Louie da fly

That's such a beautiful looking ship.

That's what I thought. Thanks.

That is a windlass just under the break of the sterncastle, isn't it?

Very true. I have to force myself to stay focussed on my current build - otherwise I'd be starting all kinds of new ones. I have a list a mile long of models I'd like to make, and it takes a considerable mental effort to keep on the same one and get it finished, particularly when I'm doing something repetitve and boring, but necessary to finish the model.
 
Even now I've got two under way rather than one, but I've at least put one on hold till the other is finished.

Ok, but my coffee's getting cold . . . 

Thought you might find this interesting: 
 

Working on the very final pair of oarsmen. Arms carved and glued on, and holes drilled at the shoulders for bamboo pivots, to fix the arms firmly to the body and allow me to swivel the arms for best fit to the oarhandle without them breaking off:
 
     
 
 
Filler added - rather than try to get each pair of arms exactly right (an almost possible task fitting and re-fitting to both rower and angled oar-handle) I carved them so the hands fitted on the handle as close as I could make it, and allowed a bit of extra at the shoulder, and added filler to close up any discrepancies.
 
  
 
And trimmed to shape and sanded smooth
 
     
 
And finally, painted. 
 

 
And, at last, all the oarsmen in place! (breathes great sigh of relief).

    
 
  
 

 
 

 
If I never carve any oarsmen again, it will be too soon!
 
Another thing.  I discovered the halyard knights were really too small - they were only about half a metre (18 inches) tall at 1:50 scale - this is the knight for the after mast, but the foremast one is pretty much identical. 
 

 
so I made new ones about waist height.
 

 
Then I thought about it some more and decided they might be tall enough now, but probably a bit flimsy to take the forces imposed on them by the halyards. So I made heftier ones.
 

 
Pretty happy with these now. A real milestone achieved.
 
 
 

Yes, you're quite right, Phil. Blame it on Liteflight - he started it .
 
The one about the Queen sounds vaguely like the old children's rhyme "Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day" and "Mots d'heures gousses rames" is "Mother Goose Rhymes" (Mère l'Oye). 
 
But "Let Stalk Strine" is "Let's Talk Australian" spoken with an Aussie accent. It took me years to find out that the "Afferbeck Lauder" who supposedly compiled the book is just "Alphabetical Order". Gloria soame is "glorious home" and terror souse  is "terrace house". I'll leave the others for your ingenuity to sort out. (The first to guess them gets an all-expenses paid trip to Outer Mongolia on a yak).
 
By the way, just on an incredibly picky linguistic point, the word réveillez seems to imply the meaning of "Re-awaken", presumably return to wakefulness after being asleep (otherwise why is the syllable re- in there?). Perhaps there was once a word éveiller which meant "to wake" - not from sleep but from the normal human state of unawareness? After all, (at least according to that fount of all knowledge Google Translate) the word éveillé means awake. And yes, éveille would be the second person singular imperative of the verb éveiller. I admit that using tu when addressing the queen is a bit disrespectful, however. But otherwise the joke doesn't work . . .
***********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Now back onto the actual topic of the thread (yes, I've derailed my own thread again), here's some photos of what I've been working on lately. And a warning to the wise - think ahead and don't make things out of sequence! I made the xylokastra (wooden side castles) back in October - December 2018, almost 2 years ago. But more importantly, I made them before I put the oarbenches in. So, guess what? The columns that support the castles don't fit in the spaces between the benches. No matter what I do I can't make them fit. 
 
   
 
The red squares below show where the columns should go. Unfortunately they don't.
 

 
(By the way, I neglected to mention that I'd finished all the rope loops attaching the oars to the tholes - you can see them in the photo above)
 
After great rending soul-searching, I finally decided my only option was to re-make the castles. Which was a real pain, because I'd spent so long painting them with pretty patterns and it looked like I was going to have to do it all over again. I slept on it and came upwith a cunning plan - if I kept the top part with all the pretty painting, re-made the columns, cut the arches apart and put them between the columns, I might be able to re-use almost everything if I was prepared to bodge sufficiently.
 
