Sizzolo

I’d suggest the opposite may be true. If exposed, the lower edge could be lifted upon contact. If the seam is on the upper edge it can’t be lifted through contact from below. Therefore, one should start from the top row and plate from top-down. I spotted a nice period painting that showed a ship being coppered and clearly shows the shipyard started from the waterline - I’ll have to dig it out. Also, I might need to make another visit to the UK national archives to get to the truth of the matter. Hopefully though someone will post a definitive reference that clarifies things for RN frigates of the period. Unfortunately Boudroit’s French ‘74 books don’t cover copper plating at all (not that I’ve found - pls correct if there is mention) which is a great shame. I’ve a feeling ‘authentic and accurate coppering’ for the scale model maker may be a relatively recent development in our art.

Can you supply your sources for this assessment?

On many models and YouTube clips I note the builder starts from the sternpost/keel and hence as the plates build up the upper rows overlap those below. However, I note that in the following sources, it appears the rows may have overlapped lower over upper, requiring the plating to start from the waterline: https://www.academia.edu/358814/The_Introduction_and_Use_of_Copper_Sheathing_A_History "..This system however only applied to British merchant vessels, the Royal Navy used a different method where the horizontal joints faced upwards." Lavery's Book 'Arming and fitting of English Ships of War' "On the first ships to be coppered, one sheet seems to have been placed directly above the corresponding one on the strake below; by 1779 this had been changed, and the strakes were staggered, as in brickwork" So, before I start placing thousands of plates on HMS Diana, is the general view that, it is accurate for a 1774 ship to be coppered, starting from the waterline, rather than the keel? I note on a few YouTube clips of the USS constitution (same year, different continent but likely similar/same tech) that this does indeed appear to be the case (lower over upper) but it's not easy to tell.

For reference, this is how I’ve approached the nailing pattern:

Larboard side second planking complete and moving on to copper. The nailing pattern was a lot more finickity than I thought it’d be. As the copper is on a roll it doesn’t like going flat through my home made machine and ends up losing its backing strip. Before you know it you just have a scrunched up ball of sticky copper laying in the corner. I think a 3d-printed jig would be the way to go, replicating the old style tape machines- spooling from one roll on to another. Anyway, as you can see, I started in the traditional way at the stern post with 4 rough test pieces (couldn’t resist!). However, I’ve seen a couple of sources state that the Royal Navy overlapped their plates, lower rows going over upper, instead of upper going over lower. This means one should start at the waterline stern, not the false keel/stern post. Has anyone else noticed this or seen other sources? Also I note the false keel was likely filled with closely massed iron nails instead of coppered. I’m still thinking of a way to model that.

Yup it's 1783 (ADM 106/2509) I'm assuming though that double banked means two sailors per row and not some kind of strange financial insurance in case it gets damaged (since this post I have learned ”double banked” means the sailor is using a long oar sweep and sits further away from the port/axel/pivot, not adjacent, thus generating more leverage. If boats are ‘Not’ double banked it means two sailors per bench with the sailors having less leverage at their port.).

Just a brief update today wrt the ships’ launch (armed). I went to the (uk) national archives today and found the original navy standing order for launches to be double banked (telling me I need to knock up a load more oars!). Not sure if I mentioned previously but I’m also going to replace the temporary masts and sail on the launch with silkspan, as per previous recommendation. I did purchase a small amount of 1940’s drafting cloth for a test but, I think that’s still out of scale for 1/64 (but may be good for 1/48 perhaps). It might be useful if I post an example of all three in a separate thread to help future planners.

All starboard planking between waterline and main wale now complete. Under the waterline I’ll be using walnut as it will all be covered with copper plates. The missing trenails above the waterline will be added when I make a new batch of nails (a v tedious process involving syringes and the pile drill). For the keen eyes - yes, a couple of minor nit picky errors on the stern plank arrangement. I hope to learn from this and not repeat in the next build! A lot of the fun of these builds is the craft learning and up-skilling over the years.

Yes I meant wiki commons but having a Quick Look there it doesn’t appear to contain a hi-res version of the outboard plan.

Hiya! Merry Christmas. Yes, according to the external planking plan (rare which is why I’m trying to follow it to some extent) the few rows under the four main wale rows replicate the lengths and patterns of the wales. It’s easy to see in the full size print I have in my wall but you can probably see it in the hi def version which is available on open source - or this low Rez pic from me. You’ll see in the pic a gap between the planking patterns - this is where the dimension shifts between upper and lower. The main wale is repeated but you can see the under-wake planks replicates the pattern.

