popeye2sea

Roy - Bill - Jason - Barry - Tom - David - Ken - Jim - Tom - Larry
 
The SMS-NJ recently had a custom Admiralty Models workshop on rigging. This very successful 2 day event was hosted by one of our members at his house. We covered a lot of the same ground as their most recent workshops in Baltimore and NOTL but also added some custom material tailored to our needs. Everyone came away from this workshop with a deeper understanding of advanced rigging techniques. Having the workshop locally enabled attendees to save the cost of hotels and restaurants.

We have been advocates of David and Greg since the very beginning because of their ability to make difficult modeling concepts more understandable to ship modelers of all skill levels. In our group we had modelers that are working on their very first kit, others that are kit bashers as well as several scratch builders working on ships like the Warrior and Liverpool. If you are looking to advance your modeling skills you owe it to yourself to check out Admiralty Models.

If you are a member of an active club with members that would like to better their ship modeling skills contact Greg or David about a custom workshop in your local area.

I posted these somewhere else, but I do not know where.  I thought these would illustrate the construction of the bentnik shrouds pretty well.

I posted these somewhere else, but I do not know where.  I thought these would illustrate the construction of the bentnik shrouds pretty well.

I posted these somewhere else, but I do not know where.  I thought these would illustrate the construction of the bentnik shrouds pretty well.

I use blacken-it for steel and the recommended concentration is 1 part blacken-it to 9 parts water.  I prepare the steel by immersion in muriatic acid diluted in water 1:10, then rinse in de-ionized water.  I have had good results with it.

You can still get chunks of wood from the Constitution that are about the size you mentioned for $5.50 from the Constitution Museum.  PM me if you need some.

The material was called "white stuff" and I believe it's makeup varied from place to place but could be made from tallow, pine tar or resins, sulfer compounds and fish or whale oil.

Here is my take on drybrushing: You have to think of two spectrums of the condition of the paint you are using. One spectrum is the degree to which the paint is either wet, right out of the container, or dry, where it is set up and hardened. The other spectrum is how much paint is on your brush, with one end of the  spectrum being a fully charged brush ready to drip paint, the other being a brush that has given up all it has to give in terms of leaving a paint mark on a surface.
In order to drybrush a surface you should have a solid base coat of one color already on the model and the color you are drybrushing over this should be different in terms of tone or vibrance, usually this color is a lighter color.
Your brush should be a crappy brush, one that has seen the last of its days as a pointy neatly bristled brush. What you want is an ugly mop of a brush a signpainter would forsake, one  with bristles like a bad hair day.
You want to get to the far end of each of the spectrums I mentioned above. You want some paint in the bristles of this brush but you don't want that paint very wet nor do you want very much paint charging up the bristles. 
You get to this happy place by dipping your brush then wiping the brush on some scrap material, you wipe this mopy brush around on a scrap of cardboard or something until you got 80 to 90% of that paint out of the bristles.
When the brush is hardly leaving any paint marks your just about ready to drybrush on the model.
The feeling you want is that feeling you get when you have a used up felt tip magic marker that is out of ink, you can't write your name  with it but you could still ruin a white linen tablecloth if you pressed hard enough.
THIS is the brush you now drag across your model. Depending on where the brush exists straddling both of the two spectrums ( and it will be shifting on these spectrums as you use it) you will see for yourself how hard you need to press and in which direction you need to brush. Lightly at first and brushing in one direction, pressing hard and scribbling in all directions at the end when the paint is all but gone. Its this last stage where you get the best drybrushing effects as the paint is only adhering on the higher points of the surface you are scumbling over.

I love this photo for a lot of reasons. here it serves well to illustrate the flags position in relation to the square sails and the point of sail the ship is on. In this case the ship is being sailed as close to the wind as possible,  she is trying to point in the same direction the wind is blowing from. She can't sail directly into the eye of  the wind. But if she braces her yards around as far as they can go, so far that the sails are contacting the stays as is visible in the photo, she can get within six points of the eye of the wind. She is said to be "Close Hauled" and in this case she is close hauled on the starboard tack, since the wind is coming over the Starboard side. The flags as you can see are streaming aft and to port. 
The flags are ACTUALLY indicating a very very slightly different direction of the true wind since the speed of the ship through the water makes them behave a tiny bit differently than a stationary flag on a fixed point in the wind would behave. So if she was sailing past a rock with a flag on it, the flags on the ship and the flag on the rock would be at very slightly different angles. The one on the rock indicating the True Wind and the ones on the ship indicating the Apparent Wind.

Here is what I found aboard the ship today.
 
There are no lines that come inboard on the gun deck.
 
In the picture below you can see the sheave in the spar deck bulwark for the main sheet. It belays on the large horizontal cleat next to it.

 
The next picture is where the main brace comes in.  Its sheave is right aft by the transom, close up under the cap rail.  (Of course, the fire extinguisher and life preserver are not original equipment  )

 
When the bulwark in the waist was higher the fore sail sheet and main tack came in through sheaves there.  Now that this section of bulwark has been removed I do not know where these lines come inboard.  It depends on whether your version has the high bulwarks in the waist  If the waist is open my guess would be to take the fore sheet aft to a sheave and cleat just aft of the break and the main tack inboard to a cleat just forward of the break.  Again, I am not sure if the tack required a sheave.  The fore tack did not seem to have one

Here is what I found aboard the ship today.
 
