Louie da fly

Thanks for the likes, everyone. Pat, it was like pulling teeth in reverse, but I've finally finished that part of things. Unfortunately two of the gunports were right in line with a couple of the balsa frames, so I had to drill holes in the frames and force the barrels into them. It worked, though. And I've been working on the masts. Here's the lower mizzen. I'd planned to have a mast step, but when I came to position the mast I discovered that one of the frames was right in the way, so I stepped the mast into the frame, and cut a sort of "channel" out of the crossbeams for the mast to go through, after first gluing a reinforcing piece to each. The bonaventure mizzen (these ships had two mizzen masts - the bonaventure fell out of use in the following decades). I've followed Landstrom in making this mast out of a single spar. Here are the two mizzen masts together And I ought to know the name of this spar but I don't - it's to control the bonaventure lateen. And the mizzen topmast (I forgot to take a final photo, but the procedure was the same as the lower mast). Here are the masts dry fitted, including the original mainmast which I currently have in storage, to put in place when the time is right. I'd have done the same with the foremast, but I couldn't get it out of the hull without breaking it, so I let it stay. Steven

Thanks for the likes and comments. Yes, the shields are rather attractive, especially the colours. I've tried to duplicate these as closely as possible with my limited palette (keeping in mind that the people who did the original pictures also had a limited palette and might not have got the colours quite right). I think Byzantine shields are particularly beautiful and interesting - not at all like Western Europeans shield patterns, which wound up in a dead end once they started introducing rules - only a certain number of colours, only a certain number of shield motifs and arrangements. This was because they developed the subject of "heraldry", which allowed you to describe a coat of arms in words so anyone could reproduce it - in a book or whatever, and as a means of individual identification, but it also restricted the flexibility of design.This never happened in Byzantium, so you have all kinds of "coats of arms" - many of which simply couldn't be shoe-horned into the Western descriptive system. Though I've been concentrating on the Great Harry for the time being, I haven't completely dropped the dromon. Here are the next 5 shields, plus one part painted and another in the mould. And I've been carving more oarsmen. Two more so far - since I dropped the feeling of "I must get this done" the enjoyment has come back. It should be fun, not a chore. One guy had his legs too far out from the body to fit him between the oarbenches (my bad). So after a bit of thought I developed a cunning plan - I cut the legs off and glued them back on closer to the body, with dowel joints to keep them in place (you can see the dowels if you look carefully). Now he fits, but I'll be taking more care in future to try and avoid it happening again. Steven

After a long hiatus while I worked on the dromon, I've come back to the Great Harry to give me a rest from the never-ending carving of oarsmen. Before I can add the upper deck of the aftercastle, I had to put in the cannons below it. As I didn't add lower decks when I first built the ship, I've had to get a bit clever and put in narrow "false decks" along the sides of the ship to put the guns on. I've turned some gun barrels from 1.5mm brass tube. A bit rough and ready but at this scale they look pretty good. As the carriages won't be seen I made them pretty basic. I glued the barrels to them with CA, which I don't usually use. (PVA doesn't stick brass very well). I rested them on a sheet of paper so they didn't stick to everything in sight/each other, and I could peel/sand it off later. And here they are on the false decks: and from outside: Steven

That's a good save. And a valuable addition to your knowledge and skill-set. Steven

Looks like you've "nailed" it! (sorry for the pun). How about a close-up of the area of difficulty, as in your first post, for comparison? Looking good. Steven

Good point, Jaager. I note it also has a hardy hole for holding auxiliary tools, and the wooden "stump" has iron reinforcing rings to stop it from splitting under the force of the hammer - a good solution for something that small a diameter. Interesting - there's a "main" stump that is massive and heavy, providing lots of nice inertia, and above it (it looks to cut out of the main stump, not an addition) the smaller diameter stump. It seems to me there would be a reason for doing it that way. Perhaps there needed to be room around the stump for things that went over the edge of the anvil - perhaps the reinforcing hoops for the oil barrels?. The 'main stump' also has a ring in it, perhaps so it could be hoisted easily. Steven

