Kenchington

For a 19th-Century fishing schooner, yes. But I very, very much doubt that Donald McKay designed a ship that way. He was working in the era of mathematical design of ships, then dominated by waveline theory as Froud's towing-tank wrk did not come before the 1870s. Trevor

In an idle moment, I went searching for information on Muscongus Bay centreboard sloops more recent than Chapelle's "Small Sailing Craft". Initially, that led me to something older: His "National Watercraft Collection" (available for free on-line) has an entry on the boat type and specifically on a US Fish Commission model in the Smithsonian collection. I don't think that says anything that his later book missed. Of more interest: In 1994, Michael Tuttle (a nautical archaeologist and maritime historian) wrote a University of Maine PhD thesis with the intriguing title: "The Muscongus Bay Sloop: Study of a Nineteenth Century Small Sail Working Craft". That is not available on-line and I have no idea whether it contains anything of interest to model builders, but it might be worth a look, if anyone is near enough to a U of M library. Alternatively, the author is on Linked-In and might be willing to share. Trevor

I may be wrong but my understanding is that it was normal for a vessel taken into the RN to be rearmed to current Ordnance Board standards once she was passed into dockyard hands -- which Lynx must have been or her lines would not have been taken off and we would not have plans of her today. Of course, what was normal did not necessarily apply in every case. Trevor

Then they are (or approximate to) the older Armstrong pattern. (Long out-dated, in Ordnance Board issue, by 1812 but let's not quibble!) So the breeching needs to loop around the cascabel, with the loop seized (at least in full-size, maybe just glued in scale). The Duke of Kent (Queen Victoria's dad) was Governor of Nova Scotia in the 1790s and used his pull to have the defences of the Halifax fortress updated. We still have a whole lot of Blomefield guns here. Trevor

Mark, There weren't before/after ways of rigging a gun carriage. Gun and carriage designs changed over time, between organizations that ordered their manufacture (e.g. the English Ordnance Board for your schooner) and between different designs for the same user (e.g. long guns vs. carronades). You are fortunate that there is a wealth of information on naval gunnery from the period of your build. If your model has long guns (not carronades), then British warships (and other Ordnance Board-supplied units, such as fortress artillery) of that time had Blomefield-pattern guns, with a ring above the cascabel as an integral part of the casting -- as in the image you posted. The breeching did indeed pass through that ring (which is why it was there). Trevor

Hard to argue with that one! If you're happy with it, I'd say go ahead. You've got more of them to make than I'd want to have to do 😀 Trevor

I bought a bag of suitable-size brass nails, 0.7mm I think. Model Shipways seem inconsistent in the size they supply with the kit (of the two sizes they sell). Some people have had their smaller nails, which should work well. Most of us get the large ones, which don't. Trevor

So true! Especially if you can pay someone else for the annual maintenance. I owned a wood lapstrake boat back in student days. Lovely. But spring preparations usually extended through to almost September. Diomedea is mostly GRP, aside from teak trim and fittings, jatoba gratings, plus the sailing and rowing gear (pine, Douglas fir, ash, some oak here and there). Less maintenance and more sailing time 😀

Does any kindly soul on MSW have access to Hendrick Busmann's 2002 book "Sovereign of the Seas, Die Skulpturen des britishen Königsshiffes von 1637" (Hamburg, Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum Bremerhaven und Covent Verlag), along with the ability to read the German text and a little time to fill me in on Busman's conclusions? Used copies of the book go for $200 and up, which is more than I am willing to pay for a book that I couldn't read! A bit of background: A couple of years back, I got interested in unravelling the many misunderstandings that have grown up around Sovereign of the Seas (the 1638 ship of that name). I have slowly been pulling information together into a sort of extended essay and I thought that the last published study I would need was Janice Valls-Russell's 2021 chapter on Heywood's contributions to the ship. I have finally got hold of that through interlibrary loan, only to find that she confined her study to Heywood's booklet (originally intended as a commemorative piece for the launching pageant that never happened). For the carvings on the ship, Valls-Russell refers readers to Busmann's work. I have access to all of the original evidence and I don't need yet another re-telling of the ship's story (and certainly not if it is as erroneous as most that have come before!). I have even managed to identify a lot of the imagery in the carvings: Zodiacal signs, trophies of arms, symbols of Charles' four kingdoms, the special feature of Charles as King Edgar (the supposed Sovereign of the Sea), gods of wind and wave, etc. etc. Valls-Russell's work on Heywood's booklet has let me recognize the half-hidden allusions to the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, beyond the two large figures on the tafferel (e.g. the sorceress Medea in her chariot, being drawn by dragons, along with Aphrodite in hers, drawn by swans). However, I suspect that Busmann's knowledge of 17th Century sculpture will have let him detect things in the Payne engraving or the "van de Velde" drawing (which wasn't by either of the van de Veldes) that are just a blur to me. Hence my interest in what he concluded. Very, very many thanks in advance, for anyone who can help me out! Trevor

