KeithAug

Nice work Pat. That turned out well.

I have always found these French ships to be a bit of a designer dogs breakfast. While not a fan of the aesthetics I do find them really fascinating. Hence I am enjoying your excellent build. I see the big advantage of the printer approach -------- you are allowed to make it on the lounge carpet. My dusty wood approach would never make it to the lounge during construction.

Beautiful ships boats Valeriy. I loved the novel build approach.

Today I had a big productive workshop plan. Then this arrived and insisted on helping. She said that she needed to do her work so we did a bit of nailing practice (see hammer and wood block). Then we learned masking taping before progressing on to drawing boats. I have high hopes that she is destined to become a ship modeller. Needless to say I didn't get much done.

Hi Roger - yes - not quite sure why they couldn't find a more aesthetic solution.

Here is a better photo. Given the strops start level with the transome I think the foot rope idea makes the most sense. Unfortunately they were not great at safety. One young crew member fell to her death while working aloft in March 2017.

Brian - Eberhard is probably the expert. Watchmakers have a cloth on the bench that attaches to a chord around their neck. I just trust to luck and make a few spares. Thank you for your kind remarks.

Hello Steve They have a very closely fitted leather covering. It is a bit too closely fitted for me to reproduce neatly. Eberhard / Steve. I think the foot rope idea seems sensible. Given the mass and height of the boom I think that flicking it across would be better managed via the sheets and winches. Gary, Druxey, John, Pat, Eberhard and Steve - thank you all once more for your supportive comments

Nice lot of small parts Roger. How many spares have you made to feed the workshop black hole?

Lovely little boat. Well done.

Thank you all for your comments and likes. I am moving on by going back to the masts, booms and spars which were only partially completed earlier. They have all sorts of fitting and attachments which need to be made and installed before I get on to the sails. I am starting with the main boom. You can see in the following photographs the blocks and strops. Do health and safety at work regulations apply to yachts? The rudimentary plans downloaded from the internet adequately define the attachment points These were marked on to the boom (on top of a piece of masking tape. The blocks attach to the strops via brackets. These were probably forged from plate on the original. They are a bit small at model scale and so I decided to fabricate them. I started with 2 squares of brass sheet drilled with a central hole and 2 other smaller holes. The squares were turned circular. and a spacer was made. The 3 parts were assembles and soldered on an aluminium alignment mandrel. I then made a filing button and used this to profile the outer shape. Two brackets were then cut from the profiled shape. The wire strops were then made from beading wire. I spent a lot of time making blocks in 3 sizes and with single double and triple sheaves. Single blocks were attached to the strops via the brackets. Two further single blocks were attached. I am not sure what the purpose is of the long strops running fore and aft are, but these were added. Much more to do.

Eberhard, I can remember what it looked like and I am pretty sure that it wasn't made by Rolls Royce. I don't remember the make but I did try t look up the training centre on the web to see if i could find out what happened to it. Unfortunately I drew a blank. I do intend trying again.

The hull is looking rather fine, particularly the plating details. A bit of scale indication on the shackles, blocks and hooks would be helpful. Including a match or something similar might be useful.

I was messing around lamenting that I couldn't see much of the main cabin interior though the door, so I pushed my very old and poor quality phone camera up against the door and took a photo. The low quality of the image seems to me to have helped the "atmospheric nature" of the image. i really liked the computer screens, keyboards and instrument panels. I also liked the roof beams with the lights peeking out, but most of all I liked the reflection in the porthole window. Sometimes it is good to take a backwards look.

The small boats turned out rather well. i must remember that method.

Nice job Dan, particularly the detailed description of the process.

Rob. The rigging is truly impressive. It must be either a labour of love or a penance. I do admire your dedication to the task and the structured way you approach it.

Was - The brass work is all looking pretty smart - are you planning to paint it?