Well, I'll be keeping on with the shields. One a day, and I have about 13 to go to get the 48 I need. The "boys" can take a back seat, though I expect I'll still be able to saw the rough blanks to shape even if I can't take them any further. So I won't be giving up totally on the crew. In the meantime I re-looked at http://forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=179436&p=2733651&hilit=longship+oar+length#p2733651 What I hadn't noticed back in 2015 was this: There was a famous 19th century experiment in France where they decided to recreate a Greek Trireme, and they laid the hull out so that they used three different lengths of oars. It proved impossible to keep all the oars in stroke. It was sort of like a clock with three different lengths of pendulums trying to keep time. But there was also a considerably larger variation between the thalamites near the waterline, the zygians part way up, and the thranites at the top in the 19th century French model. (From memory, I think the bottom oars were about nine feet long (2.74 m.) at the lowest level and maybe 20 feet (6.1 m.) long at the highest level. . . The most recent trireme reconstruction uses all 170 oars of the same length, and rearranges the seating of the oarsmen, with satisfactory results. . . . the difference in oar length on the 19th century French model was much greater than the variation on the longship; so some scholars who have belabored this point probably have not spent a lot of time rowing. I'm currently following up on this information. The French trireme appears to have been built by Stanislas Henry Laurent Dupuy de Lome in the time of Napoleon III (1860's). Unfortunately all I've been able to come across is the first page of the reference, at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1095-9270.1982.tb00069.x If anyone subscribes to the International Journal of Nautical Archaelogy and could provide me with the full article I'd be very grateful (I'm not a university, so as far as I can see I can' get access). The thing is, I followed the oar lengths in Pryor's Age of the Dromon, with the lower oars 3.395 metres long and the upper oars 5.178 long. I've agonised about whether I should cut the upper oars back to duplicate the lower ones, but I really think I should take the attitude "I worked with the best information I had at the time" and move on. Additionally, the difference between the upper and lower oars is nowhere near as much as it was in the French trireme, so it may not have had all that much effect on performance in the "real world". Steven

I agree. It looks just like an anvil. But I'm surprised it doesn't have a horn, as that would allow more flexible working of metal. Perhaps it only has a limited number of uses on shipboard. Steven

Sounds like a plan, Arjan. My original question on that thread was because Renaissance galleys all seemed to have long straight sides, so all the oars would hit the water at the same distance from the side of the ship, whereas the dromon had a hull shape more like a longship, narrowing toward the ends. As Cap'n Atli had experience actually rowing a longship, I thought he, if anyone, would know whether oar length in a ship of that shape was a problem. As it turned out, it apparently isn't. Steven PS: Your model looks very elegant.

You might be interested in this discussion regarding the relative length of oars in oar-driven ships - http://forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=179436&p=2733651&hilit=longship+oar+length#p2733651 I found the statement about inability to keep different length oars in synch enlightening - particularly as I've made the length of oars different for the upper and lower banks for my dromon. I wish I'd noticed this before . . . (I post as Egfroth on the Armour Archive) Steven

"Too small - throw him back!"

Here are the latest shields. Top row are complete, the lower row are part done. And here are "the boys" so far. I've been carving them roughly to shape and when they're all done I'll go back and do the arms for each one, then smooth them off and make them all pretty. Note the lack of social distancing. Also the 5 who have been cut off at the torso, because I realised I'd done the legs wrong for them to fit onto the benches. I'll have to go back and make lower bodies and legs for these guys, but not till I've got all the rest done. I thought about throwing them out and starting them again, but from the torso upward is ok. I have to say, though, that I'm getting pretty jack of all this wood carving. I have fourteen oarsmen at various stages of completion. I need a total of 48, so I'm not yet 1/4 the way through. There's almost nothing else I can get on with - everything else has to wait on these oarsmen. Add to that I've somehow wrenched my left thumb, so it's getting painful to hold them as I carve. I think I'll take a break from all this and do some work on the Great Harry, which has been languishing unloved for quite a while. Steven

Beautiful work, Pat. I'm a total klutz when it comes to this kind of work. I tips me lid, sir. Steven

Siggi, I love your crew figures! Am I right in thinking that their clothes are made of paper, and that you rubbed the surface of the carpenter's apron and the painter's overcoat to make them look textured and scruffy? Steven

Hi Mike. There's a search function at the top right of this page. Type in the name of the ship, and perhaps the brand of kit, and it should give you a choice of build logs to look at, if anyone's previously made the model. If you go to the Home page, there's also a subsection called Ships Plans and project Research where you can put up questions about your specific ships - and also perhaps find information already posted about them - though the Search function would probably also find those. Good luck with it. Steven

What a beautiful model, Dick! Regarding the sails, perhaps if you have the wind abeam with bellying sails off to one side - you'd get the beauty of the sails without obscuring much at all of that wonderful rigging. It's been a while since your last update, but it's certainly been worth the wait! Steven PS: I see you've got the yards supported off-centre. This has been an issue I've been thinking about for quite a while for my own model. Do you have any reason for doing it this way - and do you think this would affect the performance and distribution of forces around the masts?