There are no lines that come inboard on the gun deck.
 
In the picture below you can see the sheave in the spar deck bulwark for the main sheet. It belays on the large horizontal cleat next to it.

 
The next picture is where the main brace comes in.  Its sheave is right aft by the transom, close up under the cap rail.  (Of course, the fire extinguisher and life preserver are not original equipment  )

 
When the bulwark in the waist was higher the fore sail sheet and main tack came in through sheaves there.  Now that this section of bulwark has been removed I do not know where these lines come inboard.  It depends on whether your version has the high bulwarks in the waist  If the waist is open my guess would be to take the fore sheet aft to a sheave and cleat just aft of the break and the main tack inboard to a cleat just forward of the break.  Again, I am not sure if the tack required a sheave.  The fore tack did not seem to have one

I see what you have there for the rigging of the main and fore sheets and tacks, but I am still not convinced that these lines come inboard on the gun deck on the actual ship.  I will take another look next time I am aboard in the next few days.

If your model doesn't have sails, and thus no presumed wind direction,  point them any way you like and no one can tell you you are wrong. 

I would have to check my set of plans for the Connie, but I don't remember anything belaying on the gun deck.  Does the main sail sheet run through a sheeve in the side?  Perhaps the main brace?  I think that those are on the the spar deck level also.  Not sure what you mean by a halyard clew line.  The halyard and the clew are two different lines.

Henry,
 
I agree - nothing really new about a Bugatti Veyron, but when you put all the best concepts together into an integrated package, you get something special. I expect that she and her sisters were miles ahead of anything from the Europe.
 
Rich,
 
If you need another good reference, see A Most Fortunate Ship by Tyrone G. Martin. Also, there is a wealth of information on the Constitution Museum web site. It might help if you need to know the colors of the actual ship.
 
wq3296

Great Yankee super-ships, to be sure, but they were not unique. Let's give credit where it is due ...
 
The 24-pounder French Sister-frigates La Forte and L'Egyptienne predated Humphries frigates by about a half dozen years. They were of the same dimensions, force (thirty 24-pounders on the main deck) and design (flush decked, about 170 feet on the gundeck) and they were not only very successful, but Forte in particular, gained world fame for commerce raiding in the Indian Ocean, and for defeating a British 74. The Forte's successes and characteristics would have been known to H. when he was drawing up his own first draughts. NMM has L'Egyptienne's draughts, btw.
 
Then there was the slightly smaller, but equally successful  24-pounder Frigates La Resistance and La Vengeance, built circa 1794, each also mounting thirty long 24-pounders ...
 
Humphries was known to have been under a "French Influence" when he designed the big yankee 44's, but most writers have assumed that this was limited to the Continental Frigate South Caroline, ex L'Indienne (spelling?), seen by him in Philadelphia during the war, which was built to French designs in Holland. But Forte was much closer to Constitution, et al, in all respects than the South Carolina was.

I think it is important to highlight the philosophy behind the design and construction of the American 44s... The role of the frigate in European navies required much versatility.  These were the "eyes of the fleet", commerce raiders, convoy escorts, and flagships in far distant stations.  Not so the American frigates.  We can see from the exchange of notes between Joshua Humphries and the Secretary of War that these frigates were designed with a single purpose - to kick the *** of the common class of european frigates - specifically the British 38s.  Anything bigger, they'd have speed enough to escape.  As Frolick notes, they were not particularly fast in relation to their opponents - Java, Guerriere, and probably Macedonian could all have run circles around the heavier Americans (heck - Java practically did!).
 
It has become fashionable in recent years to re-analize the American victories in the War of 1812 and demystify the idea that the American navy was better than the Royal navy.  Many times the implication is that British crews were better, but they lost because the American ships were so big in comparison.  This sidesteps the reality that British ships had oftentimes defeated much more powerful ones in the past and had expected to do the same with the American frigates.  British officers also regarded the 24 pounder long guns as too unwieldy for frigate actions and expected to outshoot the American crews.  In reality, they probably did, but with much less effect and they suffered greatly from the accurate and heavy return fire of the bigger ships.  I think it can be conceded that the British ships were generally fought with skill and fortitude against much more powerful opponents, but the truth is those frigates lost their fights long before the shooting started...  They lost their fights when Joshua Humphries put pen to paper and convinced Henry Knox to sign off on a class of frigate that other powers thought were too expensive to build and maintain and too slow to ever be effective in single ship actions.
 
Man were they wrong.
 
Evan

The ironic thing is that nothing that Joshua Humphries designed into the ships was very unique.  All of the concepts he used were found in other ships.  The beauty of his design was combining them into one ship.  He was very forward thinking.  He knew that the country could never afford to build enough ships to go toe to toe with any European navy.

