I want to tell you about a friend of mine. His name is Bruno Gire. Bruno lives in France. I live in America. We have never met, but we've been corresponding for the past three years over the internet. I 'e-met' him on Steel Navy (of all places) and we quickly discovered that though we were born at different times on different continents we have very similar tastes in ships.
Bruno was kind enough to tell me about a site where you can download hundreds of digitized plans of warships from the National Archives of France. Needless to say, I was thrilled! Being a huge fan of French Pre-Dreadnoughts, but not being a big fan of Bad Resin (expensive kits that are inaccurate and badly cast) I was in somewhat of a quandry at the time, as it looked like I had few options for building a really exciting French Pre-Dreadnought from a kit. Combrig had just started to put out FPD's, the
Voltaire, the
Jeanne d'Arc and the
Danton, as well as the
Henri V, but nothing with tumble-home and those really great 'Vernian' fighting tops. At the same time I was beginning to seriously contemplate scratch building for the first time, and was beginning to realize that, with the plans at hand from the Archives I could build almost anything I wanted to. Bruno's thought were heading the same direction at the same time. I seriously considered the
Hoche, the
Carnot (especially after reading Jim Baumann's excellent build of it) and a few others, but, for my first real effort at scratch building I wanted to start on something that hopefully would not be too difficult, a fairly simple hull shape, something I could hone my skills on, and secondly, something not likely to be upstaged by a kit any time soon. I looked briefly at the
Gloire, the world's first Ironclad warship, but was soon drawn to one of her later cousins, the
Solferino, the only double-decker broadside ironclad ever built, and the first steam-powered warship to be built with a ram bow.
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She seemed to fit all of my needs, so I jotted down an email to Bruno, announcing my intentions, confident that he would be excited about it...
Well, he was more than excited about it, and, long story short, we decided to collaborate on the project. Bruno decided to design a PE set for the Solferino in both 350th and 700th scale that would contain hull sections, PE relief-etched deck, armor plated sides, plus an entire sheet of details, ratlines, bridges, etc. In addition we decided that we would try and find someone who could turn brass guns and masts for us, the complete picture...
In the meantime I got involved in building carracks, doing casting masters for Rusty White of Flagship Models and a few other things. Bruno got started, and then got busy. Then 'Contest Season' hit and I really got busy trying to get some carracks done for the shows I wanted to enter. This meant that, although I had the
Solferino parts ready to go (or at least enough to get started) I wouldn't actually have time to start on the build until after the first of August. So here we are, almost a year after I had the idea to scratch build a Solferino in 1/700th scale, building the Solferino in both 700th and 350th Scale. We'll cover both efforts on this same thread.
I started with the 350th Parts.
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heated up until they were red-hot and then allowed to cool. He said once they were cool they would be as soft and easy to work as brass... He was right, as usual. 