What we had in the UK, when I was a kid, was a lot of vessels still in some sort of use -- so maintained for use, not preserved for posterity. Unicorn was one but there were many others, some since restored and preserved. I got to see Warrior while she was still an oil wharf in Pembroke Dock, then long after went all over her in restored condition in Portsmouth, for example. Great Britain came home later in my time. I didn't get to see her come up the Avon but I did visit her soon after her arrival, then many times after my parents moved to Bristol.

In my early years, it was the other way around. You had many preserved ships of many kinds, right up to battleships and Queen Mary. We had Victory, Cutty Sark and not much else. Peking could have stayed but went to New York instead. Now she has gone to a more appropriate home in Germany as the South Street collection withers. I suspect that it is a case of an initial surge of enthusiasm, then the bills pile up, volunteers dry up, maintenance falls off, the public gets complacent -- and before you know it, its time to start over with a whole new round of preservation. Trevor

When navel hoods can be naval ... I was trying to tie down the origins of the painted ceiling in the Commissioner's House of Chatham Dockyard (don't ask!!) when I blundered into this image: That's HMS Gannet of 1878, now restored. The shipwrights who built her may have called the structure extending from hawse holes to figurehead the "cheeks of the head" or some such. Still, looking at that, it's not hard to see why McLean chose "navel hood" for McKay's reinforcing structure, if his early versions enwrapped the hawse holes of his clippers. Not identical structures, of course. Nor the same kind of ship, nor quite the same time period. But when a term was needed for something new and rather different ... Trevor

Mine's a Drascombe Longboat: That image is from last summer. Just got her back on her mooring this afternoon, with lots of work still to do to clean her up for the season, then get the sailing gear on board before she looks like that again! Trevor

Not even that far. I'm trying not to think about it until I have the tiller itself done. And that has to wait while I get my (full-size) boat into the water and onto her mooring! But thanks for your explanation: Gives me something to try. Trevor

I'm still working on my version of the pram's tiller. Good to see that you managed to make the kit-supplied one work! Too many others haven't. How did you get the brass through the tiller extension? I have no clue how that could be done! Trevor

Don't beat yourself up over it. If your fingers hadn't slipped, the spellchecker would have swapped the vowels on your behalf 🙂 One of the key documents on earlier English shipwrightry dates from the 1620s (though the surviving manuscripts are copies from a half-century later). It mentions "naval timbers" or maybe "navel timbers" as something like what McKay would have known as a futtock. As there was no concept of a "correct" way to spell English words at the time, nor for a century later, "naval" and "navel" were interchangeable, though quite different in their origins and allusions. So what were the timbers? Something associated with navies? Something in the centre of something else? I once wondered whether they might have been a development introduced by Basque shipwrights, who had formerly been subjects of the Kings of Navarre. There is no way to tell. We are simply left trying to understand the nautical technology of times past, while peering through a fog of confusion and presented with very scattered evidence. Research is a process, not an end-point. If we keep pushing forward, someone will get there in the end. Trevor

What a clever way to make a basket!