The ironic thing is that nothing that Joshua Humphries designed into the ships was very unique.  All of the concepts he used were found in other ships.  The beauty of his design was combining them into one ship.  He was very forward thinking.  He knew that the country could never afford to build enough ships to go toe to toe with any European navy.

The ironic thing is that nothing that Joshua Humphries designed into the ships was very unique.  All of the concepts he used were found in other ships.  The beauty of his design was combining them into one ship.  He was very forward thinking.  He knew that the country could never afford to build enough ships to go toe to toe with any European navy.

First, wash the parts in warm soapy water to remove any release agent.
The method you use to glue the parts together really depends on the type of glue you are using.  If you are using a liquid solvent type of plastic cement (actually melts the two parts together) an efficient way of joining the hull halves together is to put the parts together and then run the glue applicator along the joint.  The cement will wick into the joint by capillary action.  It's easier than applying cement to the halves first and risking over gluing or messy smears while trying to fit the hull halves together.

Beautiful work Sherry

During my build on the Victory there is always some need to talk or to explore deeper, and one realizes, that many details are not properly defined and are much more judged merely by kind of mental cinema than researched facts.
 

 
It started with a discussion in our german forum about the orientation of the free end of the shroud: Always left, always right or different depending on the side of the ship?!?
 
Here we had a research in the common literature and the results were quite similar with:
- for the cable-laid shrouds - Starboard side the free end pointing foreward, larboard aft  - for plain- or hawser-laid shrouds - Starboard side the free end pointing aft, larboard foreward    Background technically wise is that the rope always tends to curl in one direction and the free end should be crossing on the inner side, this leads automatically to the above mentioned orientations. If one simply flips the deadeye the free end would end up outside.   And please do not refer to the shrouds star- and larboard having different twists: Forget it, that is a marine myth created by Mr. Monfeld and is already revoked by himself - not without some gnashing of teeth on his side ;-)    Here some literature with the above mentioned orientation in green  
 
Schrage Rundhölzer ... page 81 Fig. 224/226 "Von außen gesehen wurden die Kabelweis geschlagenen Wanttaue von rechts nach links um die Jungfer gelegt, so dass an jeder Schiffsseite der Tamp hinter dem Want an der rechten Seite des Wanttaus zu liegen kam. Dort wo sich beide Parten über der Jungfer kreuzen, wurde die erste Bindselung angelegt und der rechts liegende Tamp mit zwei Plattbindselungen am Wanttau befestigt."   Marquardt, Schoner in Nord und Süd page 128 Fig 41 "Bei kabelgeschlagenen war das Ende oberhalb der Juffer links beigebunden (an Backbordseite nach hinten weisend), während trossengeschlagene entgegengesetzt beigebunden wurden."   Lee Masting and Rigging ... Drawing pages 40 and 42 as mentioned above (only one side shown)   Petersson Rigging period Fore-and-Aft Craft Drawing page 16  as mentioned above (only one side shown)   Petersson Rigging period shipmodels Drawing page 2 bis 4  as mentioned above (only one side shown)   Harland Seamanship Drawing page 22  as mentioned above (only one side shown)   Darcy Lever Sheet Anchor "The Lanyard has a ... Knot ... cast on the end ; which is placed the reversed way to what the end of the Shroud is: thus in Cable laid Shrouds, the ends on the larbord side lies aft; on the starboard side forewards; ..."  Drawing page 24  as mentioned above (only one side shown)   Boudriot shows the same orientation for the frensh (thanks to pollux for the information)   The Victory in Portsmouth was shown the same way (at least until the actual rerigging)   Nares, Brady und Biddlecombe only describe Cutter Stay fashion    The only one telling the other direction is Marquardt in Eighteenth Century Rigs and Rigging, which contradicts his own Book Schooner Nord und Süd   On this occasion I found some other useful information: - Max. distance of the big deadeyes twice diameter
- Tackle about half the diameter of the shroud
- Shroud not too tight around the deadeye
- free end of the tackle passes through the gap of deadeye and shroud
- free end not too long   But it left me with some further questions: - The top-mast shrouds were plain laid or cable laid (cablets)? Plain laid would mean that the ends would be pointing the other way than on the lower shrouds. - The same for backstays?  - The distance of twice diameter of the deadeye looks good on the lower shrouds lanyards. Is this applicable too for the topmast shrouds? There the distance usually looks much longer in comparison?
- When was the batten on top of shrouds introduced to maintain their orientation? Marquardt only makes a small remark in the picture section telling "about 1800".
- Was this also introduced for the topmast shrouds?
 
popeye2sea already replied one hint:
Steels, Art of Rigging simply states "Dead-eyes are turned into the lower end of the top mast shrouds, as the lower ones are into to lower shrouds.
(Thank you mate!!!)
  Cheers, Daniel

Steels, Art of Rigging simply states "Dead-eyes are turned into the lower end of the top mast shrouds, as the lower ones are into to lower shrouds.

Steels, Art of Rigging simply states "Dead-eyes are turned into the lower end of the top mast shrouds, as the lower ones are into to lower shrouds.