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Jose Gonzales

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About Jose Gonzales

  • Birthday 01/05/1965

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    San Diego, CA

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  1. Hi all, I’m planning to cover the hammock netting along the tops of the bulwarks with a canvas cover. Does anyone know how they were secured, particularly along the bottoms of the canvas?
  2. Hello all! I'm building the Revell Constitution, with components kitbashed from the BlueJacket Constitution. My build log is at Finescale.com (https://cs.finescale.com/fsm/modeling_subjects/f/7/t/170904.aspx). I want to add the ramrods, sponges, crowbars, and other gunnery tools to my spar deck, but don't know how to do it. Before the recent refits, in which the spar deck bulwarks were lowered, Old Ironsides in Boston had small racks to hold these tools, located on the elevated bulwarks. Since the refits which removed her waist and lowered her bulwarks to the proper level, the racks are gone. Does anyone know how these tools were stored during her glory years? were there racks underneath the pinrails, or storage bins somewhere on deck?
  3. Hi Bill, The picture you attached is specific for the bottom sails on the mast, known as the "courses" (fore course, main course). They are also perhaps more well known as the foresail and main sail. These sails do not have a yard below them to attach the corners to. Their sheets run aft back to the hull. The courses also have a "tack" line running forward and to the hull, to pull the corner of the sail forward when the sail is close hauled, to prevent the sail from flapping back and catching wind on the wrong side of the sail. For sails located between yards, the sheets indeed pull the corners of the sail down and outward towards the ends of the lower yard. The clew lines run counter to the sheets, pulling the corners diagonally upward toward the center of the upper yard. When a sail is furled, the clews are hauled on and the sheets are let go. Furled sail will usually have the sheets remain attached, so you will see the sheets run up from the blocks on the end of the lower yard diagonally up to the upper yard where the corner of the sail has been lashed to the yard. If the ship is docked for an extended time the sheets may be unrigged, so you could choose not to have them on the model. Same goes for bare poles, the sheets and clews can be shown hitched together running diagonally between yards, or unrigged to represent long term docking.
  4. Hi all - my favorite book about Trafalgar is "Trafalgar: The Nelson Touch" by the late great historian David Howarth. It gets into the human side of the battle, the attitudes and disposition of the sailors, officers, and leaders, as much as it does the technical aspects of the battle, and a bit about Nelson's personal life. For me, it is not so clinical as many of the historical recountings of the battle, so I enjoyed it more. Cheers, Jose
  5. Hi JD, I did something a little simpler - I used brass tubing 1/8 " dia. , and cut it with a tubing cutter (from K&S) that I got at my LHS. In between the cuts, I used the cutter to etch a little groove in the middle of the ring (I etched the groove first, then cut out the ring). I used these thimbles for the slings on the fore and main courses of my Revell 1/96 Constitution. Cheers, Jose
  6. Hello Tom, With regard to the channels and supports or knees (or lack thereof), there really isn't a need for them. The main force exerted on them is neither upward nor downward, but actually inward perpendicular to the sides of the ship. Thik of a bridge on a stringed instrument such as a violin, cello, or even a guitar. The bridge is not secured to the instrument in any way, but relies on the pressure of the strings downward to keep the bridge in place. The upward pressure on the shroud is mostly borne by the chain plates which secure the chains and deadeyes/lanyards at the bottoms of the shrouds underneath the channels to the hull. Cheers, Jose
  7. Thanks for the picture. I concur, the boom is set too high on the model. Unfortunately it is set because the parts were made that way. The saddle is integrated on the plastic part that is th trysail mast. I have seen pictures of the hull mode and the boom appears much lower . I will do some surgery on the mast to "lower the boom" ;-)
  8. Note, the mast and the spanker are not yet permanently fixed, I just put them in place temporarily. I also noticed that the spanker gaff is mounted so close to the mizzen top that there is hardly any room to rig a proper throat halyard - I can barely get a single block in there. I'm sorely tempted to make my own trysail mast and lower the whole spanker assembly, but I'm not so experienced with scratchbuilding yet. Jose
  9. These are my first pix posted in this forum. The first is of the spanker boom - not too visible, but the brown spots are the cleats. I put one of the figures underneath the boom for scale. The second picture is of the launch. I've added some details to the floor of the boat, including some eyebolts, mast mounting hardware, and I've made a rudder - not pictured. I'm debating whether to mount the rudder on the stern or tie it down on one of the benches. I'll post more as I get my feet wet on how to do things in this forum. Thanks for all your input! Jose
  10. I'm down to the last few sails on my Revell USS Constitution, and I have made a blunder on the spanker boom. The Boom has a hole at the far outboard end, presumably to run the Spanker outhaul through, but the instructions only call for that corner of the sail to be tied to the boom. I decided to follow the Lennarth Peterson book and rig outhaul and inhaul to run along both sides of the boom, and tie off to some cleats on the boom itself, so I superglued a couple of cleats to the boom, one on each side, near where it will eventually be hooked up to the spanker trysail mast. When I looked at where the cleats are, I realized that the darned boom would be about 15 feet above the deck - too high for anyone to be hauling the spanker in or out by means of any lines tied off on these cleats. How do the other models of Constitution handle the outhaul/inhaul? Thanks! Jose
  11. Hello all, I am building the venerable Revell 1/96 Constitution, with modified rigging, drawing from Lennarth Peterson's book, as well other online resources. My question is regarding the sheets on the main topmast staysail and other staysails. The Revell instructions call for sheets only on the starboard side, rigged back to the pinrails near the mainmast on that side. Other sources show the sheets belayed to cleats or pins on the aft side of the main hatch. I have chosen to do the latter. My question is, should the sheets be doubled for the port side? If so I assume they would have to wrap over the stays running above the lower corner of the sail so that they could be switched when the ship switched tacks. Thanks, Jose
  12. Yes, I just did that last night. It was difficult, given that so much existing rigging and structure is in the way. You know the square hole in the back of the top, and the rectangular hole where the shrouds go through? I tied the B block between the two holes - took a long piece of thread and tied it around and between the two holes with a knot below the top. Then I pushed both long arms of the thread up through the square hole and pulled so the knot was on the top side of the top. Then I threaded the B block down one of the two thread arms and tied the block down using a pair of long tweezers in each hand. Luckily my clumsy hands did not run into any of the backstays too hard and snap anything off! Now I've got to do the same thing for the Royal halyard on the other side, then do the same thing on the main and mizzen - even tighter quarters there!
  13. Hi Andy, I'm working on my second Revell Constitution - my first was built when I was 16, 32 years ago. The halyard is supposed to wrap around the middle of the yard, but on the Constitution model, there is, of course the mounting bracket that clips on to the mast, that blocks this. On my first model I wrapped the halyard around the bracket behind the yard. In my current one, what I did is drill a small hole through the bracket, just behind the yard, then I ran the halyard through the hole and around the yard right in the middle. Hope that helps! Jose Gonzales
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