I'd always been unsatisfied with the old columns anyway. I'd just joined them to the top structure by putting a dab of glue on the tops, and right from the start they'd begun to come loose. You can see this on the far right column in the picture above, but they all did it. A more secure method of attachment would be a definite improvement. So I made a whole set of new columns - each carved to the full height of the castle structure from a single piece of wood, so there was no join between the column and the bottom of the arches.
 

 
Here's the first one in progress. As the column is now made from a single long piece of wood, the capital had to be built up by gluing thin strips around the column and then sanding them to shape.
 
   
 
 

 
 
Here is one of the old castles, with the two new end columns and a beam joining them. The beam will be below the floor structure, but as it'll be behind the arches it won't really be visible. Actually, I got the position of the beam wrong. If you look at the next photo I've moved it up to the correct height.
 

 
So, then I pulled the old castle to bits:
 

 
The old columns (and their capitals) are likely to get thrown out. I've scored between the arches, but won't separate them until I'm ready to use them.
 
And here is the old superstructure glued to the new column assembly. The Vegemite jar is now mult-tasking as a weight to keep everything in place. And with one of the end panels glued in place.
 
     
 
Note - the big worry I had was that the new configuration of the castle structure was wider than the old one because it had to fit between the benches, which was the problem I was trying to solve. But by adding the end columns to the ends of the castle, I'd made it just the right amount longer, and it still looked good.
 
I've since realised that it's better to have the intermediate columns only coming up to the bottom of the castle floor, as then I wouldn't have to change the battlements. So I'll cut those columns shorter before I add them.
 
And here are the results of my experimentation with dye colours. I already had thin cotton in the colour I wanted (the reel on the far left) and my purpose was to dye thicker white thread to match that colour. I had dye in "brown" and "tan" and tried various mixtures. My first attempt is on the far right - just brown in two different strengths and dipped for different times. The dark one I'm keeping for tarred rope - it's not black but dark brown, but that's probably closer to the colour of rope tarred with natural tar.
 

 
The others are various mixes of the two colours in different strengths, but none of them achieved the colour I wanted. I showed it to my lovely wife (the expert in this sort of thing) and she said "It needs green". "Oh, and you have a packet of green dye that's been hanging around ever since I've known you." She added green dye to the mix - and - perfect! The thread next to the reel on the left is the end result. I'm very happy with it.
 
There's more going to come - I'll add an update in the next few days.
 

Oh, man, good fix. That's a soul-wrenching discovery.

Well, back on topic. It was a fun diversion, though! I'm sure that the full-length columns will be less likely to collapse than the originals, so perhaps it was a fortunate accident. Glad you could save the decorative painted part of the xylokastra.
 
Stupid question: couldn't you find thread in the color you needed without having to make the witches' brew of dye?

Yes, you're quite right, Phil. Blame it on Liteflight - he started it .
 
The one about the Queen sounds vaguely like the old children's rhyme "Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day" and "Mots d'heures gousses rames" is "Mother Goose Rhymes" (Mère l'Oye). 
 
But "Let Stalk Strine" is "Let's Talk Australian" spoken with an Aussie accent. It took me years to find out that the "Afferbeck Lauder" who supposedly compiled the book is just "Alphabetical Order". Gloria soame is "glorious home" and terror souse  is "terrace house". I'll leave the others for your ingenuity to sort out. (The first to guess them gets an all-expenses paid trip to Outer Mongolia on a yak).
 
