CFB Esquimalt Naval and Military Museum owns a large collection of ship plans. Naval historians and model ship builders often contact us in search of plans to include in projects they’re working on.
Museum volunteers Ken Leclair and Paul O’Reilly review ship plans from the museum’s collection.
In the past, the relevant plans had to be removed from storage and sent to a commercial company for reproduction on large-format scanners. All of this process involves wear and tear on the plans, some of which are quite fragile. The risk was just too big for us to be able to continue this process.
So in order to make the plans collection available for model builders and other interested individuals, many have now been scanned and digitized. This is all thanks to the efforts of museum volunteer team Ken Leclair and Paul O’Reilly, both also members of the Victoria Scale Modellers club. Ken and Paul reviewed the plans collection and provided a list of those that were suitable for reproduction and likely to be in demand from model builders and other potential users.
Ken Leclair then undertook the task of overseeing and organizing scanning of the plans by a commercial contractor. They were then converted to PDF format for ease of sharing. In many cases, Ken had to to do an extensive amount of extra work on the scans of the plans in order to make them truly useable.
Armed yacht HMCS WOLF, 1945 – inboard profile. Detail from a general arrangement plan, museum collection.
These plan copies can now be purchased from museum staff for a small charge.
Plan detail for one of the CC boats, the submarines that were purchased for the province of BC by Premier Richard McBride in anticipation of WW1.
CFB Esquimalt Naval and Military Museum
CFB Esquimalt Naval and Military Museum
