Louie da fly

Thanks for the input, Snug Harbor Johnny. In fact I've been making the groove with a scalpel. Much easier than with a power tool, though a little laborious. However, I'm still having trouble with the wood splitting, so I'm going to experiment with card impregnated with glue. I'll be using CA for one trial and PVA for the other and see how they compare. In the meantime here's my first new pair of deadeyes since about 1970. I've been aware that the paintwork needs some touching up. I'd like to keep it all as it was but the paintwork has deteriorated and been damaged over the years, as well as getting grubby despite my best efforts to clean it. Though some of the paintwork will stay, in a lot of places I've decided to re-paint properly. The patina of age is one thing, but grubbiness is another, and with the original intention of restoring her to her original glory as much as feasible I think the paintwork really has to be re-done in a lot of places. I put an initial coat of paint in various places, and it brought to light quite a few faults and breaks in the woodwork, particularly the arched ports for the handguns. So, out with the wood filler - a mix of PVA glue and "sawdust" from hand sanding the hull with fine sandpaper. I closed up all the gaps I could see . . . Then decided also to remedy the fact that the arched gunports for handguns were as big as those for the heavy guns. Filler dried Rough bits trimmed and arches cut to shape, plus another coat of paint. Next job is to fix up the fiddly painted decoration. If I were to use the much simpler decoration shown in the picture of the Great Harry in the Anthony Roll, my job would be easier. But as I'd committed myself to copying the Landström reconstruction which has decoration much more appropriate to Elizabethan galleons than Henrician great carracks, I've got quite a job of work ahead of me. Oh, and new channels for the mizzen shrouds to replace the missing and broken ones. The bonaventure mizzzen won't have channels, as that was how she was in Landström's reconstruction picture and in the model as I originally made her. Steven

Beautifully elucidated, Dick! This man inspired a whole generation in Australia to get interested in science. I remember him explaining why it's possible to boil an egg at the top of Mount Everest, despite the water boiling at a lower temperature because of lower air pressure. And for those who had a deprived upbringing . . .

Great stuff, Ken! The more mediaeval ships the merrier IMHO. There are several build logs on MSW for cogs/kogges etc. They may be helpful to you. You might also be interested in these contemporary representations of cogs - https://www.pinterest.com.au/lowe1847/mediaeval-cogs/ Steven

I love your analogue plotter. As Professor Julius Sumner Miller used to say "You could sack a city with that!" I take it you have it somehow fixed immovably to the hull of the ship while you do your "plot"? Steven

That's looking very good, Eric. We all have to make decisions on how far to take things, often constrained by things (often mistakes) that have occurred previously. I think the decisions you're making are totally spot-on. The braces (knees?) look very good and add to the verisimiltude (love that word!) of the model. The mast step is very interesting - one would have thought that they'd have made it as rigidly attached to the hull as possible. Instead they attached it to the thwarts! However, thinking about it, the forces involved would be spread over the whole length of the long mast-step assembly, so the force on any one thwart would have been quite small. This is reinforced by the frail connections of mast-steps on several Byzantine ships found in the Yenikapi dig in Istanbul - in some cases it seems to have been just resting on the keel! The rivets - well they might add to the look, but they're a very small item which may not even be very visible at any sort of distance. I can't see anybody getting too upset about leaving them off. In fact, I think many people who add treenails to their models (and obvious nails on coppering) are putting something there that would not be seen on the real thing. Overall, this is a model to be proud of. Keep up the good work. Steven

That's not uncommon from what I've seen in other build logs. Have a look at how others have solved the problem with Viking kits - or bypassed (fudged) it. It might help. Steven

Good to see you back, nose to the grindstone again. The new model looks very good, and your solution to the strake problem seems to be working. Who knows, when you're finished you might like to revisit the first model and fix it as well . . . or not . Steven

That planking is looking very good. I take it the bulkheads get discarded after you've got the planking done? Something that happened with me when I built a model on a plug was that the elasticity of the planks pulled the hull sides inward after I'd taken the plug out and before I could put the frames in. I had to put in some temporary structure to push the sides back out to their correct position. In your case you can probably avoid this problem if you replace each bulkhead with a frame, one at a time, rather than taking all the bulkheads out and then putting in the frames. Steven

Looking simultaneously suitably scruffy and aesthetically beautiful. Looking forward to the next instalment! Steven

And Basil Brown is of course played by Ralph Fiennes, probably best known as Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter. To paraphrase an old chestnut: Lord Voldemort has no nose. How does he smell? Terrible! Steven

Very nice, Desalgu.