Quick update to let you all know the build is still progressing! Unfortunately no pics yet as I want the next pics to be impressive! I’ve been planking under the wales to the waterline in boxwood and it’s looking much neater. I find once you get into your battle rhythm with a build things start getting good. I’ve increased the drill size for the trenails by one measure and there’s a good improvement in progress with no noticeable reduction of quality (I.e I’m not sitting there trying for 5min with every single trenail to squeeze an 0.6mm nail into a 0.65mm hole only to have it plink out of my tweezers across the room never to be seen again. It’s easier with an 0.7mm hole. Each plank has over 20 holes so you can imagine why progress is slow). It’s worth noting here - the HMS Diana models at the National Maritime museum, crafted at the time of the original ship likely for the first captain and admiralty… no bloody trenails. I was considering ripping out the upper wales that have the large visible nails but I think I’ll leave as-is. Port will be cleaner. I spent today cutting the planks for the counter out of ebony. They’re looking pretty good so far (they will likely fit). I cut them as pre-shaped pieces rather than risking bending them in two dimensions again (ebony fights this). I’m getting better at realising where things could mess up, slowing down and re-assessing my approach before cutting wood. Other noteworthy progress is that I’ve been studying both the captains log and the Boudriot 74 gun ship book 4 to get a better idea of what sails would be aloft. I need those sky sails up, and interestingly studdingsails could occasionally be set alternated, port on main mast, stbd on fore for example, not a symmetrical ‘all stunsls’ as one might imagine! Fore-topsl had its wind stolen too so that will be interesting to model! Also, don’t get me started on where the stay sail were set! I spent a good few hrs looking into that. Finally, I’ve decided it’s probably best to do all black hull planks on the upper in ebony too or it’ll look weird with altering textures and finishes. I’ll avoid this in the next model! (HMS Sophie). Plus - there won’t be any blue or red hull paint. I can’t find any evidence of it in 1806 but there’s plenty of pictorial evidence of black/white/yellow stripes. The overall objective of this piece is for the sails to draw the eye so the lack of colour shouldn’t matter. Hopefully the eye then closes in and notices the thousands of bloody trenails! I’m planning on gold leaf for the rear decoration though so that should look quite fancy.

Starboard wales now complete (no pic - the pic above gives enough of an idea). I think in future I'll use boxwood as it's much nicer to work with. Ebony is a real pain, not very forgiving and the glue stinks! Also, I'm going to end up with a difference of colour between the bulwarks and the wales but I can live with that. I'm not looking forward to having to do the whole thing again on Portside. It was worth the time though - I just would rather not have to spend weeks on them and break umpteen number of teeny drills. They're also not extremely secure with cyanoacrylate (CA) glue either so if the hull accidentally hits the floor when I'm working on some fiddly parts I'm expecting a few of them to fall off. Switching to boxwood will make me much happier! To add some variety to my workflow I think I'll finish the whole of the starboard lower hull planking, including the coppering (which I'm really looking forward to). At the end of that I might feel like doing ebony wales again on the port side!

“Admiral, there be wales here!” Lt Cdr ‘Scotty’ Scott, 1986

Thanks Allan. I did some research and knocked up a quick test using some tissue-like material I already had (could be silkspan or modelspan - no idea!). Seems to take shape quite well from the same mould. I’ll do a load more testing before committing one way or the other but I expect that will be next year sometime. I also bought the book - cheers! 1/64 marine now painted to help indicate the scale better of bits n pieces.

Oh it’s definitely a flag but I had it laying about and wasn’t planing on using it on a ship so just used it to test my ‘windy-sails’ theory. It’s of the same material as what I intend to use for my sails. 😀 I may paint up a scale figure tomorrow and put it in future pics so one can get a better idea of scale.

Another brief distraction - a very rough test sail (prototype). I had some ideas about how to portray sails in the wind, dented by taught rigging. The test was reasonably successful. Essentially I carved a mould out of balsa wood including trenches for the rigging, wrapped it in clingfilm, then placed over the sail and weighed it down in the correct places. Then I gave it a few coats of diluted wood glue. It needs a final coat of Matt varnish spray (I find cans of Windsor and Newton Matt spray from the art shop most handy as I can avoid using my airbrush… and it’s designed for spraying canvas anyway). The final sail is quite solid but has decent simulated ‘movement/energy’ which is what I’m looking for.

I’m v happy with the way the cannonball box turned out. For those interested, they are cheap 1.5mm copper balls from Amazon, shaken up in a plastic zip bag with steel blackener liquid, dried then poured into the box and touched with a couple of drops of extra thin superglue. The glue wicks around all the balls, setting them in place and adding a nice little gloss touch to them. No major progress today due to spending hours watching Napoleon at the cinema, although I have thought of some theories to create full sails - hope to run a test tomorrow. Pics likely on Friday.

