Louie da fly

So I tried tightening up the lanyard on the deadeyes and for some reason they didn't tighten - then I looked at the bowsprit and discovered I had a problem. Way back on the first page of this build log (17 October 2018) I had to glue the bowsprit together. Trouble is, I used PVA (white) glue which is flexible. When I tightened up the lanyards, the bowsprit bent at the join. Wish I'd taken a photo - but here it is after I removed the lanyard. I cut a chunk out of the bowsprit each side of the join and inserted a piece of wood to support it (using CA, not PVA). I got the best colour match I could, but it wasn't perfect (though not as bad as it looks in the photo). And here it is with both sides joined Smoothed off It droops a tiny bit at the join, but I can't see I could have done a better job with all the constraints involved, so I'm satisfied enough with it. The only problem is that when I sanded it smooth it took the dark "aged" surface off the bowsprit. So I'll have to get clever and do a bit of colour matching. I'm currently thinking of using water colour paint. Steven

Strangely enough "lime juice" was lemon juice - much higher vitamin C content. Steven

I had to look this one up on Wikipedia (the Source of All Knowledge). Why would an American ship be called "England"? Of course, it was the surname of a naval war hero. Makes sense now. Steven

Nice work, mate. She's looking good. By the way, if you want to remove the second duplicate photo, click on the 3 dots at the top right of your post, click on "Edit" in the dropdown menu, and just right click on the photo and select "cut". Then save the post. But if you have two of the same photo in the "uploads" at the bottom, just hit the X at the top of one of them, and it'll do the same thing. Steven

You might be interested in something like the jig Kikatinalong made for his carrack - see I thought it was pretty cool. Wish I'd thought of it. Steven

Looking good, mate. Do you have a jig to hold the frames at right angles to the keel (in all three dimensions)? If not, I'd highly recommend getting/making one before you start assembly. Steven

Wonderful to see you back at the workface! That's looking very good so far. By the way, now you're back into it, it might be time to change the title of this thread by taking out the word "clarification". You do it by going to the very first post you made and click on the three dots at the top right of the post, then select "edit" from the drop-down menu and change the wording of the title. Looking forward to more progress on this. Steven

Nah, just bad lighting. They're quite a decent light brown colour, not dissimilar to the colour of rope. Steven

