Ryland Craze

This has to be the quirkiest sternwheeler yet.
 
 This was a homemade sternwheeler built in 1938 by then 58 year old former ship carpenter "Captain" A.O. Engel of Pittsburgh, PA. His intent was to travel down the Mississippi towing a 62 foot barge carrying Engel's first boat, a 50 foot cruiser battered in a then recent Pittsburgh flood. Engel's plan was to repair the cruiser once he reached his destination. At the time, in 1938, Billy cost Engel $1,000.00 (approximately $23,000.00 in todays money) not including labor and was named for a grandson.  
 
 I discovered this image on e-Bay, it was a listing for the original press photo with writeup on the back. You know I bought it, right?! I am drawn to these quirky sternwheelers like flies to a dead mule. 

 
 The cruiser kinda looks like a converted canalboat and is every bit as ugly as Billy, maybe even more so. If that duo were to knock on your door after dark you'd call the police. 
 

 
 This should be a kick in the pants. 
 
   Keith

Something 'else' just caught my eye on this curious boat. What could 'this' be? The angle of its projection suggests that it's not just a 'wooden' feature nor a photographic anomaly, but rather something like a bent 'pipe' running forward out of the pilot house. Could this have anything to do with the indoor 'bar'? LOL
 

I'm going out on a limb again. Could Billy have possibly had 'two' doors for the pilot house, one forward and one aft? I see what must be a handrail, and also some curious carpentry in the aft end of the pilot house. Could that irregular open panel on the port side be a door? Maybe there was a stair coming up from 'inside', not on the outside. One entered the pilot house from the rear end and came out on the upper deck from the forward door.
 

Thank you to everyone for the comments and the likes.
 
 
 The pilothouse is finished. I wish I was really good and I could make a realistic looking bicycle horn, as a tongue in cheek gesture I'd hang it on the starboard side. 
 
 I'm leaving the door as is for the time being, the brown grew on me maybe the door color will to. I've added a bit of weathering and will probably revisit weathering once the PH is attached.

 

 

 

 
 And with that done, it's on to the hull. 
 
 
 Thank you for your support and for following along.
 
   Keith

Ouch, I bet that did make little Knocklouder sound off. Unfortunately there's no bell, I wish there was. Thank you, Bob.
 
 You maybe right, John. This was such a bare 'legged' (it's a family show) operation. Heck Engel didn't even have nav lights. 
 
 One would think he would have gone through some sort of inspection process, isn't that a registration number, 12-A-855, on the port side of Billy's bow? 
 
 That made me smile. Thank you, Eric. 

We had a swing door between the kitchen and living room,  lost my little  finger  chasing my older sister,  I was two, that made little Knocklouder make some noise.  Lol.
What did Billy have for an engine? Straight pipes off the manifold always has a nice sound to it.  
 I do see a little bell out the front window, pretty tiny  for a riverboat  I think.
Handle or not neat looking pilot house.
Bob  M.

Tom, a door on the pilothouse fore wall leaves no place to put the ship's wheel. An inside stairway would mean it would have been open to the sky and elements and there wouldn't have been room in the pilothouse to have a stairway leading directly into the PH. 
 
 As I noted in post #5, item 1, being a hand rail. The 'green' knee rail maybe a leftover piece of a salvaged porch rial leaned up against the PH? I'm not convinced it would have played a part in a stairway.  I think the red handrail may sit along the starboard side roof edge?
 
 Creating the space necessary for a stairway at Billy's bow is a challenge that's way I favored a ladder until the question of how did Engel get heavy items up onto the boiler deck?  
 
 There had to have been a stairway and a door, the how of it is the puzzle.
 
 When John enlarged the image I noticed that. If real, it appears to be a garden spigot with unknown reason for being.  I know, I know, we are talking Billy here and reason seems at times sketchy. Due to the small size and not knowing the why of it I'm ignoring it and not including it in the build. 
 
 Bob, if that's a stairway in front of the pilothouse it's completely plugged with junk and useless. Plus a center located stairway cuts into the center of the main deck structure below the PH. A stairway and door fitted into the removed corner on the bow/starboard side is making the most sense to me at this point. 
 
 
 Tom and Bob, thank you for your thoughts and input.  

