Louie da fly
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And here's the picture from the sarcophagus. Pretty close, I think. Steven
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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
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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
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I've done some more since, and he's looking better still. But too dark for photography at the moment.
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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
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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
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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
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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!
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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
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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
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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
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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
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I've got all the wales made now, and temporarily attached to the plug. I'm pretty happy with the smoothness of the curve, and how symmetrical they are from port to starboard. There's still some tweaking to be done, as the latest wales don't follow the plug exactly at the tighter curves. I'll put them in my home made bending jig (a piece of wood with nails in it) and finalize the shapes. My pieces of wood were all just a little too short to do the gunwales in one long run, so I also have to make extra pieces for the tight curve at the 'tail' and scarph them to the gunwales. Then I'll round them to the correct cross-section, and they'll be done! Steven
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That's really interesting, Jack. A pity the scale isn't shown on the drawings so we could get some idea of how big these things were. Pretty obviously, the drawings are at all kinds of different scales, as the tholes are enormous compared with the rest of the items. Nice carvings, though. If the curved side of the steering oars is toward the bow, we can see by the sectional drawings that they are streamlined to give a smooth 'entry' and fairly blunt at the 'tail'. Further evidence that the Vikings had (as was already fairly obvious) a good practical knowledge of hydrodynamics. Steven
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Perhaps the kind of horn they called an oliphaunt, on account of because the first ones were made out of tusks.
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I've got four wales made and fitted onto the plug for the dromon now. I looked again at the Yenikapi archaeological finds and realised that I was trying to merge the wales of two different ships, so I had more wales than I should. So instead of having 5 wales each side, she'll only have three (including the "gunwale" (not really a good name - guns hadn't been invented). This is something of a relief, as I'm finding it rather hard going getting them to the shape I want, and I'm rather glad to be getting rid of 40% of my problem. I'm hoping to get the other two wales bent this weekend, and then tweak all of them so they're exactly the right shape. I've also done more on the flute player and one of the steersmen. The flute player's pretty much complete except for smoothing off. I won't be able to complete the steersman until I have the steering oars in position so I know exactly where his arms and hands should be. The flute is a separate piece, as there's no way I could carve it all from one bit of wood. So there's a hole for the flute to go through. Actually this is just my trial flute, to see if it worked. I'll be making a better one. When I'd got this far I so pleased with him I was very tempted to leave him as he was, but the photo makes him look a lot rougher than he looks to the naked eye. So I suppose I'll have to smooth him off after all. Here's the picture I modelled him on. He's the one in blue. I realise this could be taken as some sort of horn rather than a flute, as it doesn't have holes in the barrel as does the one held by the guy in the stern. But flute is the word the sources use, so as far as I'm concerned that's what he's playing. And anyway, I don't think there's any point putting finger holes in the flute at this kind of scale . . . By the way, note the tiller on the steering oar. Steven
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I'd never seen these oars before - thanks very much for posting them. But are those other things steering oars? It seems strange that there are three of them for a single ship. Steven
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Torbogdan, do Dusek specify the shapes of the bireme's oars? You might like to have a look at the contemporary representations of Ancient Greek galley oars among the images here. While doing my dromon, I've got very interested in oar shapes. I've made mine as close as I can to contemporary representations, but as no oars have ever been found, it's largely educated guesswork. Steven
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I think you have to take time and place into account, Druxey. I really don't know about the drum, but it certainly appeared in Hollywood epics like Ben Hur. But then they also perpetuated the myth that the Romans used slaves to man the galleys. Certainly, there is contemporary evidence for the use of flutes both in a Byzantine and an Ancient Greek context. The guys are 1:50 scale, and I've already made one. But I wasn't all that happy with him - I think these will be better. I'll be mass producing the oarsmen, and apart from them I'll have the two steersmen, the flute player and probably the captain reclining in his krabbatos. Steven
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I've now done 36 oars for the upper bank. Only 14 left to go! (I'm not going to do the lower bank until later, when the hull's pretty much made). I've bent several wales and have re-configured where the wales go, after having another look at the archaeological finds from Yenikapi. Looks like I won't have so many wales to do, which is a bonus. And I'm working on two figures - a steersman and a flute player (who gives the time to the oarsmen)
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I've broken and thrown away maybe 5 or 6 oars, but on purpose - they weren't good enough. I find that when I try to hurry, the quality goes down dramatically. Trouble is, I keep forgetting the lesson and have to re-learn it by messing up good oar-blanks.
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Very nice build, Jack. It'll be good to see it all displayed. I envy you only having to make 30 oars. My dromon has 100, and I don't have a lathe. I'm up to 36 so far . . .
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The other thing is that these ships were very vulnerable to the weather. They simply wouldn't have put out from a protected harbour if the winds were strong. Steven
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Yes, but that only really applies to ancient Greek vessels. Leo is pretty specific about the use of planks for the castles. Steven
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