The page from the captains log on 4th Aug 1806 stating the sails raised (inc ‘sky scrapers’ at 11:30, about half way down the page on the right hand side before they see the ‘strange sail’)

I must be v careful of what I commit myself to but I’d be more than happy to pull some specific records for you next time I have a slot scheduled in the archives’ reading room or map room. Unfortunately I probably now have all the info I need for the time being wrt HMS Diana but I imagine I might need to return there in future to get my sails built accurately (sails/masts/yards). Give me a (short) shopping list of specifics and I’ll take some pics. Would save you the air fare! I might even consider a special journey if I’m at a loose end as it’s a lot of fun to pull the records of something nobody has seen for centuries (although the trains have been very professionally and reliably stuffed up every time). I tend to heal my travel tension with a decent pint while mulling over the photos when I get back to my local pub.

Diana had 14x 32 on QD and 4x 32 on FC fitted in Jan 1812 so the painting likely shows her in her final, standardised, bleak state. It might make logical sense then if I stick to my 'transitional' period display with weird sails, a mix of 32's and 24's, some old flashes of red and blue paint on the sides.. . should look nice. It's nice to see the carvings on stern and bow survived, according to the painting.

Ah that's fantastic Morgan - I've never seen that painting! I was just pondering on how to colour her (instead of studying for a tricky interview tomorrow.. . . gulp) so this helps a lot. I might keep some of the style of her earlier blue and red striping though and theorise that perhaps she eventually was normalised with black siding after 1806 perhaps. The RMG plans I showed on page 1 of this blog very closely match your painting so that's a relief. It also underlines the commentary in Gardiner's book about a missing QD port. The plan was dated 18 May 1808 so, possibly she received the additional port on the forward part of the QD after this point. All very interesting! Thanks again for the reference - I'll have to look for more Diana paintings now and possibly buy a full scale print.

Many thanks for all the kind remarks everyone! It certainly helps keeps up morale! I have a couple of teeny details remaining to add, plus I might swap out the masts with accurate lengths in boxwood - currently she's carrying the equivalent of 3 main masts Work has resumed on the ebony wales. The issue I hit with them was that I broke my production line by making a few, glueing them, then making a bunch more. The issue this generates is that inevitably you end up with slightly different angles and measurements in the top-and-butt planking which leads to gaps and undesired knock-on effects. To resolve the issue I'll have to create some unique planks to allow everything to align nicely. There are two methods I could have followed for the wales - cut tonnes of completely identical top-and-butt planks, or more accurately, cut each plank individually and uniquely as per the very handy original planking plan (not many ships have their own external planking plan). So for Starboard I'm going for a bit of both (lots of clone planks and some unique planks to fill the difference in my plank generation). On Portside I will likely make every plank uniquely as it will be mentally more satisfying (but take forever no-doubt!). wrt my research at the National Archives, I found gold. Well - lots of old mould and smelly papers but - some really useful information. For fun I dug up some old 'prize papers' which had to be viewed in the map room. I took a few pictures so I could do my reading and interpretation without the time limit. I didn't find documents referring to Diana in the box but it would have taken me more time than I had to open every package -they're extremely delicate and hard to read. Also I managed to get the captain's logbook of the period I'm modelling Diana in (1806). They are such fun to read - Now that I have pics I intend to go to my favourite pub, order a decent bottle and do the transcribing. I photographed every day in August as that is when she apparently carried Sky sails (aka sky scrapers) which I intend to model. I think Diana at this period would look fantastic with these extended sails, all studsails out, plus the built up barricades, and be a nice example to show the community the ship outside of her original appearance normally modelled. Finally I confirmed the details in Gardiner's 'The Heavy Frigate' by finding the source information for armament in 1806. I read this to mean in Apr 1806 she had the original 8x 9lb Cannon on Qtr Deck replaced by 32lb Carronades.(nice to notice that her original 9lb were of the long type). Previously she received an additional 4x 24lb carronades on the qtr deck in 1794, and 2x 24lb on the focsl. So - in 1806 she would have looked quite interesting. I was hoping this might be the case, hence needing to confirm with the original sources.

Armed Ship’s launch finished! I may revisit and touch up with some spots of paint at some point. Also might stick the furniture down as it’s all still moveable. Design-wise I used the original plan on previous page for the basic structure but took a lot of ideas from my visit to Chatham a couple of weeks ago (lots of boats there in the lifeboat museum), plus some ideas on how she might have been rigged from various other random sources. I expect I’ve got a few bits incorrect wrt the date certain bits might have appeared - she’s supposed to be around 1806. Style-wise I’m doing my usual ‘lived-in’ look, as if the object is in the middle of doing something or being prepared. I love the perfect and clean look of some models but personally I prefer the rougher look for a number of reasons - I like the aesthetic… making perfect clean pieces requires a lot more time and skill than I have, and… it allows me to hide mistakes! Anyway - back to the frigate wales next. The boat took about a week with < > 3hrs per day. It would have taken a lot longer without using Vangard Models excellent 26’ launch kit as the foundation.

Something to do whilst waiting for hangover to leave: box made out of one of the planks from the Vanguard Models kit: