liteflight

Chief Mark
I look forward to your build.
 
Can anyone suggest a collective noun for Nefs ?  There seems to be an outbreak of nef-building ( statistically, the number of builds has doubled in the last week)
 
And that doesn’t include builds of Hulcs,  frumious or otherwise.

Chief Mark
I look forward to your build.
 
Can anyone suggest a collective noun for Nefs ?  There seems to be an outbreak of nef-building ( statistically, the number of builds has doubled in the last week)
 
And that doesn’t include builds of Hulcs,  frumious or otherwise.

Planking in progress. Note the rubber spaces as recommended by Liteflite (though sometimes I use wooden spacers when stiffness is needed).
 

 

 
And a sliver to close up a gap. 
 

 
And trimmed off.
 
 

 
More planking:
 

 
 
 

 
 
I've been thinking about Druxey's question regarding the layout of the planking butts - it makes sense that the further they are apart the stronger the structure. But only one of my books (Mondfeld) has a diagram showing how they are supposed to be done. And even then I misinterpreted the layout. 
 
So now that I've got this far, I've decided to change the layout in future strakes so the spacing is more equal (see the black marks)
 
More to come.
 
Steven 
 

Lovely and interesting work, Steven
 
tiny suggestionette in relation to your pushpins holding the planks in position.  A circle of rubber about the diameter of the head of your pin would exert more grip with less precision of driving required.
My first thought was to slice a good draughstmans rubber into sat 3 mm slices, then make circles with a wet sharpened tube ( I use Readily-available-wetting-agent ( saliva) which is also a perfect accelerator for cyano)
 
Love your crew, and the remade and delicate instruments
andrew

Lovely and interesting work, Steven
 
tiny suggestionette in relation to your pushpins holding the planks in position.  A circle of rubber about the diameter of the head of your pin would exert more grip with less precision of driving required.
My first thought was to slice a good draughstmans rubber into sat 3 mm slices, then make circles with a wet sharpened tube ( I use Readily-available-wetting-agent ( saliva) which is also a perfect accelerator for cyano)
 
Love your crew, and the remade and delicate instruments
andrew

Lovely and interesting work, Steven
 
tiny suggestionette in relation to your pushpins holding the planks in position.  A circle of rubber about the diameter of the head of your pin would exert more grip with less precision of driving required.
My first thought was to slice a good draughstmans rubber into sat 3 mm slices, then make circles with a wet sharpened tube ( I use Readily-available-wetting-agent ( saliva) which is also a perfect accelerator for cyano)
 
Love your crew, and the remade and delicate instruments
andrew

I discovered a small problem. Due to the shape of the hull, I've had to include stop planks, but I was "stopping" them as though they were carvel planks - with both the plank above and below the stopped plank taking its place. But that doesn't work with a clinker built vessel. The overlapping of the planks means that only the plank above the stopped plank overlaps. So instead of this:
 

I had to change the overlap to this:

 
Which means I had to take off the clingwrap and start again.
 
The first buisine player is complete except for removing him from his bit of wood.
 

 
   
 

 
And I experimented with the buisine. I first thought of making it out of wood, but wood painted to look like brass doesn't look like brass. So I decided to try making one out of brass. Found an old piece of brass welding rod and put it in my "poor man's lathe".
 

 

 
And worked it up, bit by bit. To keep the thing from bending uncontrollably I kept my working surface close to the drill chuck, only letting it out bit by bit as I needed to.
 

 

 

 

 
Pretty happy with the way it turned out. The only problem is that I seem to have made it too thick - more like a bazooka than a trumpet.
 

 
And now it's been cut off I can't fix it. So I think I'll have another try and see if I can make a thinner one. I hope I can make it work this way - otherwise I'll have to go back to wood, which I'd rather not do, for the reason above.
 
Steven

And a bit more progress on the steersman:
 
       
 
       
 
 
      
 
I've yet to do his face and a few finer details - but I'm going to leave the arms as they are until I have the ship built and the side rudder installed, so I can get them just right.
 
