually putting colors on HMS Hood.
I’ve disabled all comments on this site, as comments collect spam, but you can send me an email at the address at the bottom of this post. I’ll be happy to answer any questions relating to the techniques on my site. If things aren’t clear, I can always update my posts or make a new one. Please note that the most interesting photographs of HMS Hood come from the official HMS Hood association. I communicate frequently with them on HMS Hood in its final configuration and I certainly wouldn’t be able to include all those corrections without them. I put all these finds in this blog but I hope you appreciate I cannot distribute the photographs; you’ll have to ask the Hood association. The same holds for most drawings of Royal Navy equipment that come from all the books I purchased over the years and one most important source: John Lambert plans; if you need it you can purchase it at the correct outlet.
Another issue is the etch set. I get to occasional “Can we have it? Can we have it?” request. At the moment: no. The set is actually two sets. The first one had a lot of bad parts; the second set is improved but still contains a few experiments and hence failures. The parts were designed with only my model in mind; to be added to other parts that may be difficult to make. Plus, I do know nor care how well it fits a commercial model ;). I also don’t really want to issue a manual or explain the rationale behind all the parts; I sometimes forget what a part was for or how it was once meant to be folded. These sets are not kits, they are experiments. Perhaps later, when I know which parts succeeded and which ones failed. Perhaps a super detail set can be issued with a manufacturer, such as for the main gun turrets and octuple pompoms?
Anyway, thank you for visiting my site! Questions and comments can be sent to:
efoeth at zonnet.nl