Louie da fly

Nice. Steven

That's a very elegant shape. And the holes are beautifully exact. Steven

Sorry, Bluto, but I think my jig is much more crappy and amateurish. Works, though . . .

Five oars down, five to go! I've smoothed off the lion's head somewhat and worked on his mane. Close to finished, but I'll have to put him to one side until I've done the hull so I can cut the back to fit against the bow of the ship. Something wrong with either my camera or my technique - a lot of the time it doesn't focus properly. This is the best I've been able to do. I took a leaf out of Druxey's book and put little brass pins in the top of the keel to fit in corresponding holes in the plug. I was hoping the guy across the road could make the holes with his drill press - I don't have one myself and I don't trust myself with a hand-held (electric) drill at this scale - the keel is about 4mm thick and the hole is 1.5mm diameter. But his chuck would take such a small drill-bit, so I had to go to Plan B. I used an awl and the pointy end of a triangular-section rat-tail file to start the hole, and then when it was well enough established I was able to make it bigger with the hand-drill. It all worked surprisingly well. I should have doe it this way earlier. The hole was still a bit tight and I was able to hammer the pins in (they're just brass escutcheon pins) and then cut off the heads. They sit nice and firmly. I've tried fitting the keel to the plug with the pins and it works well. As Eeyore said about his birthday present - it goes in and out like anything! I was fiddling with the keel and unfortunately I lost hold of it and it fell on the floor, and the tail broke off at the scarph joint. Perhaps a blessing in disguise - it makes fitting everything properly easier, and I can align it exactly against the plug when the time comes to glue it back together. But now the keel sits in place I've discovered that the wales are just a tiny bit too short (about 3 millimeters - 1/8") to join the keel properly at the stern. I'd got very disappointed at this, then - epiphany! I don't have to cut new pieces and scarph them to the wales to make them longer, I just need to re-shape the plug very slightly and shorten the keel a little (only a few millimeters), and they should come in nicely. A job for the coming weekend, perhaps, if i get the time. Oh, and I've found a contemporary picture showing a support for the steering oars which I like the look of. It's a Byzantine representation of scraping the hull of a ship. You don't see the steering oars, only the stocks the ship is up on, but the shape looks good. I'd been puzzling over what I was going to do and now I've got something I'm happy to go with. Steven

She's starting to look really good. Keep up the good work. By the way, another advantage of copper is that it's softer and easier to work than brass. (I know from personal experience working small scale in both metals - I'd far rather work with copper than brass). Steven

I saw them building the full-sized replica in Fremantle some years ago. I've still got a bit of oak they made from an off-cut with the name 'Duyfken' stamped on it. A rather treasured possession. Such a pretty ship. Steven

Very ingenious idea for the netting, Jim. I like it. Steven

Two down - Eight to go!

Eso es hermoso. Steven

Here are the last ten oars for the upper bank. First, sawn roughly to shape then trimmed to follow the outline of the oars. They'll take a few days (or evenings) to make, but it's good to see the end in sight. That's 40 oars carved with hand tools so far - and approaching 50. I won't be doing the lower bank until the hull is built, as I have to work out how they'll fit inside. I've got to the stage that I need to trim the wales to length so they can join the keel smoothly. Then I have to put metal pegs in the keel (something I learned from Druxey's latest build) so it lines up with the plug. As I don't have a drill press and I don't trust myself to be accurate enough with a hand drill, I have to wait till the guy across the road is available to help - which means I won't be doing it till the weekend. Getting the hull made is taking far longer than I expected - mainly because the things I've been doing towards it mostly can't be done in the evenings, so I go from weekend to weekend, and do 'fill-in' jobs like carving crewmen and oars (and lion's heads!) in the evenings between. Steven

Here are images of the 7th century Yassi Ada ship and the early 11th century Serc,e Limani ship lines and 3d image. Some things just don't change all that much. It's interesting that both ships of which we have the lines have very flat bottoms and an almost rectangular cross-section. Good for carrying cargo, maybe not so good for sailing. Steven

Are you going to square-rig it? The earliest reference I know to lateen rig is 6th century. Steven

And here's the picture from the sarcophagus. Pretty close, I think. Steven

More progress on the lion's head. I'm pretty pleased with him, but if I wanted him to be a copy of the Byzantine lion I saw in Istanbul I've missed out. If anything he's a bit too natural and not stylized enough . . . Here's the original And here's my carving With my hand for size comparison. I've made him with his mouth somewhat more open, so the Greek Fire nozzle can fit through. Still a way to go - got to do his mane and smooth him off. Then when the bow of the ship is finalized, I'll cut away at the back of the head to fit it to the ship. Steven

Though the ships I mentioned above are 6th to 11th century, I just came across a photo of a 3rd century Roman sarcophagus with a boat on it almost identical with your model. A very long-lived style. Steven

I've done some more since, and he's looking better still. But too dark for photography at the moment.