By the way, just on an incredibly picky linguistic point, the word réveillez seems to imply the meaning of "Re-awaken", presumably return to wakefulness after being asleep (otherwise why is the syllable re- in there?). Perhaps there was once a word éveiller which meant "to wake" - not from sleep but from the normal human state of unawareness? After all, (at least according to that fount of all knowledge Google Translate) the word éveillé means awake. And yes, éveille would be the second person singular imperative of the verb éveiller. I admit that using tu when addressing the queen is a bit disrespectful, however. But otherwise the joke doesn't work . . .
***********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Now back onto the actual topic of the thread (yes, I've derailed my own thread again), here's some photos of what I've been working on lately. And a warning to the wise - think ahead and don't make things out of sequence! I made the xylokastra (wooden side castles) back in October - December 2018, almost 2 years ago. But more importantly, I made them before I put the oarbenches in. So, guess what? The columns that support the castles don't fit in the spaces between the benches. No matter what I do I can't make them fit. 
 
   
 
The red squares below show where the columns should go. Unfortunately they don't.
 

 
(By the way, I neglected to mention that I'd finished all the rope loops attaching the oars to the tholes - you can see them in the photo above)
 
After great rending soul-searching, I finally decided my only option was to re-make the castles. Which was a real pain, because I'd spent so long painting them with pretty patterns and it looked like I was going to have to do it all over again. I slept on it and came upwith a cunning plan - if I kept the top part with all the pretty painting, re-made the columns, cut the arches apart and put them between the columns, I might be able to re-use almost everything if I was prepared to bodge sufficiently.
 
I'd always been unsatisfied with the old columns anyway. I'd just joined them to the top structure by putting a dab of glue on the tops, and right from the start they'd begun to come loose. You can see this on the far right column in the picture above, but they all did it. A more secure method of attachment would be a definite improvement. So I made a whole set of new columns - each carved to the full height of the castle structure from a single piece of wood, so there was no join between the column and the bottom of the arches.
 

 
Here's the first one in progress. As the column is now made from a single long piece of wood, the capital had to be built up by gluing thin strips around the column and then sanding them to shape.
 
   
 
 

 
 
Here is one of the old castles, with the two new end columns and a beam joining them. The beam will be below the floor structure, but as it'll be behind the arches it won't really be visible. Actually, I got the position of the beam wrong. If you look at the next photo I've moved it up to the correct height.
 

 
So, then I pulled the old castle to bits:
 

 
The old columns (and their capitals) are likely to get thrown out. I've scored between the arches, but won't separate them until I'm ready to use them.
 
And here is the old superstructure glued to the new column assembly. The Vegemite jar is now mult-tasking as a weight to keep everything in place. And with one of the end panels glued in place.
 
     
 
Note - the big worry I had was that the new configuration of the castle structure was wider than the old one because it had to fit between the benches, which was the problem I was trying to solve. But by adding the end columns to the ends of the castle, I'd made it just the right amount longer, and it still looked good.
 
I've since realised that it's better to have the intermediate columns only coming up to the bottom of the castle floor, as then I wouldn't have to change the battlements. So I'll cut those columns shorter before I add them.
 
And here are the results of my experimentation with dye colours. I already had thin cotton in the colour I wanted (the reel on the far left) and my purpose was to dye thicker white thread to match that colour. I had dye in "brown" and "tan" and tried various mixtures. My first attempt is on the far right - just brown in two different strengths and dipped for different times. The dark one I'm keeping for tarred rope - it's not black but dark brown, but that's probably closer to the colour of rope tarred with natural tar.
 

 
The others are various mixes of the two colours in different strengths, but none of them achieved the colour I wanted. I showed it to my lovely wife (the expert in this sort of thing) and she said "It needs green". "Oh, and you have a packet of green dye that's been hanging around ever since I've known you." She added green dye to the mix - and - perfect! The thread next to the reel on the left is the end result. I'm very happy with it.
 
There's more going to come - I'll add an update in the next few days.
 

Yes, you're quite right, Phil. Blame it on Liteflight - he started it .
 
The one about the Queen sounds vaguely like the old children's rhyme "Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day" and "Mots d'heures gousses rames" is "Mother Goose Rhymes" (Mère l'Oye). 
 