Main yards  just need to be rigged and after that a final coat of paint
 

There is a pile of blocks just on these two yards 😳  foot ropes are easily done, thanks to the threader.
 

The booms  irons went great , you just got to do a couple then you get the hang of them. As I stare over to the Astrolabe,  I can see what a mess of the irons I did. After I finish  the Pegasus  I will go fix them,  I have a little  bit more  knowledge  about them , but that could be dangerous  lol.
I need to order some more cleats, I figure I should need about 26 more, an order was placed  with buddy @Gabek , I also only  had one fiddle  block and need 12. I talk to Gabe , he says he'll make me 50 of each. Pick them up Thursday . Lots to do before then that's for sure, it just wonderful. .   Thanks for looking in. 
 
Knocklouder 😁 
Kurt ⚒️ 
 
PS.   Forgot to tell you  Gabe is not taking any orders till winter of 2027.
😁

I’ve not had much time for shipbuilding recently, but I’ve managed to progress on Sherbourne slowly but not keep a full build log. 
 
My intent with this build was to work on three areas:
 
1. Learn to plank the deck. This goal failed. I ordered some expensive boxwood from a cabinet maker online. The strips that came were a deep yellow colour (apparently Boxwood can be). The real problem was that they splintered when I tried to soak them, bend them, cut them, etc. 

I started out using tracing / baking paper to trace the outlines of the margin plank from Chris’s engraved deck then glued this to a 1cm wide boxwood strip. Then tried to cut the shapes out but they splintered into pieces. I then tried soaking a strip and bending it to shape. 
 


I could just about get the shape, but the wood splintered in doing so. 

Clearly the wrong wood for the job. 
 
I got fed up so I reverted to the engraved deck rather than order a different wood to try. 
 
I really like the Vanguard engraved decks. I’m less keen when they’re cut away to show the interior as they are on Sphinx and Surprise. The cutaway deck works really well on Harpy as it makes the model much more interesting, but in my opinion detracts from the small frigates. It’s entirely a personal preference but I’d prefer they weren’t cut away as standard. I’d like to have had the option to fully deck Surprise myself so I can choose whether to have the cutaway engraved deck or not. I may have another go with deck planking on my next build (Speedy).
 
2. Paint the hull yellow ochre and see how it turns out. My planking can be messy so it’s nice to have the option of a fully painted hull. 
 
Sherbourne was one of my worst yet planking jobs, not that it mattered as everything that is planked is below the wales and painted white. I’ve been short of time and may have rushed the fairing so the planks didn’t lie as well as they should. Entirely my mistake. Some photos of the first planking below. It was worse than it looks here!

I also snapped the inner plywood bulwark and am eternally grateful for Chris’s superb customer service at Vanguard. He very kindly sent me a replacement. 
 
3. Mix and use wipe-on poly. You can’t easily buy wipe-on poly in the UK. I used the Blackfriars oil based polyeurethane varnish clear satin that BE recommended and mixed it with white spirit 50:50. Seems to work well. The effect on bare pear wood is almost identical to the finish I’ve achieved on other boats with Danish oil. Being a varnish I guess it seals and protects the wood better. 
 
The latter two have been a success  - some progress photos below: 


There’s still work to be done to the hull before starting the rigging. I’m not going to put any ropes on the cannons on this build. I forgot to do so before fitting the ring bolts to the bulwarks and they’re so small on this build that I’m not going to try and add them later. 

Wonderful example of how well it works.  I get that they have moved to a pay format for downloads.  Everybody needs to earn a living.
 
For those that wont or dont want pay I would suggest you can try doing so anyway.  Its very cheap for a month…and after you sign up they charge you each month.  So you can cancel soon after finishing your downloads.  It would cost you about $15.  
 
can you imagine paying a CAD guy to
design those figures you have shown?  
 
You wont get that quality for $15.
 
Chuck

Thank you Chuck..
Here is my Meshy work so far... hardly can wait to see the resin printouts..
 

 


 
Cheers
 
 

Yes it will…dont het a drop anywhere you dont want it.  You will have to sand like crazy to remove the spot from that area.  It will dye the WOP.
 
chuck

literally a Q-tip is much better.  A cloth could get messy no matter how small.