There was a tie when the Smithsonian sold larger copies of Chapelle's many ship and boat plans. I don't know whether they still do but worth checking out. For more background (though a rather later period than the centreboard sloops), courtesy of your federal government as it was in 1890: https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=v98aAAAAYAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA235&dq=Maine+lobster+fishery+history+sloop+trap&ots=KQi-n948T4&sig=OFip4-NeAMJY7d3w689r3XwcPxo&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false That link will take you to the Google Books version. You can likely find others on-line.

Chapelle's "American Small Sailing Craft", figure 99 -- though the book-published version is very small. At least, I assume that that is what all kit manufacturers have used for their Muscongus Bay centreboard sloops. How closely the Model Shipways kit follows Chapelle's version, I will not know until I catch up to your progress! Trevor

Really, really nice: Well done! And you're inspiring me to finish mine. In a loose pile at the helmsman's feet. There's no chance to keep it neatly coiled, as it is hauled in and veered out with every gust of wind. Then again, in a little boat like the pram, a tangle when you need to let the sheet out will set you swimming, so one of the skills a small-boat sailor must develop is keeping that loose pile free of tangles. It comes with experience, reinforced when necessary by a dunking in cold water or (far worse) a dunking in cold water that you share with your non-sailor wife. Been there. Done that. 🥲 Trevor

Sorry about that image! It was intended for a different post that I have abandoned. In fact, I'm going to bow out of this discussion now: I'm just too pressed for time to keep up. And I'm far from sure that my interventions have been helpful anyway. Best of luck to you all as you work to resolve the various interpretations! Trevor

And you did a great job! Your fore topsail is a very nice, subtle approach towards the way that older sails set. Not many artists captured it but, in rather light weather, the weight of flax/hemp sailcloth made the sail hang down from the yard, then balloon forward near the foot, where the force of the wind overcame the lesser weight pulling down. You have captured that shape, though not so extreme, hence better suited to the cotton canvas of a clipper. But I don't see how a forecourse can be well modelled. There's no way to reproduce the way that the wind lifts the sail, against its own weight, when the only solid connection is along the yard. No criticism there. I just don't see how, mechanically, it can be done. Trevor

For realistic sails, there's nothing to equal the real thing 😀 That's Stad Amsterdam, with a sailplan close to a 7/8 copy of Cutty Sark's, so not a Yankee clipper but not so very different either. The image on the left was taken with a wide-angle lens, which has messed with the perspective. Trevor

You gentlemen are generating posts far faster than I can hope to respond to them! But before attempting to catch up: Rob: It is all too easy to get lost in discussing the fine details of long-gone ships. None of that should distract us from your absolutely awesome model of Glory of the Seas. Every time I look at your images, I am stunned by the quality of your work! Please don't let any disagreements overshadow that achievement. Now ... I don't think that anyone has suggested that the 18th Century type of navel hood had a place on a clipper (as in "clipper ship", not so sure of the Baltimore clippers). At least one contemporary commentator used the term for a quite different structure on the bows of Flying Cloud and you have extended that into a term for a modified version of that same structure on Glory. But neither conforms to the older dictionary definition. I hope we can agree that understanding some long-ago document requires that we both follow its words and understand its context. From what I can see, McLean was extolling the virtues of a particular ship, for an audience who understood ships, but not providing instructions to shipwrights who might build a similar vessel. Hence, he did not have to be fully precise. He wrote that the angel was "where the line of the planksheer" terminates, not at the end of the planksheer itself. I take that to mean that extending the curve of the planksheer would lead to the location of the angel -- which makes complete sense and fits with such other evidence a you have presented. It is less certain what McLean meant by "navel hood" but the paintings of Flying Cloud (unlike the photographs of Glory of the Seas) suggest that the carved (and gilded) work on those "hoods" dropped down as it flowed aft from the feet of the angel. My guess (though there's plenty of room for disagreement) is that the lower, after end of McLean's "navel hood" surrounded the hawse hole (as the old, original type of navel hood had on other ships), while the upper forward end stretched out meet the forward reach of the stem structure, where the latter bore the angel. I'll also try to respond to: But not right away! Trevor

Lee Valley's catalogue can have that effect. There is no known antidote, except for enforced abstinence. But at least you are safely distant from the temptations that await anyone who enters one of their stores 😀