gak1965

That is alarming. Glad to hear you are recovering and going to follow along.

Thanks! I am always on the lookout for your next post!

They might be - and that is in fact an ingenious fabrication method. So it is a set of blocks for hauling the topsails. The rest of the halliards are just as you describe, sheaves directly in the mast and I'm just using holes for those rather than try to install the actual sheave. This is a more complicated rig just for the topsail. I'm including a snap of a small section of the plans that show what I'm talking about: They do look like gin blocks but mounted as a pair on the trestle trees instead of on the yard. Regards, George K

Well, bowsprit rigged until it is time to mount the forestays (soon!). A couple of pics: The foremast needs 4 more blocks before it's time to start mounting shrouds. One question I hoped that someone like @rwiederrich might be able to answer is how they handled the halliard blocks on the trestle trees (given that those are 2 of the four). The plans suggest that they weren't standard wooden blocks, but something that frankly looks more like a sheave (or maybe a roller on a desk chair), an iron circle inside of a triangular support. So far, my attempts to fabricate them have failed utterly or just been badly out of scale. I could paint standard blocks black so that they are more like iron, or if anyone has suggestions, I'd love to hear them. Thanks for looking in! George K

Sorry - I think we are actually saying the same thing, I just did so poorly. Both the supplied plans and the description point to the mounting points being topside of the main deck and below the forecastle deck in the open forecastle interior to the bulwarks. Here is a small section of the plans to show you what I mean: My problem is that there is deck covering the space where the lines would belay, and it would involve drilling through both the bulwarks and the ceiling planks to get there. Probably not impossible with sufficient patience and some specialized tools, but I'd need a (very small) offset drill with a very short bit (something like a dentists drill) to put in the necessary holes for the belaying bolts. So, anyone that wants to do this maximally accurately will need to put in the belaying points (and I'd recommend drilling the hole in the bulwarks) before they plank over the forecastle. And because of the amount of strain on the lines, I'm not really hip about trusting to glue to hold the lines in place (which is what the instructions suggest). So, likely a bolt in the bulwarks. Regards, George K

Brian, Appreciate the insight. I think it's a perfectly fine way to manage lines that go into inaccessible locations. The sheets probably didn't have a huge amount of stress on them, but I don't have a good feel for the amount of strain on the forestays of the Academy model. Are the deadeyes/lanyards one plastic piece or are they held together with thread? If the latter it would tend to suggest that the glued line/bulwark joint can take a fair amount of strain, which is the question here. Rick, That's my concern too. I'm worried about the amount of stress on the stays. The doubled lower forestay anchors in the knightheads, but the doubled topmast forestay that goes through the bees to the bulwarks has the combination of a decent lever arm, a stiff spar, and plenty of pull from the backstays that makes me think it's going to need to be pretty strongly seated. I suspect I'm going to take the approach of mounting a homemade eyebolt (that will have the twisted wire stem for better grip) with some CA glue and belay the lines on the bolt. Maybe bend the stem so that it can adhere to the bulwark from behind, or if I'm lucky have it screwed into one of the bulkheads. Not technically correct, but I'll keep the loop just big enough for the line and a black eyebolt against a black bulwark with black line will hide the sins.

Well, another milestone reached. I'm still mounting blocks on the masts (but I think I'm almost done with that), so to break up the routine I started rigging the bowsprit. So far, I've only installed the bobstays and the shrouds. The kit surprisingly did not include any hearts (although there was a laser cut sheet that included what I thought were mast hoops that turned out were bullseyes). In any case, I bought some extras from Bluejacket and used them. The kit had a single diameter of chain for everything. When I put the anchors together, I thought that the supplied chain was massively out of scale (too small), so I bought a couple of feet of two larger sizes, the intermediate of which I used to represent the 1 inch chains on the shrouds and bobstays. For the bobstays, I stropped the hearts with 34 gauge black wire and then bent the tail into a hook which I either inserted into a jackstay eyebolt (for the non -chain end) or the chain itself. The lanyards are black seeing as this is standing rigging. Here is a view of the stem and bowsprit. Here is a view showing the shrouds. The forward attachment of the shrouds is pretty much the same as the bobstays, but the hull end is quite different. The bobstays are basically attached to an eyebolt embedded in a metal strap. By contrast the shrouds are attached as in the photo below (sorry about the image quality). The mounting strap is 1/64" wide brass, with a split ring attached on one end, and the chain attached to the split ring (anchor chain obviously coming from the hawse pipe). From the last post, no one had any suggestions, so I wound up mounting the blocks on the forward cross tree - it makes sense from logic and the similar blocks on the mast tops, so, that's how I decided to proceed. Next step on the bowsprit is to rig the dolphin striker and the associated martingales and bobstays. The kit comes with a Britannia striker, but I think I'm going to scratch build one. It's the correct length but the locations for the stays are all wrong, and it's just a bit clunky. One decision that I will need to make eventually is how to terminate the various stays on the foremast on the hull. The Boston Daily Atlas indicates that the stays were belayed inside the ship on various frames, which is to say under the forecastle which is pretty much inaccessible at this point. Doing this in the way of the real ship would seem to require drilling through both the hull planks and the ceiling planks, feeding the line through both and terminating them somehow inside the ship. Two options come to mind, one of which is to drill holes in the outer hull, feed the line in and glue or to mount to small eyebolts. Neither is perfect, I suspect that I will do the latter as the lesser of two evils. If I had thought further ahead, I might have run the lines before I decked over the forecastle, but we can all be wise in hindsight. As always, thanks for looking in! Regards, George K. PS - Background movie in the first pic is, of course, The Hunt for Red October. One of several proper choices, I think you will all agree, for ship modeling.