Pat, is it possible that the fore support for the boom has a pivot to allow the aft end to swing out supported by the topping lift, thus allowing the boats to be launched between the boom and the hull. It seems to me that this would be the simplest and quickest way of completing the exercise, but then again what do I know🥴.

Druxey. I did try it but it just produced a wavy edge and a more random distortion. In the end I decided a more regular distortion would perhaps work better. In 1969 at the age of 16 I started work as a Rolls Royce Engineering Apprentice. The first year of training included 32 weeks of manufacturing training in the Apprentice Training School in Mickleover Derby. Royce's lathe was in the corner of turning training bay. It was immaculately maintained and had a polished brass plate explaining its history / ownership. If you were very good (or lucky) you were allowed to use it. I must have been lucky. My everlasting memory of it is that it was like an alter at which the lucky few got to worship.

Hi Brian - yes it is true that many areas of the world have much higher temperatures than our little heat wave. Having mild winters and summers does have advantages but the main disadvantate is that very few homes in the UK have A/C. My brother in law who lives in Phoenix Arizona has his A/C set at 25 deg which is a bit lower than our lounge which was registering 35 deg. Steve it was a bit of media hype, the fires were pretty limited especially compared with the wild fires being experienced in other parts of the world and of course the emergency services dealt with them reasonably well. Fire brigades here prioritise preservation of life (including their own) above the preservation of property and some media types choose to ignore this when dramatising the situation for televisual effect. The main issue over the hot spell was that in the UK people don't normally have to be mindful around parched ground and unfortunately the fire safety behaviour of some isn't great. You might be horrified to hear it is Chinese. I see a lot of negative comments about the quality of Chinese machine tools but I have to say I would find it hard to find fault with this lathe especially for light modelling work. Many years ago I used a lathe that had been the personal property of Sir Henry Royce, it was beautiful. However I have to say that my cheap Chinese lathe produce work that is just as good. Pat - thanks ------- but I just assumed everyone would do it that way.

Very nice superstructure Dan, but god only knows how you manage to interpret those fuzzy images. It would do my head in.

Thank you Keith, Steve, Andy and Brian, your comments are always welcome. Thanks to everyone for the likes. It got very hot here for a couple of days - 40.3 deg C a few miles up the road. The workshop faces north west so it never got higher than 25 deg. A good excuse for a couple of days of boat work. For a while I have been contemplating the sails. They are quite large requiring about 1.5 square meters of cloth. It would have been good to model them full of wind but at the size they are I don't think it will be practical to get the material to hold a curved shape. I am not planning to do all that sewing some of you are very good at. At 1/36 scale my quality of stitching would be much too heavy, so I will go with the "pencil" approach to detailing the seams. As for the material I got a sample of Silkspan (tissue) but rejected this as too flimsy. I also bought some low weight polyester (kite material) but didn't like the patten of the reinforcing threads so that was also rejected. I visited some of the local material shops to look at cotton but couldn't find anything I liked. In the end I defaulted back to what I have used before Amity sail cloth from Cornwall Model Boats. I think it is a polyester. The size of the Amity sheets is 1m x 0.7m so I had to buy two packs. I have a little left over from the previous model and hopefully this will make up for the slight shortfall relative to my estimated requirement. I also bought a couple of rolls of ripstop tape for reinforcing edges and adding the sail reinforcing details. I decided hot weather was the ideal time to get the sheets prepared. I started by building a frame just a bit larger than the maximum sheet size. I made it disassembleable learning from previous mistakes. I mounted the material on the frame stretched by elastic bands. I then gave it a couple of coats of 1/2 and 1/2 PVA diluted with water. Ideally the material wouldn't stretch but unfortunately it does. I tried to minimise the distortion but I would have liked to have done better. It will be interesting to see how it turns out. The 2 sheets are done and dry courtesy of our record breaking weather. It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good!!!!

Eberhard. Beautiful job - to my eye much more realistic than the previous one. Practice makes perfect.

Nils - thank you - very useful. Pity about the cloth, i always find it difficult to get the right stuff.