Holly takes up Fiebings dye beautifully and buffs to a nice matte finish. But I do treat it like it's radioactive as one errant drop will be a permanent feature of your model. I do touch ups on the model but always try to apply it before gluing it in place though.

Dropped anchor and time to retire for the day. 

Okay, short chapter 6 is done.  I read the directions and was having a difficult time understanding the instructions.  I knew what the intent was by looking at the pics in the manual and the drawings, but I just couldn't picture what the author was trying to convey.  So, I ventured a bit on my own, fully understanding the intent of the final work.  I warn you; this one is a bit pic heavy as I describe what I did.  The results are 95% the same, I just took a different path.  That's one nice thing about building wood models; there is always a little wiggle room to venture on your own yet achieve the same results.  I will also add that I am very pleased that I always keep the leftover strips of wood from my previous builds.  One never knows what will be needed down the road.  For some reason, this kit seems a little short on wood.  Or perhaps it's just me.  but this work is all done with scraps.
 
I started out by gluing together two 5/32 x 1/16 scrap pieces of wood so it would line up with the side of the transom.

 
I then added two glued pieces of 1/4 x 1/16 under the first piece.  Realizing that the design more or less wants you to step down from the full width of the transom to the side of the ship.

 
Then I sanded those down.

 

 
Then I added a 3/16 x 1/16 piece in the middle so the cap would come over the top and sit on top of this piece.  This way the cap would have the step down to the side of the hull.

 
And then sanded that down so it curved down and ran smoothly into the bottom piece.

 
Next was the cap work.  I must say, I was a bit disappointed that this piece of wood did not come with the kit.  Luckly for me, I had left overs from other builds and had what was needed.  This cap piece is the same thickness as the instructions call out.  So, I cut out the wood and soaked it in hot water.  I used a triangle shaped file to add creases to the underside of the cap so I could start the bending process. Much like a described previously when bending the planking under and up the stern.  Once I got the creases in, I used a large rubber band and wrapped it around the first step of bending the cap.  Sorry, no pics of that, but the cap was NOT fully bent at this stage.  I let that soak in the hot water for 5 minutes and then added a smaller rubber band and let it soak in the now warm water for 5 minutes.  I did NOT cut the cap in half like the instructions said.  I wanted to try and make it one piece.  if it snapped, I had enough scrap left over to start again and then cut it in half.  Luckily, I was successful.  Then I laid the cap over the transom and rubber banded it down overnight.  Note how I made the cap longer than it needed to be.  This would allow me to cut the cap down to fit over and rest/shelf on that middle side piece I described earlier.
 
 
And my results.  Like I said above, this was my own journey, but I wanted to explain it here just in case anyone else seeing this, and was confused by the instructions, could have an alternative path to achieve the same results. Yes, I also added the wood nails to the stern since I figured it wasn't made out of a single large piece of wood.  Nothing in the instructions like the sides, about that.
 

 

 

I love the Indefatigable box in the background looming over everything else in a threatening manner.

All in on the display, very nice!  Congratulations, you’ve come such a long way from the start of Vanguard!

OK, we're back from Blackpool, our first real show, and we have learnt a lot! Here are some pics.
 
Jim was brilliant, building up a Sphinx hull whilst there, which created much interest. We were the only exhibitors with period ship kits, the rest were mainly tug boats, fishing vessels, lifeboats and warships - but I guess we are only one of two companies in the UK that produce this type of model, so not too surprising.
 
We plan to do Telford next year.



 

 

Black strake and first two wales are on, the planking layout and tick strips line up pretty well with how the paintings look.
 

 

Having done some for the MSON, I feel for you and the massive quantity of videos you've committed to indexing, but rest assured that everyone using them will appreciate the work.
I hope you haven't committed to a deadline!

NRG has agreed to post a video log which i am presently indexing. With 134 videos it is taking much longer that i thought as i now have to watch each one and make notes.  The first few were very primitive. So yes a index and log is essential.

One more frame today.
 

Up early as the sun rises above the horizon and ready to set sail started working on upper rub rails. After many years of docking the rails were in dire need of new paint and a brighter color so let’s get to work.