A bit off topic, but if you read the Wikipedia article on the bridge it is astonishing how many people seem willing to damage a historic bridge (and possibly fall to their deaths) to avoid following clear instructions. Good grief.

For the Lakers out there, the Article of the Day on Wikipedia is the Edward L. Ryerson! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Edward_L._Ryerson Regards, George K

Hello all, A brief update and a question to the clipper cognoscenti. I've been mostly stropping and mounting blocks on the masts so they will be there when they are need during the rigging process. The one major change is that I've mounted all of the belaying pins, which were first chemically blackened per a suggestion a couple of months ago. There are a lot of pins! A couple of photos: On to the question. There are blocks on the mast tops and the trestle trees that are for the bunt and leech lines. I've included a pic from the plans that show the blocks on the topmast cross trees. The plans plus the instructions indicate that the blocks on the tops go on the forward cross tree. I can't definitively determine the situation on the topmast. Logic says put them on the forward cross tree, but if anyone has thoughts otherwise, I would love to be enlightened. As always, thanks for looking in! George K

That makes sense. It's certainly true that on the Niagara the jibboom stays are routed onto the spritsail yard. So the spritsail yard lifts and braces basically become 'standing' rigging to anchor the yard in 3 dimensions since it's basically just lashed onto the bowsprit?

Dumb question that I haven't found an obvious answer to using simple searches. Why did Niagara and Constitution (and I presume other ships) have spritsail yards that did not have sails bent? I understand the physical reason why they didn't have a sail due to being blocked by the dolphin striker, martingales, etc. But why wasn't the yard itself eliminated with the sail? It must have served some purpose or, as Long Jack would say, "twould be overboard", although certainly by the time the clippers came along they were gone. Thanks, George K

Bob, Looking great! Having not seen the Harriet Lane plans, do they use this "heavier" or "thinner" language or is it only in the instructions? My experience with 3 MSW kits is that they mark line diameter or circumference for the real ship on the plans and then you need to convert to the available line. I've never seen an MSW kit with all the different scale lines (or deadeyes, or hearts, or whatever) shown on the plans, they generally provide some number of sizes and you match as best you can or obtain additional material (I have giant spools of rigging thread now). Regardless, I wouldn't lose any sleep over the exact line thickness. Lines got replaced when worn out, maybe you could find the same size, maybe not. Real ships were always a mixed bag. And thinner at least tells you to relative size WRT the footropes, I tend to use standard black sewing thread. I'm sure others do differently. The one thing that I found helpful is to make the stirrups from wire. Much easier to deal with and they hang better in my opinion. Regards, George K