You're doing a beautiful job with the planking. I'm at about the same stage, and I know how frustrating it can be. But you're making good progress, and it just takes as long as it takes. Keep up the good work. She's taking shape well. Steven

So here's the latest photo of the lion's head. Still a fair way to go . . .

Very nice. That looks very much like the Serce Limani "glass wreck" ship and also several of the merchant ships uncovered at Yenikapi in Istanbul. Steven

Good luck with it. There'll never be an exact replica of the Golden Hind unless someone gets a time machine and goes back to have a look (and take photos, measure up etc). Whether she had a stern gallery, what her colour scheme was - all conjecture. But it's certainly possible to make a model of what she could have looked like and not be too far wrong. She may not have been a new ship in 1577, as Francis Drake renamed her on the voyage - she'd been the Pelican. According to Wikipedia, she was 100 feet long. You already have Mathew Baker which is probably your most reliable source, but (though these are not English), you might also look at the SO-1 wreck (see here) and the Red Bay wreck which sank in 1565 (see here and here. (there are also other websites available if you do a bit of a search). And the Swedish warship Mars, sunk in 1564 here And there's a thesis here on the evloution of hull design in sixteenth century ships of war which has some useful information in it. Have fun! Steven

I've pretty much got all the tweaking done on the wales and fairly happy with the result. I took my time this weekend, working on a single wale and getting it the way I wanted before moving onto the next one. A little bit of asymmetry at the bow between the port and starboard "gunwale", but I'll be able to fix that next weekend. I've also bent the two 'tail' pieces of the gunwale to go on the curved stern - one either side. Not totally happy with them - the "plank and nails" jig I made doesn't make as smooth a curve as I'd have liked, and I've had to cut and file the wales to shape. Which makes them thinner than the rest of the gunwale. I'd been planning to taper the gunwale at bow and stern anyway, but I'm not sure I haven't been forced into cutting too much of a taper. If it doesn't work, I've thought of another jig to make better ones. Then I cut scarph joints (my biggest bugbear to date) to join the tail pieces to the main gunwale. This means I now have to think about putting the actual structure of the hull together - wales, keel and frames. I have to admit it's a bit daunting - mainly scared of stuffing something up by carelessness and having to start over again and make new pieces. But if I'm careful and painstaking I'm hoping everything will turn out all right. I've got a bit of wood the same thickness as the keel so I can work out where and at what angle to cut the wales at bow and stern to fit smoothly when it comes to glue them to the keel. The flute player is nearly finished now. I've cut him off his stand, and he stands nicely on his feet. He's also got eyes now, and I've added folds in his tunic and a bit of structure to his hair so he doesn't look like he's wearing a Beatle wig (or for our Australian viewers, like Eric Bana doing an impression of Ray Martin). Maybe needs a bit of sanding still, but honestly the remaining roughness is invisible to the naked eye. I've realised the steersman has his arms up too high. If you kept them up there all the time you were steering you'd get tired arms very quickly. So I'm going to replace him with another guy I'd already been planning to make (to go on the other steering oar) and use this one as a sailor pulling on a rope. And rather than make a second steersman, I'm going to have only one rudder in the water and the other swivelled back out of the water (to reduce water resistance, apparently a fairly common practice). It should add a bit of interest (as well as meaning I don't have to make another steersman). Oh, and I've been working on the lion's head to go at the bow to house the Greek Fire siphon. The original was made out of metal, probably bronze, but I'm carving mine out of pear wood. He's looking pretty good so far, I think. I'm basing him on a Byzantine lion statue I photographed when I was in Istanbul many years ago. He started out looking like an angry Homer Simpson, but now he’s actually staring to resemble a lion!

It's coming together nicely. I think it requires a special kind of insanity to choose a galley to build a model of. You're doing a very good, methodical job, and it shows in your results. Steven

Druxey, I've had success with the jig and I'm happy to continue with it. I think the main problem was that I tried to sort out 6 wales in the time I should have been using to do one, or maybe two, properly. If there's not too much going on this weekend I should be able to have another go at it and not hurry this time, but concentrate on getting it right, even if I only finish one or two. (The wood is patient). Steven

Druxey, I'm soaking them in water, then bending them in a jig and using a heat gun on them to make the bend permanent. Some of it at least was my own fault in misreading my own notes on how much bend was needed.Normally it works well. I think I just had a bad hair day today. Plus I think I was trying to do too much too fast. Steven

One of those days, I'm afraid - rather frustrating. My attempts to tweak the shapes of the wales didn't work the way I wanted them to. The bends I'd made were either too sharp or too loose, or the wales seemed to be the same shape after I'd bent them as before I started. And it had all seemed so easy! Eventually I gave up - the alternative as I saw it, was to go ahead getting more and more frustrated and make mistakes - or trash the wales and throw the plug of the ship against the wall. So I decided to put it aside and come back when I was fresh. Some better news - my flute player has made a lot of progress. I've filed him smooth(er) - though there's still work to be done - and the stand has gone - he's now standing on his own two feet. Back next weekend, hopefully with better results. Steven