Yes, hooped guns seem always to have been made of iron - basically, a bunch of iron "planks" put together edge to edge to make a cylinder and reinforced with hoops. Presumably the joints were forge-welded, though how you'd do that I have no idea. Bronze ones were cast. And there was another variety (which I still find hard to believe, but the evidence is incontrovertible) made of iron sheet rolled into a cylinder and welded at the join (!) Don't think I'd feel very confident using one of these - or even standing anywhere near it while it was being fired. Steven

And some footage of Basil Brown himself! https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/sutton_hoo_dig_collection/zs6xqfr

Thanks Roger and Druxey for the suggestions. Druxey, I don't have the equipment for the accuracy needed to use your technique; no drill press - not yet at any rate. It's in its box, waiting for electricity to be connected to the shed. Roger, if all else fails I may look at resin, but I'm trying to avoid modern materials as much as possible. I'd probably lean more toward card impregnated with glue - at least card's made out of wood . I'll keep these options in mind if needed, but so far I seem to be having success with the technique I'm using. Here are the mainmast starboard upper deadeyes attached to the shrouds. I'm still getting a bit of splitting when I enlarge the holes, but the thread is keeping the deadeyes in one piece. I think I can get this to work, as once the lanyards are threaded through I'll add a dab of glue to each where needed to keep everything together. Steven

Johnny, sounds like a very good idea. The only thing I'd recommend is make one strip first, and see how it goes. It would be a tragedy if you made a whole lot of them and they all turned out to be too narrow, so there wasn't enough deadwood next to the holes, causing them to split. Bookbinding sounds fascinating. The only thing I've ever done in the field is glue back together some of my old valued paperbacks in which the glue has deteriorated with age, causing the pages to come adrift - not very successfully, I might add Steven

Exactly Oh, and I was getting YK 12 (9th century) mixed up with the almost identical YK 11 (7th century). Steven

Thanks, people. J11 - it's not a kit. I scratch built it after drawing up the plans, based on a copy of the Anthony Roll picture, the coloured reconstruction picture on the first page of this log, and a reconstruction cross-section, all from Björn Landström's book The Ship. I must have been pretty keen when I was seventeen. Unfortunately my plans went the way of all flesh in the 50 years between building it and restoring it - I've no idea what happened to them. It'd be nice to have kept them as a record. Snug Harbor Johnny - just be aware I've changed my technique a bit - now instead of making the strip thick enough to get several deadeyes from one "triangle", I make it the final thickness of a single deadeye, and only try for one. Otherwise the extra ones just split. And I put the three holes near the top (not too close!) of a rectangular piece of wood with enough wood either side of the holes - and at the top - to avoid splitting, and I only do one deadeye at a time. And don't shape the triangle until the holes are in place. I expect your Vasa is a larger scale than mine anyway, so you probably won't have as much of a problem. Steven

I tried to find the Tapestry on-line; no luck. But Vroom would have been 29 when the battle took place, so there's a good chance he was at least familiar with the type of ship the Revenge was. He may have actually talked to people who knew what she looked like - he may even have seen her before she departed on her last voyage. On the other hand, he may have just made it up . . . Me too. I got hooked on Tolkien in my teens, way back in the 60's - bought the three-volume hardback LOTR out of my pocket money. I just recently re-read the Silmarillion. Only took about a week to recover . . . Steven

But did you get blood on the model? It doesn't count otherwise . . .

Lovely crisp detail work. Very impressive. Steven

Not a bad idea, Mark - head it off at the pass (as they say in the cowboy movies). Steven

Fascinating, Círdan (love the name, BTW - as in Círdan the Shipwright?). I've never seen these before. You're probably right. In Henry VIII's time it would have been more likely (as shown in the Anthony Roll), but by the reign of Elizabeth the palette was apparently a lot wider, if Matthew Baker is to be believed. I note that all the ships are depicted with only three masts. Is there any documentary evidence for the Revenge having four, or is that just imagination on the part of the kit manufacturers? Steven

In Germany a reconstruction has been built of the Oberstimm-type ship, called the Fridericiana Alexandrina Navis. It was built in 2016 and has recently been under maintenance, renewing the paintwork etc. https://www.egea-ev.de/projekte/ https://www.geschichte.phil.fau.de/files/2019/10/Ancient-Warfare-13.2_FAN_Dreyer.pdf For those who have facebook, you can see more at https://www.facebook.com/roemerbootFAN Steven

A bit of the history . . . And here's a video from the people in the UK who are building a full-sized replica: Here's their website - https://saxonship.org/?fbclid=IwAR2tmg3x4sTXGqSmQi60mBwmmIaJzlpQfs9BK1PWbSn9NkONbBwpwiF8gVQ fascinating! Steven

Thanks for all the likes and comments. Keith and Jeff, I think card is as likely to tear as wood is to split. But I'm amazed they make triangular card deadeyes that small. Druxey, I considered plastic, and even got some plastic to try out (just the lid off a coffee jar), but haven't got round to it. Now that I seem to have a workable technique I think I'll keep on with it (and anyway I'd prefer to use wood if I can - traditional material and all that). Once I've made all the 2mm deadeyes I have to work out how to make smaller ones - wood just won't do the job. But I have some ideas, probably involving thread and glue to make a composite "blob" that will act as a deadeye. Steven