And the next two figures (the guys in the aftercastle
 

 
playing the mediaeval trumpet, or buisine)
 
    
 
                                                                                                        
Steven                                                                                                                                               
 

Yes
And with carefully researched clothing coloured to match the available dyes ( of course) 
 
Fascinating build, I am following agog.  
I’m not a popcorn afficionado ( but thanks for making it available). I prefer the emu drumsticks you have elegantly offered.
 
Hull carving using buttocks:  this has been my preferred way of carving hulls for racing yachts.   To help with precise fairing of the hull I colour the wood glue with acrylic paint so that there is a good visual marker of your progress in fairing the hull or plug.
 
Photos  are my Footy “Presto” , colours are to honour her Italian designer Flavio Faloci

Yes
And with carefully researched clothing coloured to match the available dyes ( of course) 
 
Fascinating build, I am following agog.  
I’m not a popcorn afficionado ( but thanks for making it available). I prefer the emu drumsticks you have elegantly offered.
 
Hull carving using buttocks:  this has been my preferred way of carving hulls for racing yachts.   To help with precise fairing of the hull I colour the wood glue with acrylic paint so that there is a good visual marker of your progress in fairing the hull or plug.
 
Photos  are my Footy “Presto” , colours are to honour her Italian designer Flavio Faloci

Yes
And with carefully researched clothing coloured to match the available dyes ( of course) 
 
Fascinating build, I am following agog.  
I’m not a popcorn afficionado ( but thanks for making it available). I prefer the emu drumsticks you have elegantly offered.
 
Hull carving using buttocks:  this has been my preferred way of carving hulls for racing yachts.   To help with precise fairing of the hull I colour the wood glue with acrylic paint so that there is a good visual marker of your progress in fairing the hull or plug.
 
Photos  are my Footy “Presto” , colours are to honour her Italian designer Flavio Faloci

Yes
And with carefully researched clothing coloured to match the available dyes ( of course) 
 
Fascinating build, I am following agog.  
I’m not a popcorn afficionado ( but thanks for making it available). I prefer the emu drumsticks you have elegantly offered.
 
Hull carving using buttocks:  this has been my preferred way of carving hulls for racing yachts.   To help with precise fairing of the hull I colour the wood glue with acrylic paint so that there is a good visual marker of your progress in fairing the hull or plug.
 
Photos  are my Footy “Presto” , colours are to honour her Italian designer Flavio Faloci

Yes
And with carefully researched clothing coloured to match the available dyes ( of course) 
 
Fascinating build, I am following agog.  
I’m not a popcorn afficionado ( but thanks for making it available). I prefer the emu drumsticks you have elegantly offered.
 
Hull carving using buttocks:  this has been my preferred way of carving hulls for racing yachts.   To help with precise fairing of the hull I colour the wood glue with acrylic paint so that there is a good visual marker of your progress in fairing the hull or plug.
 
Photos  are my Footy “Presto” , colours are to honour her Italian designer Flavio Faloci

OK, for better or worse, here's the hull with its final detailing arrangements. These are all glued in and no going back. Apologies for the crappy photos, I hurt my knee this morning (nothing permanent, just very stiff) and didn't feel like carrying the model outside for better light with the increased stumbling hazard. You'll get proper photos when it's fully done. This is just to show you what I did.
 
Bow: Paired shields lashed between the thwarts as far back as the mast foot, with three shields lashed to the outer hull.
 

 
A couple chests in the bow and another angle of the shields:
 

 
Amidships cargo: Bundles and chests before the mast, barrels around the mast, spear bundles aft:
 

 

 
Stern: More shield pairs lashed between the thwarts aft of the mast foot, two more shields on the hull on either side along with a couple stashed in the very stern, and more chests:
 

 

 
And an overhead view of the whole thing:
 

 
Astute eyes will notice that this is only 40 shields for the 60 rowers, but I'm stopping there. Partly laziness in just not wanting to make more shields, but more that I don't see a clear place to store/display any more without the hull starting to look crowded. Maybe it was crowded in real life, but I don't want the model to look too busy.
 
I'm pretty pleased with this overall. It's enough detail to bring the hull to life without really feeling cluttered. Next step is to tighten the standing rigging and install the sail & yard. Actually getting pretty close now since I pre-made that whole assembly.
 
