Our scale model ship plan archive is getting larger with new and unique ships. This time, three sister ships. Scale model ship plans of car ferry Kartal, Kabataş and Hürriyet. These ships are everyday heroes of a metropol built on a place where two continents meet.
For a scale model ship builder, there are some common types of ships. You can find scale model ship plans for tall ships, tugs, cargo vessels, war ships and so on. More or less, they look like each other. But there are some ships which are tailored for a specific task and specific needs of a place.
Just after the automobiles started roaming the streets of Istanbul, a question emerged. How do you get your car from European side, to the Asian side? At that time, there were no bridges or tunnels crossing bosphorus strait. Unless you want to drive around Black Sea, the most logical way is to load your car on a boat. But if you want to do this more often, it is too much time consuming.
In mid 1800’s Hüseyin Haki Bey became the manager of the Bosphorus ferry company Şirket-i Hayriye and saw the need of transportation of horses and carts between two continents. So he designed a new kind of steam ferry. Double ended ship had ramps on each end, had an open deck and was propelled by paddles on sides. A cart could get in the ship from one end and get off from the other. This design also eliminated the need for manuevering and still in use today. He prepared the drawings with İskender Efendi and Mehmet usta and went to Maudslay Sons and Fields shipyard. In 1872, world’s first car ferry of the kind, Suhulet was ready for service.
Just a quick note, in 2007, Suhulet reincarnated
Years later, increasing population and vehicles also increased the need of such vessels to carry them between two sides of the Bosphorus strait. In 50’s Turkish ship building industry was also expanding, and this was a good opportunity for eager engineers. Ata Nutku and Zekai Başkurt drew the new car ferry design in Haliç Shipyard which is the oldest active shipyard on the world now.
Kartal was going to be the base design for the ships to follow. But in those days, it was really hard to import machinery and materials and this was making the project harder. The solution to the problem was steam engines taken out of decomissioned S/S Maltepe. Maltepe was built by J. W. Klarwitter in Germany in 1914 and had two triple axpansion steam engines. First they renewed the engines and brought them to perfect condition. Then they took the design of these engines, made some improvements and built new ones in Haliç Shipyard for the second ship Kabataş. These are the first marine steam engines built in Türkiye as main engines.
There are three drydocks in Haliç Shipyard for repairs and maintenance. But they needed a slipway to get Kartal on the sea. They consulted civil engineers for that, after some tests they concluded the bottom is like a swamp, so the slip way wouldn’t be strong. But then Ata Nutku and his team made a second analysis with divers and found rock bottom. They built the slipway, and now there was a place to continue constructing on Kartal’s keel. After Kartal was launched, hundreds of other ships followed her, and the slipway is still going strong today.
Another missing material was the oil for the slip way to let the ship slide down to the water and unfortunately it was not possible to import. Then Mesih Altınyıldız, the chemistry engineer in Haliç shipyard came to the rescue. He said he would produce required oil and started testing in the lab. After succesfull results, they used the oil.
On first of July 1954, there was a big crowd around the slip way. Handan Önüş, wife of the Turkish Maritime Bank general manager Yusuf Ziya Öniş cut the ropes and broke a bottle of champagne onboard Kartal. After the workers cut the connections, with a slight push Kartal slid down to the waters of Haliç. The team could not help themselves to run behind the ship with their pure excitement.
With the building of Kartal, the young republic could see anything is possible in the ship building industry with determined engineers, technicians and workers. Although there were independent projects before as all steel ships, Kartal provided the continuity. Following her, many other projects, hundreds of sister ships took to the seas and they proudly carry Haliç Shipyard as birth place on their plates.
Kartal carried passengers and vehicles between Asia and Europe for many years and laid up and sold in 1985. Here are some specifications to figure out the scale model plans of the ship. She was 58.2 meters long, 16 meters wide, and had a draught of 2.8 meters. Had two triple expansion steam engines each providing 650 hp. She had two screws in both ends of the ship and was capable to make 11 knots with service speed of 10 knots.
The Scale Model Ship Plans of Kartal / Kabataş / Hürriyet istanbul car ferry
The scale model plans are taken from Istanbul Technical University Professor Ata Nutku archive. I should thank Mr. Ali Bozoğlu for the images. The blueprints are scanned on PDF and are the actual project of the ships. You can find information both in Turkish and English on the model plans. Some pages are a little distorted but you still can work on them. We hope you enjoy building scale model ships out of these plans.