But "Let Stalk Strine" is "Let's Talk Australian" spoken with an Aussie accent. It took me years to find out that the "Afferbeck Lauder" who supposedly compiled the book is just "Alphabetical Order". Gloria soame is "glorious home" and terror souse  is "terrace house". I'll leave the others for your ingenuity to sort out. (The first to guess them gets an all-expenses paid trip to Outer Mongolia on a yak).
 
By the way, just on an incredibly picky linguistic point, the word réveillez seems to imply the meaning of "Re-awaken", presumably return to wakefulness after being asleep (otherwise why is the syllable re- in there?). Perhaps there was once a word éveiller which meant "to wake" - not from sleep but from the normal human state of unawareness? After all, (at least according to that fount of all knowledge Google Translate) the word éveillé means awake. And yes, éveille would be the second person singular imperative of the verb éveiller. I admit that using tu when addressing the queen is a bit disrespectful, however. But otherwise the joke doesn't work . . .
***********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Now back onto the actual topic of the thread (yes, I've derailed my own thread again), here's some photos of what I've been working on lately. And a warning to the wise - think ahead and don't make things out of sequence! I made the xylokastra (wooden side castles) back in October - December 2018, almost 2 years ago. But more importantly, I made them before I put the oarbenches in. So, guess what? The columns that support the castles don't fit in the spaces between the benches. No matter what I do I can't make them fit. 
 
   
 
The red squares below show where the columns should go. Unfortunately they don't.
 

 
(By the way, I neglected to mention that I'd finished all the rope loops attaching the oars to the tholes - you can see them in the photo above)
 
After great rending soul-searching, I finally decided my only option was to re-make the castles. Which was a real pain, because I'd spent so long painting them with pretty patterns and it looked like I was going to have to do it all over again. I slept on it and came upwith a cunning plan - if I kept the top part with all the pretty painting, re-made the columns, cut the arches apart and put them between the columns, I might be able to re-use almost everything if I was prepared to bodge sufficiently.
 
I'd always been unsatisfied with the old columns anyway. I'd just joined them to the top structure by putting a dab of glue on the tops, and right from the start they'd begun to come loose. You can see this on the far right column in the picture above, but they all did it. A more secure method of attachment would be a definite improvement. So I made a whole set of new columns - each carved to the full height of the castle structure from a single piece of wood, so there was no join between the column and the bottom of the arches.
 

 
Here's the first one in progress. As the column is now made from a single long piece of wood, the capital had to be built up by gluing thin strips around the column and then sanding them to shape.
 
   
 
 

 
 
Here is one of the old castles, with the two new end columns and a beam joining them. The beam will be below the floor structure, but as it'll be behind the arches it won't really be visible. Actually, I got the position of the beam wrong. If you look at the next photo I've moved it up to the correct height.
 

 
So, then I pulled the old castle to bits:
 

 
The old columns (and their capitals) are likely to get thrown out. I've scored between the arches, but won't separate them until I'm ready to use them.
 
And here is the old superstructure glued to the new column assembly. The Vegemite jar is now mult-tasking as a weight to keep everything in place. And with one of the end panels glued in place.
 
     
 
Note - the big worry I had was that the new configuration of the castle structure was wider than the old one because it had to fit between the benches, which was the problem I was trying to solve. But by adding the end columns to the ends of the castle, I'd made it just the right amount longer, and it still looked good.
 
I've since realised that it's better to have the intermediate columns only coming up to the bottom of the castle floor, as then I wouldn't have to change the battlements. So I'll cut those columns shorter before I add them.
 
And here are the results of my experimentation with dye colours. I already had thin cotton in the colour I wanted (the reel on the far left) and my purpose was to dye thicker white thread to match that colour. I had dye in "brown" and "tan" and tried various mixtures. My first attempt is on the far right - just brown in two different strengths and dipped for different times. The dark one I'm keeping for tarred rope - it's not black but dark brown, but that's probably closer to the colour of rope tarred with natural tar.
 

 
The others are various mixes of the two colours in different strengths, but none of them achieved the colour I wanted. I showed it to my lovely wife (the expert in this sort of thing) and she said "It needs green". "Oh, and you have a packet of green dye that's been hanging around ever since I've known you." She added green dye to the mix - and - perfect! The thread next to the reel on the left is the end result. I'm very happy with it.
 
There's more going to come - I'll add an update in the next few days.
 

Yes, you're quite right, Phil. Blame it on Liteflight - he started it .
 
The one about the Queen sounds vaguely like the old children's rhyme "Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day" and "Mots d'heures gousses rames" is "Mother Goose Rhymes" (Mère l'Oye). 
 
But "Let Stalk Strine" is "Let's Talk Australian" spoken with an Aussie accent. It took me years to find out that the "Afferbeck Lauder" who supposedly compiled the book is just "Alphabetical Order". Gloria soame is "glorious home" and terror souse  is "terrace house". I'll leave the others for your ingenuity to sort out. (The first to guess them gets an all-expenses paid trip to Outer Mongolia on a yak).
 
By the way, just on an incredibly picky linguistic point, the word réveillez seems to imply the meaning of "Re-awaken", presumably return to wakefulness after being asleep (otherwise why is the syllable re- in there?). Perhaps there was once a word éveiller which meant "to wake" - not from sleep but from the normal human state of unawareness? After all, (at least according to that fount of all knowledge Google Translate) the word éveillé means awake. And yes, éveille would be the second person singular imperative of the verb éveiller. I admit that using tu when addressing the queen is a bit disrespectful, however. But otherwise the joke doesn't work . . .
***********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Now back onto the actual topic of the thread (yes, I've derailed my own thread again), here's some photos of what I've been working on lately. And a warning to the wise - think ahead and don't make things out of sequence! I made the xylokastra (wooden side castles) back in October - December 2018, almost 2 years ago. But more importantly, I made them before I put the oarbenches in. So, guess what? The columns that support the castles don't fit in the spaces between the benches. No matter what I do I can't make them fit. 
 
   
 
The red squares below show where the columns should go. Unfortunately they don't.
 

 
(By the way, I neglected to mention that I'd finished all the rope loops attaching the oars to the tholes - you can see them in the photo above)
 
After great rending soul-searching, I finally decided my only option was to re-make the castles. Which was a real pain, because I'd spent so long painting them with pretty patterns and it looked like I was going to have to do it all over again. I slept on it and came upwith a cunning plan - if I kept the top part with all the pretty painting, re-made the columns, cut the arches apart and put them between the columns, I might be able to re-use almost everything if I was prepared to bodge sufficiently.
 
I'd always been unsatisfied with the old columns anyway. I'd just joined them to the top structure by putting a dab of glue on the tops, and right from the start they'd begun to come loose. You can see this on the far right column in the picture above, but they all did it. A more secure method of attachment would be a definite improvement. So I made a whole set of new columns - each carved to the full height of the castle structure from a single piece of wood, so there was no join between the column and the bottom of the arches.
 

 
Here's the first one in progress. As the column is now made from a single long piece of wood, the capital had to be built up by gluing thin strips around the column and then sanding them to shape.
 
   
 
 

 
 
Here is one of the old castles, with the two new end columns and a beam joining them. The beam will be below the floor structure, but as it'll be behind the arches it won't really be visible. Actually, I got the position of the beam wrong. If you look at the next photo I've moved it up to the correct height.
 

 
So, then I pulled the old castle to bits:
 

 
The old columns (and their capitals) are likely to get thrown out. I've scored between the arches, but won't separate them until I'm ready to use them.
 
And here is the old superstructure glued to the new column assembly. The Vegemite jar is now mult-tasking as a weight to keep everything in place. And with one of the end panels glued in place.
 
