In late-1862, John Ericsson, designer of the famed Monitor, wrote a letter to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox about removing obstructions, mainly torpedoes (mines), from a “certain Southern city”. He told Fox that he could design a raft for his monitors that could catch and destroy the obstructions and he was soon given a contract by the Navy. Early the next year, he had constructed a “minesweeper” attachment for a monitors bow officially known as the Ericsson Obstruction Remover, and unofficially known as Ericsson’s Devil. The design was a simple rectangular raft with a notch in the stern to accommodate the bow of the monitor with a fancy explosive system to “safely” destroy any torpedoes caught. Testing with USS Weehawken on the North Edisto River were promising, the monitor actually steered better with the raft than without. Due to skepticism and fear that the system would cause damage to the ship, the system was removed prior to the Charleston attack and replaced with grappling hooks suspended by chains. When it came time for the attack, things went quite different than testing had shown. First, the attack was delayed nearly two hours when one of the grappling hooks had snagged the anchor chain of Weehawken. Second, the chains and lashings holding the raft to the monitor broke repeatedly in the heavy seas near Charleston Bar and once they had crossed the bar into the harbor, the raft turned into a massive battering ram pounding the ship as it moved out of sync until finally being cut loose once it began to damage the armor plating. The raft drifted for a day and eventually washed up on Morris Island. Several other rafts were kept at Port Royal, SC and additional testing was done but they were never deployed. Several times after the war, whole rafts or just parts were found around the Southern coast. One was found in Bermuda in 1868, another was found after Hurricane Allen in 1980 in Texas. The remains of the raft used by Weehawken can still be found in the marsh on Morris Island.
This ship is modeled in 1/600 scale and can be printed using any resin or FDM printer. Ship comes with and without base.
When printing in FDM, some details may be too small to print with a stock 0.4mm nozzle.
Included with this purchase is:
Ericsson Torpedo Raft
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