Well, the poor old Great Harry has been languishing while I've been working on the nef, but now I've been able get back to her. I hope she's not too upset with me. I've been puzzling over whether it's best to add stays first, or shrouds as all the texts seem to say. Seeing as the shrouds aren't standard anyway (when I first built the model I didn't know they looped around the top of the mast, so I just glued them to it just under the top and I also didn't know about cross-trees and trestle-trees), whatever I do will be a sort of bodge - but not visible unless you're really looking for it. There's some uncertainty about whether the stays were each kept tight with a pair of deadeyes, or pairs of blocks or hearts - I went with deadeyes. In fact I'd already made two pairs of way back when I built the ship - one pair for the main, and one pair for the fore - and I was planning to re-use them. Comes the time - I can't find them no matter how hard I look. Turned the whole workshop over - nothing! It must be those aliens again. So I decided I'd have to make new ones. And wouldn't you know it, just as I finished, the old ones turned up! But the new ones were nicer anyway, so I kept on with them. However, for the main I might as well put the stay on now and add the shrouds later. I drilled a hole in the floor of the top each side of the mast, then looped the stay through them. (I did the same for the foremast as well). At this point I made a mistake that I later had to go back and correct on all the masts. I tied the stay off in a loop at the top. What I should have done was to leave it loose for the time being, and only tie it off when I had the lower deadeye in place, and could work out the right position for the upper one. Fortunately I had enough loose cord that I could cut it and start again. So here's the lower deadeye for the forestay. For the mainstay I had to make a wide "loop" that passed each side of the foremast with the deadeye at the after end. I drilled two holes in the front face of the upper forecastle to take the loop, just above where the bowsprit comes out. And here's the loop and the lower deadeye: The loop passes under the bowsprit (not sure if this is correct, but it seemed to be the right thing to do) and the two ends joined together with a fake splice. The splice would probably be at the other end in the real world, but no-one will ever know - except you guys, of course. And here, finally, is the forestay with its deadeyes (lanyards not yet tightened up). And this is how I made sure the upper fore shrouds were taut - again, no room in the floor of the top for holes to do it properly, so I glued all four together at the upper end and glued the assembly to the mast just under the top. Once the glue was dry I threaded them through the railing of the lower top in the most appropriate places and hung a miniature clothes peg from each one to tighten it and glued it at the lower end. Then cut them to length once the glue was dry. Unfortunately, despite all the wonderful work henrythestaffy did 3d printing tiny deadeyes for me, after a lot of thought I've decided that trying to add them here is just too fiddly to be feasible. They would be minuscule and there's no way you could thread a lanyard through them, so I'm leaving them off. I'd also been agonising over how I was to do the futtock shrouds, but reading through R.C. Anderson's The Rigging of Ships in the Days of the Spritsail Topmast 1600-1720 I discovered that although from about 1620 "the deadeyes were connected to the lower shrouds by means of ropes called "puttocks" (later called futtock shrouds)" this was because "as soon as topsails began to be relatively large sails, it became impossible for the tops to stand the strain which would come on them if the deadeyes were fixed to them and them only." But in the early-mid 16th century, the time of the Great Harry, topsails were quite small, so there was no real need for the reinforcement provided by futtock shrouds. And checking on the only two contemporary pictures of her - from the Anthony Roll and the painting The Embarcation at Dover there's no sign of them! So I won't be fitting them. Steven

Well done, sir! Steven

I love your moulding (is that the same thing as a waterway? I had a similar problem with my two most recent builds - if you have decking and exposed frames, unless you put in something like this moulding, water will get through the gaps between the decking and the frames and end up in the bilges. At the scale I was using I couldn't even get the decking to meet the external planking perfectly, let alone do this moulding. Even a moulding running along the inner edges of the frames would help, as it would be a barrier to water running off the decking and into the bilges. Steven

PHOTOS! We need PHOTOS!!! Steven

I'm coming back to this build after quite a gap. You've done an amazing job, Ekis. It really feels like you're there. Steven

My bad, really. I shouldn't have mentioned the idea. Steven

Box gutters are a b*gger. Having spent my life designing houses, I try to steer very clear of them - they collect leaves and clog up, water doesn't have anywhere to go if they overflow. But the great majority of (Victorian) houses in Ballarat have them . . . including my own. Fortunately in our case, they haven't overflowed (yet - cross fingers). Steven

Yep, we had that bad weather up here in Ballarat, too. It was a bewdy. We got considerable flooding here - fortunately we live on top of a hill, so it didn't affect us personally. But it was all pretty dramatic - thunder, lightning, heavy downpour, big old trees blown over. I was glad I'd cleaned out the roof gutters about a week prior, thinking, "Well, it's summer, not likely to get much rain from now on. Good time to clean the gutters . . ." Keith's right, though. Victoria will be waiting for you when you're ready to get back to her. Steven

Great to have you back, mate! The ship is looking very good. Steven

Beautiful work, mate! Steven

My feeling entirely. It's not supposed to be a competition. I was going to put it on hold anyway, until I'd done a lot on Great Harry, or preferably finished it. In the meantime, there's plenty of research needed before anybody can even think of making sawdust. Steven

Oops! Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned it.