     
 
Note - the big worry I had was that the new configuration of the castle structure was wider than the old one because it had to fit between the benches, which was the problem I was trying to solve. But by adding the end columns to the ends of the castle, I'd made it just the right amount longer, and it still looked good.
 
I've since realised that it's better to have the intermediate columns only coming up to the bottom of the castle floor, as then I wouldn't have to change the battlements. So I'll cut those columns shorter before I add them.
 
And here are the results of my experimentation with dye colours. I already had thin cotton in the colour I wanted (the reel on the far left) and my purpose was to dye thicker white thread to match that colour. I had dye in "brown" and "tan" and tried various mixtures. My first attempt is on the far right - just brown in two different strengths and dipped for different times. The dark one I'm keeping for tarred rope - it's not black but dark brown, but that's probably closer to the colour of rope tarred with natural tar.
 

 
The others are various mixes of the two colours in different strengths, but none of them achieved the colour I wanted. I showed it to my lovely wife (the expert in this sort of thing) and she said "It needs green". "Oh, and you have a packet of green dye that's been hanging around ever since I've known you." She added green dye to the mix - and - perfect! The thread next to the reel on the left is the end result. I'm very happy with it.
 
There's more going to come - I'll add an update in the next few days.
 

While sitting here in Kea Island and planning my next project i remembered a piece of history well known to locals but unknown to most foreign visitors which come to the island for the hot sun and its crystal clear blue waters.
 
Lambros Katsonis was a Greek revolutionary hero of the 18th century; he was also a knight of the Russian Empire and an officer with the rank of colonel in the Imperial Russian Navy, decorated with an Order of  St George IV class medal. Born in Levadia he joined the Orlov Revolt in 1770, but not pleased by the result he built up a small fleet and began harassing the Ottomans in the Aegean Sea. In 1778 he assembled a Greek pirate fleet of seventy vessels, which harassed the Turkish squadrons in the Aegean and forced the Ottomans to abandon the island of Kastelorizo.
The Sultan, aware of his achievements tried to bribe him by offering an Island. Instead, Katsonis refused and continued  harassing the Ottoman's fleet and trying to inspirate the rest of the Greeks in an arm race against the Turks.
In August 3, 1789 his flagship was chased by  26 Ottoman ships near Makronisos Island. Katsonis managed to escape to Agios Nikolaos bay in Kea, where the central port of the island is located until today. The Ottomans anchored just outside the bay waiting for him.
However Katsonis came up with an idea. He sent his sailors ashore, they cut several tree trunks, spreaded all over them with pork fat and lay them down at a narrow piece of land, known as Koka Straight. Then he ordered his men to tow the ship over the trunks until it slipped to the other side , straight to the Aegean sea. By the next morning  and when the Ottomans realised that  Katsonis had escaped, they attacked the port of Kea burning it to the ground and killing hundreds of civilians.
In May 6 1790 Katsonis and his fleet of seven ships faced the Ottomans with 20 vessels. Before dark, Katsonis although outnumbered had gained a tactical advantage over his enemy. Then, a force of 11 Algerian pirate ships hired by the Sultan, joined the battle at the Ottomans side.  Katsonis  managed to escape but he had lost 5 of his ships and over 600 well trained men. Ottomans and Algerians lost over 3000 men while half of their force was sunk or put out of action. They attacked Kea again and in October they sailed to Istanbul where they celebrate their victory by hunging from the ship's masts  about 50 prisoners from Katsonis crew.
Katsonis was a unique ocassion who even defeated was decorated and promoted for his actions from Cathrine the Great of Russia. Later  Russian and Ottoman Empire signed a peace treaty. Katsonis was ordered to cease hostile activities but he denied.  His disobidience was the reason that he got banned from the Russian fleet. He returned to Greece dealing with the rise of the Revolutionary party. Then in June 1792 his fleet while anchored at Mani Bay was attacked by a joined force of Ottoman and French comprised of 30 vessels. After a 3 day battle Katsonis managed to escape to Ithaca then returned to Russia with his family where he rejoined the Russian Fleet until he retired.
 