Well - away from 20th century vessels and back to the 19th. I've completed all three topgallant masts, and assembled them into the fore, main, and mizzen. The doublers are all painted white, with everything else "bright". At some point, I will need to add the gilded balls and (I presume) lightning rods, but I think that can wait until the ship is almost done. A couple of photos. The fore and main in situ as it were: and all three looking to port, and from the stem: And, kind of an odd view looking diagonally forward. A couple of observations. First, the fore topgallant mast seems to be raked a bit more than I want - I think the spar itself has a bit of a bend. When I put the forestays on I'll move the tip forward maybe 4-5 mm and it will align with everything else. What I am happy about is that there are no obvious problems with the alignment of the masts port and starboard (see the pic from the stem). Second, this was definitely a learning exercise. Even though the birch dowels I used to make the topgallants were denser and stronger than basswood, at this thickness and length there was no way to use my cutting tools without either (a) the spar just bending away from the tool or (b) snapping in two. Even after this discovery, it took 3 tries to do the first, 2 tries for the second, and fortunately only 1 try for the mizzen topgallant mast. Speed is not your friend - if I used sandpaper that was too rough (say less than 100 grit) to "rough out" the shape, I always wound up having the thinnest part snap (even when I wasn't sanding in that region). Interestingly, what did seem to work well was to start at the narrow end (so that I made clear "ridges" where the diameter changed), using 150 grit and then sanding the other segments to make a spar that had the right proportions (i.e. it had 4 segments with specified length and proportionally smaller diameters) but was still too wide, and then go back with a mix of 150 and 220 grit to eventually obtain the proper diameters. For once, I didn't have to remake all of the mast caps. By gently hand sanding the openings wider I was eventually able to get the diameter of the holes sufficiently large to fit the spars. I did bust one of them, but it was less trouble than I expected to make a new one for some reason. In that case I hand drilled (i.e. I spun a 1/8 inch drill but with my fingers) to get the hold opened in a piece larger than the cap, and then sanded the rest of the opening. Anyway - next steps are to place the remainder of the mast mounted blocks (there are quite a few) and mount them on the ship. I've seen many people do wonderful work mounting the yards before they fully mount the mast - that hasn't been how I've done it in the past, and so for now the plan is to mount before rigging. One thing that has occurred to me is that I should probably make sure that I've drilled and fitted the path for the boat davits in the mizzen channels before I start putting in the shrouds. Drilling afterwards could be ugly. As always, thanks for looking in! Regards, George K

Spruance, one (1.5?) generation back. Commissioned in '77, decommissioned in '02, sunk as part of a automated damage control system test for what became the Zumwalt class. Wreck discovered in 2014 (video here, but I'd mute the volume, the narration is maddening). There is but a single (heavily modified) 'Spru-can' left of the 31 built, ex-USS Paul F. Foster which is the self defense test ship in Port Hueneme and it's a shame. A group in the Midwest tried to preserve the USS Conolly but it fell through.

Speedy recovery! I find the logging helps keep me moving along - so if you do build, might as well put some info down for the next person to come along. Regards, George K

Wow. And the story suggests that they found the USS Johnston as well. There is a great book on the subject of the Battle off Samar, "The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors" by James D. Hornfischer.

Yeah. I was on USS Peterson (DD-969) as a midshipman. In the summer of '84 we were with a small Marine battle group (Nassau, Ponce, Saginaw) off the coast of Beirut. Periodically other NATO/aligned ships would join for a time, but the Soviets always kept a Krivak around. We watched them, they watched us. One day, we got a good look at them when one of the trash bags didn't sink, and the Krivak immediately put on steam and picked up the bag. Hard to see from here, but it follows the identification slang for a Krivak (Hot dog pack, Smokestack, Knife in the Back, two Guns in the Back), the hot dog pack being the quad launcher for SS-N-14 Silex anti-ship/anti-submarine missiles. As it happens, some of the sailors on the Pete had filled one bag with, ah, unpleasant materials, and intentionally not weighed it down. Childish, I know. For reference, "Pete" with USS Biddle (CG-34) in the background, later, in Marseille (apologies for the quality, they are scanned prints). @ClipperFan or @rwiederrich, I don't know if you've been back behind what used to be the curtain, but it can be really weird for anyone that lived through the Cold War. I was in Kyiv back in 2008 and I visited what is now called the "National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War" but what was then the "Museum of the Great Patriotic War". They had a display of hardware outside the museum, but in addition to the WWII stuff, there was a bunch of Cold War equipment there as well. Two representative snaps below - an Mi-24 Hind helo and an R-12 Dvina IRBM with the Rodina Mat (Батьківщина-Мати) in the frame as well. As you can imagine it was weird looking at the stuff the Soviets were aiming at us as a display that families came to look at when they visited the memorial and park, and the shield of the Rodina Mat still has the seal of the USSR on it (my understanding is that the Ukrainians want to remove the hammer and sickle, but it's a big job and frankly they have other things on their mind right now). I assume it's just as weird for people who were in Warsaw Pact service who visit the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum (especially the Udvar-Hazy Center) which has an SR-71 spy plane and Cold War fighters and things like Poseidon missiles (and some Soviet stuff as well). When I was walking around Kyiv I wondered if anyone there had been assigned to the Black Sea Fleet back in '84, their HQ was obviously in Sevastopol in the then Ukrainian SSR. George