Yep - one of the issues I'm still trying to get my head around. But don't hold your breath. I don't expect to start on it until I've done a LOT more on the Great Harry - possibly even finish it. Maybe we could do parallel builds at the same time? Steven

Ok, first decision. The bow. Though Woodrat's similar ship has a bow like this: . . . which explains so many contemporary pictures where it looks mysteriously like this: . . . on my own it is pretty obvious the bow is different. For example, see the above post and this detail: The stempost in all examples curves back dramatically (there are slight variations in its configuration but whenever the stempost is visible the reverse curve is always there) and the bow seems to be fairly sharp. This bow shape is reinforced by the so-called Cocharelli Codex (Genoese, 1330-1340) which unusually shows several ships as seen from the front. This plus the fact that they look remarkably similar to the San Marco ships despite them being almost 200 years apart, leads me to think that this shape co-existed with that shown on Woodrat's ship, and that this is how the bow should be configured. Steven

Very good question, Richard. This very question has been discussed in post #165 (dated December 18, 2021) on Woodrat's Incredible Hulc thread at https://modelshipworld.com/topic/25641-the-incredible-hulc-by-woodrat-a-frumious-reconstruction/page/6/ Though this is somewhat later than the Viking period, it's the best we've got. There seems to be no evidence from the Vikings' time of how they reduced sail, though the way they controlled the sail looks very interesting! Here are another couple of pics of reef points from about 1200-1300; Steven

In the church of San Marco (Saint Mark's) in Venice is a series of mosaics celebrating the so-called "translation" of the body of Saint Mark from Alexandria to Venice, where he became the city's Patron Saint. "According to legend, Saint Mark’s body was taken from Alexandria, Egypt, in 828. Two Venetian merchants travelling in Alexandria, obtained the relics of Saint Mark from Priests at the church of Saint Mark, where the saint’s body was interred. The Priests feared Saint Mark’s relics might be damaged or destroyed by the Saracens during the persecution of the Catholic community in Alexandria. Promising to safeguard the Saint’s relics, the merchants convinced the Priests to allow them to return to Venice with the body of Saint Mark. The body of Saint Mark was taken out of the sarcophagus and unwrapped from its silk shroud, the relic being substituted by another and less eminent Saint. It was then placed in a chest and taken on board the Venetian ship, the merchants first ensuring, that the Saint’s remains were covered by a layer of pork and cabbage. When the Muslim officials asked to inspect the chest, they cried out ‘Kanzir, kanzir’ (Oh horror) at the sight and smell of the pork. . . . Thus the Evangelist was safely conveyed to Venice but not before a number of miracles eased his passage across the Mediterranean.” There are five mosaic panels showing the ship itself at various stages of the voyage. They are all very much the same - three masted, lateen rigged, with two side-rudders - but with minor variations in the shape of the aftercastle, the stempost, the line of the gunwale etc. Some of these variations don't make a lot of sense and I am going to have to reconcile them and come up with a version that I'm happy with. This is a rather difficult ship to get a good concept of, but I was inspired by a couple of sketches on a Facebook forum by Wagdemar Lookomsky (I hope he doesn't mind me posting them here) which finally suggested a configuration for this ship that made sense. I'll be using these as a basis for my own reconstruction, but I won't be copying them exactly. I will be basing the hull shape mainly on that of the 14th century Contarina ship which Woodrat has already used for his 14th century Venetian Round Ship (see https://modelshipworld.com/topic/17991-venetian-round-ship-13th-century-by-woodrat-132-scale-fully-framed-completed/ ) and I will be shamelessly copying much of his technique in building my own (though at a smaller scale). However, this is at the research stage at the moment. First I want to get a lot more done on my Great Harry restoration, which as languished while I built my nef. But this is a bit of a heads-up for those who are interested. Steven

Oh, yes! Just out of interest, you might find this amusing: "the leading genuine fake Russian choir in Southern Hemisphere" By the way, even the name is a joke. An Esky is the Australian name for what might be called a chilly bin or a cooler (for keeping your beer in). So the band is named for a dusty esky . . . . And the Australian town of Mullumbimby ("Mullum" to the locals) becomes Mullumgrad. Steven