Yes, you're quite right, Phil. Blame it on Liteflight - he started it .
 
The one about the Queen sounds vaguely like the old children's rhyme "Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day" and "Mots d'heures gousses rames" is "Mother Goose Rhymes" (Mère l'Oye). 
 
But "Let Stalk Strine" is "Let's Talk Australian" spoken with an Aussie accent. It took me years to find out that the "Afferbeck Lauder" who supposedly compiled the book is just "Alphabetical Order". Gloria soame is "glorious home" and terror souse  is "terrace house". I'll leave the others for your ingenuity to sort out. (The first to guess them gets an all-expenses paid trip to Outer Mongolia on a yak).
 
By the way, just on an incredibly picky linguistic point, the word réveillez seems to imply the meaning of "Re-awaken", presumably return to wakefulness after being asleep (otherwise why is the syllable re- in there?). Perhaps there was once a word éveiller which meant "to wake" - not from sleep but from the normal human state of unawareness? After all, (at least according to that fount of all knowledge Google Translate) the word éveillé means awake. And yes, éveille would be the second person singular imperative of the verb éveiller. I admit that using tu when addressing the queen is a bit disrespectful, however. But otherwise the joke doesn't work . . .
***********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Now back onto the actual topic of the thread (yes, I've derailed my own thread again), here's some photos of what I've been working on lately. And a warning to the wise - think ahead and don't make things out of sequence! I made the xylokastra (wooden side castles) back in October - December 2018, almost 2 years ago. But more importantly, I made them before I put the oarbenches in. So, guess what? The columns that support the castles don't fit in the spaces between the benches. No matter what I do I can't make them fit. 
 
   
 
The red squares below show where the columns should go. Unfortunately they don't.
 

 
(By the way, I neglected to mention that I'd finished all the rope loops attaching the oars to the tholes - you can see them in the photo above)
 
After great rending soul-searching, I finally decided my only option was to re-make the castles. Which was a real pain, because I'd spent so long painting them with pretty patterns and it looked like I was going to have to do it all over again. I slept on it and came upwith a cunning plan - if I kept the top part with all the pretty painting, re-made the columns, cut the arches apart and put them between the columns, I might be able to re-use almost everything if I was prepared to bodge sufficiently.
 
I'd always been unsatisfied with the old columns anyway. I'd just joined them to the top structure by putting a dab of glue on the tops, and right from the start they'd begun to come loose. You can see this on the far right column in the picture above, but they all did it. A more secure method of attachment would be a definite improvement. So I made a whole set of new columns - each carved to the full height of the castle structure from a single piece of wood, so there was no join between the column and the bottom of the arches.
 

 
Here's the first one in progress. As the column is now made from a single long piece of wood, the capital had to be built up by gluing thin strips around the column and then sanding them to shape.
 
   
 
 

 
 
Here is one of the old castles, with the two new end columns and a beam joining them. The beam will be below the floor structure, but as it'll be behind the arches it won't really be visible. Actually, I got the position of the beam wrong. If you look at the next photo I've moved it up to the correct height.
 

 
So, then I pulled the old castle to bits:
 

 
The old columns (and their capitals) are likely to get thrown out. I've scored between the arches, but won't separate them until I'm ready to use them.
 
And here is the old superstructure glued to the new column assembly. The Vegemite jar is now mult-tasking as a weight to keep everything in place. And with one of the end panels glued in place.
 
     
 
Note - the big worry I had was that the new configuration of the castle structure was wider than the old one because it had to fit between the benches, which was the problem I was trying to solve. But by adding the end columns to the ends of the castle, I'd made it just the right amount longer, and it still looked good.
 
I've since realised that it's better to have the intermediate columns only coming up to the bottom of the castle floor, as then I wouldn't have to change the battlements. So I'll cut those columns shorter before I add them.
 