Great! Looking forward to following it. Steven

Oh, and always "dry fit" pieces together before you even think of gluing! (It would be nice if kit pieces were all perfect, but sadly too often they are badly finished, ill-fitting, warped etc.). If something doesn't fit you'll know in advance and be able to fix it before you're committed. You'll save yourself a lot of grief and extra work ungluing and re-doing. Steven

Hi Marco. Well you'r right - that's a pretty ambitious model for a first timer. But so long as you're prepared to be patient, expect to make mistakes but not be put off by them (or having to do things over), then you've got a good chance of achieving your goal. There have been other first-timers who've successfully completed complex builds, and there's no good reason why you shouldn't as well. But yes, start a build log - it's the best way to get feedback and encouragement, and good advice from other MSW members if you hit problems. Steven

In between times I've been continuing on with making shields - due to the time it takes for the glue to dry, I can only make one a day. Here are the latest ones - five completed, two partly painted, one ready to paint and another in the mould. I now have 26 completed shields - more than half way! I got "on top of" making the oarsmen's arms. Here is the first one. I think I'll be making all the oarsmen with the arms carved separately - it gives me much more flexibility in placing them appropriate to the oarsman's position in relation to the oar handle. Port pavesade nearing completion. (I miscalculated a bit, so I'm going to need a very short bit of railing to finish off) Port pavesade complete and starboard pavesade under way: Uprights in place and the first length of railing glued and clamped. Clamps removed. Note the wood shavings in the foreground, from carving one of the oarsmen. And second length of railing scarphed to the first: So, by spreading my efforts between three different kinds of jobs (four if you count painting the shields as a separate job) I get a steady progress happening, and also don't get bored with the repetitive stuff. Steven

Not so sure it's alive. As far as I can see there are no mentions after the middle of the 20th century. The magazines were published in the UK, where the copyright status is "copyright in literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works currently expires 70 years from the end of the calendar year of the author's death. Where the work has more than one author, the copyright expires 70 years after the death of the last survivor of them." I don't know how (if at all) that applies to the publishing company, which I suppose would be the owner of the copyright, even though a lot of the content was written by private contributors. An interesting legal puzzle. Steven

Exquisite work, Drazen! Steven

Thanks everybody for the likes. md1400cs, much of the "history" is speculation - trying to reconstruct what a dromon must have been like based on very patchy evidence from 1000 years ago, in Greek (so you have the added problem of translation difficulty and alternative meanings in English for Greek words - what exactly did they mean when they wrote that? And some technical terms just no longer exist in Greek, so the "meaning" is based on educated guesswork). I'm very lucky the book Age of the Dromon exists - its my main source of information and guides me in many of my reconstructive choices. But there are many things even that source leaves open - just how do you construct a pavesade? Where exactly does it sit on the hull? Do the shields overlap the gunwale? A lot of educated guesswork needed when making the model. But to me that's a lot of the fun - working out how it must have been - or how it may have been, given the available evidence. As much of a detective story as a build log. And I find that very enjoyable. I'd rather try to figure out how a ship went together than have the plans handed to me on a plate. Others may feel very different, but that's how it is for me. Steven

I've made all the uprights for the pavesade: Drilling holes in the port gunwale to take the uprights (using a brass pin about 0.5mm diameter as the drill-bit). First upright in place: And all done on the port side: And adding the railing. First section: Second section -joined to the first with a scarph joint. More to come on this. Now I'm working on the arms for the upper oarsmen. I've been dreading this - difficult to get exactly right. I worked up a couple of arms in plasticiene, then using that as a guide I cut out some very rough and oversize arms from pear wood. Shaved one down at the shoulder-end until it fitted to the body,then stuck it in place with a wooden peg joining the arm to the body. Sorry, I didn't take photos at this stage. Then started carving the arm till it fitted, holding the oar handle with the oar in place. Not a perfect job - I cut too much off the hand and the shoulder is too wide (unless he's Superman). I can't do anything about the shoulder without trimming off the wooden pin that holds the arm to the body, and the hand will have to be re-done as part of a new arm. But that was to be expected - this was the test piece, and will serve as a model to make the others from. Steven