Sizzolo

All ebony wales done. Hopefully minimal ebony work going forward as I did most of the gundeck hatch surrounds a while ago. Finished making the boxwood top&butt planks earlier (interestingly on the external plank plan, the four rows of wales are replicated underneath the wales by four rows of the same alignment but with planks one inch thinner) so hopefully it’s also the last I see of making those tricky things too! Let me know if anyone’s interested in seeing the jigs I built for making them.

From Fincham: “ Formerly, large frigates and all upwards. were double fastened, …” Diana being a large frigate likely means option D. Soooo… ill leave the wales as-is but will do all the surrounding nails in Option D pattern.

Pics of current progress (past two days). Almost finished the wales. Once these buggers are done the visible progress will be much faster (as long as I make time). There’s a nice transition in colour using ebony between glossy appearance and matte / dark where the trenails are visible under certain angles. I expect this is the only benefit of using ebony. I’ll just be painting boxwood for the rest of the black hull sections.

Progress! Finally! The wales are fitting really well and what’s better is I found a new method of glueing the ebony instead of using superglue! Soak the planks for a few hours in water to loosen up the wood and allow the oils to get out. Then remove and wipe hard with acetone. Lots of the natural oil comes out this way. Try to squeeze when wiping. Then I use the pile drill to make the holes and proceed to glue in all the walnut trenails. When ready to glue into place give the back another wipe with acetone and apply Titebond Original (yellow) wood glue. Press into place and hold tightly. After 3 or 4 minutes I apply some tape to maintain some pressure - and it’s done. Seems quite solid now and so much better than CA glue. Yes, the trenails are barely visible (some are invisible in the pic!) plus I could have done better with some of the alignment (pile drill seems to be where inaccuracies are coming in). I’ll be more cautious when doing the boxwood planks as the nails are more prominent there.

I think I might avoid doing trenails on the hull for the ‘74! (Next project - HMS Implacable which was originally a French ship so I can use Boudroit’s plans, and the rear and figurehead are on display near me for study).

I’ve a feeling this works for the double/single method?

I just realised I have a copy of Blaise Ollivier's book from 1737 too! (purchased from https://ancre.fr/en/ a few years ago). I'll have a good read through. Thanks again for the direction!

Copy/paste typo here ‘…which attach the…’ However - any idea what a diagonal inner frame is?

Looking at Fincham 1859 (online) I see: ”When the planking is treenail fastened, the strakes are either double, double and single, or single fastened; that is, so as to have in each strake, when double, two treenails in every timber; when double and single, to have two in every other timber, and one in the intermediate; and when single, to have only one in each timber (fig. 17). 164. Formerly, large frigates and all upwards were double fastened, and smaller ships double and single from the black strake (108) down. Above, the large ships were double and single, and the smaller ships single..” —- Unfortunately Plate 6 isn’t visible in the source but, from the description it sounds like ‘double and single’ might align with Diana’s framing of double width and single width frames. - so when we see frames doubled up to make one timber, the strake has 2 diagonal trenails and when the frame is single width there is one trenail (so, almost like your picture Thukydides.) It’s hard to guess without seeing plate 6… but logically the double/single does align with double/single width Timbers.. and the French 74 was fully double for its whole length which aligns with ‘larger than a heavy frigate’. I don’t know when copper bolts started to be used however - specifically at the butt ends… I thought they were all trenails for English ships. They’d look nice on the model though and thin wire is a million times easier to get than making hundreds of bloomin’ 0.5mm boxwood nails!

So, seeing as I'm doing the wales yet again (!!!) I want to make sure I'm 100% right with the trenail pattern. Looking at Boudroit's Volume 1, page 150 provides me with a good idea of a nail pattern but the frames on HMS Diana are different from the Boudroits French '74. Some are single frames and some doubled up, whereas all frames are doubled on the 74. Also the French used nails and trenails below the waterline and nails only above (According to Boudroit, but his drawing doesn't easily distinguish between iron nails and wooden ones). Anyway, there could be at least two ways to nail the hull planks onto HMS Daina - which one do you think is correct? Perhaps you have a reference to point me at that would make it definite? I'm leaning towards option B; two trenails for every plank/frame instead of just one for single frames. (on the French side I've shown where the inner iron nail holding inner planks would intercept the frame with 'o' - these are not nails on the outer hull, but is worth considering when thinking where the outer nails would weaken the frame). Maybe there's an option C?

Ok. I'm doing the larboard wales yet again. They weren't aligning correctly (see drawing): Ebony is really unforgiving so it was extremely difficult to align the Wales. The root cause was just very tiny errors in dimensions. You can see that end A was narrower than end B and that causes all the misalignment issues. Anyway, I've made some new ones which are all identical and when laying them down on paper they look to be just right. Fingers crossed! (this leads me to my next post which I'll keep separately as its specific to trenails.)

Thanks for all the help everyone.

Purely from a physics perspective, vertically stored barrels can ‘fall over’ whereas horizontal will just roll/pivot if there’s room to move. Most importantly though in the design of barrels: they really neatly lock together when on their sides as the narrow ends align with the widest point (middle) of adjacent rows. I’ll try and add a pic later which demonstrates this.

Fantastic info everyone! Thank you all v much.

Cheers: I hadn’t thought about branding - makes sense. Maybe some kind of coded branding iron motif. I guess on the ends rather than the sides because unless you continue the pattern around the full circumference there’s a chance the mark would be hidden.