And here are the results of my experimentation with dye colours. I already had thin cotton in the colour I wanted (the reel on the far left) and my purpose was to dye thicker white thread to match that colour. I had dye in "brown" and "tan" and tried various mixtures. My first attempt is on the far right - just brown in two different strengths and dipped for different times. The dark one I'm keeping for tarred rope - it's not black but dark brown, but that's probably closer to the colour of rope tarred with natural tar.
 

 
The others are various mixes of the two colours in different strengths, but none of them achieved the colour I wanted. I showed it to my lovely wife (the expert in this sort of thing) and she said "It needs green". "Oh, and you have a packet of green dye that's been hanging around ever since I've known you." She added green dye to the mix - and - perfect! The thread next to the reel on the left is the end result. I'm very happy with it.
 
There's more going to come - I'll add an update in the next few days.
 

Probably. French is by no means my first language - but gueux turns out to mean beggars, not peasants  . . .

Looking good. That will be a very attractve boat when it's finished.

That makes a huge difference. Starting to look really good!

Beautiful clean work, Ondras. You're doing wonderful work.

You're right. It's called the "sheer". From https://www.marineinsight.com/naval-architecture/hull-ship-understanding-design-characteristics/
 
"Sheer: The upward curve formed by the main deck with reference to the level of the deck at the midship, is called sheer. It is usually given to allow flow of green water from the forward and aft ends to the midship and allow drainage to the bilges. The forward sheer is usually more than the aft sheer to protect the forward anchoring machinery from the waves."

What can I say? As usual, superb work, Dick. Beautifully precise work on those exposed deck-beams, too.

Pat, Dick's been very naughty. The hulc has probably had more controversy over its form, shape, construction, than any other vessel. But constructing a model of one per the current academic theory - that it had no stempost or sternpost and that the planks were in "reverse clinker" (overlapped upwards) would be interesting.

Probably. French is by no means my first language - but gueux turns out to mean beggars, not peasants  . . .

Probably. French is by no means my first language - but gueux turns out to mean beggars, not peasants  . . .

OC, I'm gobsmacked by the quality of the paintwork on your figures. My dromon oarsmen are pretty much the same scale as yours, but the paintwork on mine is much more basic and plain - I haven't the skill to do the kind of shading you've done.
 
(OTOH you didn't have to carve all yours! )
 
BTW, I don't know if anybody's mentioned it before, and at the risk of sending you off on another tangent, have you read "Death to the French" by C. S. Forester? It's a novel about a rifleman who gets separated from his unit during the British withdrawal to the Torres Vedras in the Spanish campaign, and lives off the land fighting the French until their retreat as the British advance, and he is able to rejoin his unit. Fictional (apparently) but with fascinating period detail of what it must have been like to serve as a rifleman at the time.

Working on the very final pair of oarsmen. Arms carved and glued on, and holes drilled at the shoulders for bamboo pivots, to fix the arms firmly to the body and allow me to swivel the arms for best fit to the oarhandle without them breaking off:
 
     
 
 
Filler added - rather than try to get each pair of arms exactly right (an almost possible task fitting and re-fitting to both rower and angled oar-handle) I carved them so the hands fitted on the handle as close as I could make it, and allowed a bit of extra at the shoulder, and added filler to close up any discrepancies.
 
  
 
And trimmed to shape and sanded smooth
 
     
 
And finally, painted. 
 

 
And, at last, all the oarsmen in place! (breathes great sigh of relief).

    
 
  
 

 
 

 
If I never carve any oarsmen again, it will be too soon!
 
Another thing.  I discovered the halyard knights were really too small - they were only about half a metre (18 inches) tall at 1:50 scale - this is the knight for the after mast, but the foremast one is pretty much identical. 
 

 
so I made new ones about waist height.
 

 
Then I thought about it some more and decided they might be tall enough now, but probably a bit flimsy to take the forces imposed on them by the halyards. So I made heftier ones.
 

 
Pretty happy with these now. A real milestone achieved.