Looks like I'm not quite going to finish by the one-year anniversary (July 5), but I do intend to finish in time to enter this in the NRG's online contest (deadline August 2).
 
Thanks for sticking with me!
 

I'm slowly getting into the rigging, mostly using as my guide Anderson's The Rigging of Ships in the Days of the Spritsail Topmast, which, though it mainly deals with ships of 50-100 years later than mine, still has a lot of info that is relevant, and is often the only source apart from Mondfeld and contemporary illustrations.
 
Sheesh! So much to learn. My brain hurts. But if I take it slowly, item by item I expect by the end of it I may have advanced from a state of utter confusion to one of relative ignorance.
 
Here's Anderson's diagram of the rigging of the clew of the courses.
 

 
And here is what I've done. From the top, clewline block, tack and sheet block.
 

 
Note at 1:200 making actual blocks is basically impossible, so I've compromised with hearts which are simpler but carry out a similar function.
 
This was really difficult to put together and for the next three course clews I'm thinking of working out a streamlined method which ends up with the same result.
 
Steven

Working on the fore shrouds. I'd already (way back when I was 17) glued the ratlines to the starboard shrouds, thinking it's be easy to add the deadeyes later (how wrong I was!). Since I took this photo I have tightened the lanyards, glued them in place and cut the free ends off (also very fiddly).
 

 
And the port shrouds were new. Unfortunately my clever way of setting up the spacing of the deadeyes just didn't work. The shrouds ended up too long, and I ended up having to strip them off, cut off the top end and glue them back on. A lot of mucking around. I'm hoping that with experience I'll get better on later ones.
 

 

 
 
And I did some test painting for the "cloth of gold" sails. Here's the original painting from 1545, and the reconstruction painting from Björn Landström's book The Ship, which I used as my model.
 

 

 
I traced the repeating pattern and made a template for it, but wasn't satisfied with it so I made another by photocopying the pattern and sticking it to  thin card from a manilla folder.
 
 
 
  
 
For the first test run I used gold acrylic - looked good, except they didn't have gold paint back then. So I ended up trying out various combinations of yellow, brown and black acrylic paint, doing it in layers, and finally mixing them to try and get a convincing colour (far right). By the way, the colour values are very bad - the fabric is really a canary yellow and the paint colour is a sort of brownish greyish yellow.
 

 
I hadn't wanted to do it this way, because it's so hard to get separate "batches" to match each other, and acrylic starts to dry the moment you expose it to air. But that turned out to work best, so I have to grit my teeth and do great long stints of fiddly painting until the current batch runs out and I can take a break (not wanting to waste my limited supplies of paint). So here's  the fore topsail painted and the foresail and topgallant marked out for painting.
 

 
Since I took this photo I have painted a little over half the pattern on foresail. More to come.
 
Steven
 

Love the anchors, Steven
They look like forged iron and the rings look suitably distressed as well.
I think that the stocks might look better with bands nailed around them.  If you are not sure you could try the look with dark paper applied with glue stick so that water or alcohol would remove it if it offended your (excellent) eye.
 
Good work with the jigs, they do the trick.  I remember seeing a deadeye jig made from a steel hinge, with the deadeye located in a hole in the lower leaf, and the lanyard ‘oles in the upper leaf.  Since you are drilling into virgin stock it would be even easier.  Come to think of it a brass hinge would be even easier to make and more pleasant to work with.
 
Please tell me and the rest of the watching world how you keep your cutting board so pristine!  Mine looks less than clean as I use it as a table protector, and all cutting, glueing and some painting activities leave their mark.  Even with a weakly clean ( I have trouble summoning the energy) it remains more than a little “used”
Or do you have a “photo” mat which lives a pampered life in cellophane and replaces the working mat?

Love the anchors, Steven
They look like forged iron and the rings look suitably distressed as well.
I think that the stocks might look better with bands nailed around them.  If you are not sure you could try the look with dark paper applied with glue stick so that water or alcohol would remove it if it offended your (excellent) eye.
 
Good work with the jigs, they do the trick.  I remember seeing a deadeye jig made from a steel hinge, with the deadeye located in a hole in the lower leaf, and the lanyard ‘oles in the upper leaf.  Since you are drilling into virgin stock it would be even easier.  Come to think of it a brass hinge would be even easier to make and more pleasant to work with.
 
Please tell me and the rest of the watching world how you keep your cutting board so pristine!  Mine looks less than clean as I use it as a table protector, and all cutting, glueing and some painting activities leave their mark.  Even with a weakly clean ( I have trouble summoning the energy) it remains more than a little “used”
Or do you have a “photo” mat which lives a pampered life in cellophane and replaces the working mat?

For the foremast I realised there just wasn't enough room on the forecastle for the knight and a capstan - so I've cut a hole in the forecastle deck to lead the ties down to a supposed knight and capstan conveniently hidden belowdecks.
 

 
Then the problem was to lead those ties down and fix their ends belowdecks. So, I led the ties as a loop through the hole in the forecastle deck and made a wire hook to grab the loop and pull it out through the "doorway" at the break of the forecastle. I got the inspiration for this method from C.S. Forester's  Lieutenant Hornblower (where a gunner uses it to repair an unbushed cannon).
 

 

 
 
And then I put a bit of wood through the loop and glued it in place.
 

 
Then slid the piece of wood through the "doorway" and glued it in place on the inner deck.
 
Next I put cheeks with sheaves on the foremast and threaded the ties through them.
 
 
 
Needs a bit of tidying up. You can see the hole in the mast where I'd originally intended to put a single tie - until I did some reading and realised they were always double. A bit of filler will fix that.
 
And I've been working on the stand. Not finished yet, but well on the way.
 

 
Dry fitted.
 

 
Steven
 
 
 
 

Brilliant carving at that scale!  And I was not sure where the little slivers were going to until they got their crosses on and became shields.
 
as an aside, I used to fly indoor models with Willard Wigan.  He used to bring examples of his sculptures to show us.  
https://www.willardwiganmbe.com/
if he had a gigantic match, I never saw it

Brilliant carving at that scale!  And I was not sure where the little slivers were going to until they got their crosses on and became shields.
 
as an aside, I used to fly indoor models with Willard Wigan.  He used to bring examples of his sculptures to show us.  
https://www.willardwiganmbe.com/
if he had a gigantic match, I never saw it

Brilliant carving at that scale!  And I was not sure where the little slivers were going to until they got their crosses on and became shields.
 
as an aside, I used to fly indoor models with Willard Wigan.  He used to bring examples of his sculptures to show us.  
https://www.willardwiganmbe.com/
if he had a gigantic match, I never saw it

Brilliant carving at that scale!  And I was not sure where the little slivers were going to until they got their crosses on and became shields.
 
as an aside, I used to fly indoor models with Willard Wigan.  He used to bring examples of his sculptures to show us.  
https://www.willardwiganmbe.com/
if he had a gigantic match, I never saw it

Making a third figure - this time a common sailor - probably to stand on a yard holding onto a rope. Or possibly it's John Travolta . . .
 
    
 
    
 

 
And finally doing the railings for the main deck, one of which broke off short, and the other got lost.
 
Here I'm adding extra length at both ends to the broken one, using scarph joints.
 

 
      
 
And in place - just glued at both ends so far. Once that's dry I'll glue down the intermediate bits.
 
 

 
 
Steven
 

Here are the cannons for the main (lower) deck, which is open to the sky so the carriages can be seen. They're based on those found on the Mary Rose, though I haven't been able to reproduce the shape of these rather unusual barrels with the equipment to hand (hell, at this scale, I haven't even given them trunnions!).
 
   
 
I made the barrels the same way as I have previously, with a piece of brass tube from a hobby shop in my "poor man's lathe" (electric drill), and shaped with a small hacksaw and files. And here's the cascabel, made from yet another "sequin pin" with the head filed down:
 
   
 
   
 
I glued it in place with CA.
 
And here's the construction of a gun carriage (note the giant matchstick):
 
     
 
The wheels were cut from a piece of pear wood I'd carved into a cylinder and drilled the holes for the axles with another sequin pin. And more sequin pins for the axles.
 
    
 
And all complete.
 
   
 
Some of them are a little too high to fit through the gunports, but I'll just sand the wheels down a bit and they should be fine.
 
 
Steven