Well, back to the topgallant masts. Each of the previous failures taught me something, the most important was probably that I was not going to be able to use anything other than sandpaper to shape the topgallant masts, that the birch dowels at that length/thickness were not going to be successfully shaped with my cutting tools on the lathe. So, 100 grit paper to get the approximate shape, and 220 to finish it off, I managed to make the following (I did use a pointed cutting tool to square the ends). My goal was to properly capture the stepping of the mast (key to successfully mounting the stays) and I think that i did that: Here are two other views, the first sitting next to the diagram (this is for the main - which is what is shown in the diagram. All the penciled in numbers are just my conversion of the sizes of the real masts into mm) And the second of the piece before I cut the ends off: The Tamia tape on the right side of the picture was just to increase the diameter so that it would fit properly in the collet. I squared the foot of the mast to fit into the appropriate location in the trestle trees, drilled holes for the halyards, and then expanded the size of the hole in the topmast caps, and then trimmed the topmasts to accept the square hole in the cap, and voila, one (partly finished) mast! A couple of views of the mast below, looking directly aft: And looking from the port side, in profile, as it were: And a view from the port side with the mast (precariously balanced, and the topgallant leaning slightly aft because it isn't glued in place) on the ship: Although the plans suggest that the whole mast above the tops should be bright (with the exception of a gilded ball on the truck) the Butterfield painting shows the topmast from (and including) the trestletrees to the cap in white, with the foot of the topgallant also white to the point where it passes through the cap. I don't really see the spreaders in the painting, but I assume that they too are white. So, first stain on the mast itself, followed by some white paint, at which point I can call the spars on the mainmast done. Moving forward, I will need to scratch build a cap for the fore mast as I broke one of the two same-sized caps widening the round opening. That's no big deal, I think that all of the caps on the Niagara (and 1/4 of the ones on the Fish) were scratch built because I had a tendency to break them opening out holes. Good practice for the eventual RRS Discovery (1901) scratch build. This feels like something of a milestone. I'll say this much, the ship is going to take an enormous case, particularly vertically. Somehow paintings don't really give you a feeling for how much sail these things must have carried but when you see just how high the masts go versus the length of the ship - that drives it home. As always, thanks for looking in. Regards, George K

I wonder how many people my children's age would even get the West Germany reference. Getting old, I guess.

Well, three failed attempts to make the fore topgallant mast today (two breaks, one asymmetry). But this arrived from my one of my favorite bookstores (Powell's in Portland, OR), so not a complete loss. Fun fact from an early look through the book. The green color of my fish was chosen l because according to Steven Ujifusa's book "Barons of the Sea", McKay had originally wanted to paint it that way. Interestingly, on p 344 of the edition I have of Crothers we read that Fearless was painted a green color known as "Tea color" and that this green was used on all of the ships owned by William Weld & Co. Boston. Fearless was built after the Fish, but makes me wonder if McKay saw some of Weld's other ships and got some ideas...

No update for a few weeks (vacation), but here are some lovely model ships (and one real boat) from the Reykjavik Maritime Museum. No hints as to where I might be 🙂. George K

Yeah. Gonna have to stick a crowbar in my wallet and get one or both ...

That seems consistent with the plans and what photos I could find. The practical upshot is that I'm not going to install the chocks (if at all) until I see where the stays land on them. Better that they flow and maybe stick out slightly from the spreaders than have them bend oddly. In a month or so, I'm guessing I'll see how closely I actually followed the plans when the first topgallant stay is set. Thanks, George K P.S. It's sad to hear that you are looking for a buyer for BlueJacket. I wish you the best of luck finding a someone to continue it's wonderful operations and you the best in retirement.

Thanks all. To try to clarify my question, here is a segment of the plans. It shows (I think) that the spreaders are not changing the flow of the backstays. Now, here is a drawing I made to show the question I'm wondering about. On the left you have a mast viewed looking forward and on the right you have a mirrored mast from the side. On the looking forward view you have two options: on the left side, the spreader changes the direction of the stay, on the right, it hits it naturally and just kind of helps keep the stay in place using its natural flow. On the right, you have the same situation (although I realized it is the opposite as on the other drawing). On the left, the spreader is just sitting where the path of the stay naturally falls, and on the right, it changes the direction of the stay. This is a public domain image from Wikipedia showing a (modern) spreader - as you can see they are changing the flow of the stay: Again, my read of the plans says that this isn't what is going on - that it is following the natural path of the stay - but would appreciate anyone's insights. In either case it would prevent interference, but it will drive where I put the chocks. Thanks again, George K