Ian_Grant

George, your water dioramas are always superb - totally convincing! And Ares is another exceptional model.

Good idea to use a french curve as a bending jig!  Must keep that in mind.

3 minutes ago, wefalck said:

A couple of weeks ago I had, during a business visit to Athens, the opportunity to visit the Hellenic Maritime Museum in Piraeus. They have a 1/50 scale model of the ARES on display:

 

I think your small model compares quite favourably with this model, which is three times the size!

Is that the museum which has "Olympias" on display?

Bill, you are as prolific with wood as with plastic now. Congrats!

Quick report on trial:

Went to my first RC boat club Wednesday sail at "Brown's Inlet" in Ottawa. They said they'd be there at 4:30 but no one showed up. A little after the 5pm the fitful  breeze died completely. As I was dismantling the rig, two ladies walking past asked, "Why don't you sail with those other guys?".  Turns out I was at the wrong end of Brown's Inlet and the two ends are cut off by trees etc. Next time I know where to go.

Anyway, as soon as I put her in the water I saw she was sitting stern-down with the forefoot barely touching the water. Even in the light breeze her bow kept wanting to veer off the wind. I'll need to rethink the weight distribution. Might even come down to completely tearing her down again and rebuilding much more lightly eg see those beams in first post first photo, and build the cabin with thinner pieces in pine not maple. Also get rid of the metal frame holding the pulley for the winch loop.

That's strike two for this summer in my RC revival; first the Roman galley and now this.

I'm also now getting enthused about restoring my HMS LION from WW I. Thinking of adding detail, correcting some errors and of course buy a modern brushed ESC for her decaperm motors. Will stay with gel-cell battery as that was most of her ballast, back in the 70's.

Looks great Jim.  So the Duchess didn't have Jarvis brace winches?

"........I’ve started on the mechanism to make the captain go below on diving".   

??!!!!!  Wow that would be something to see. Great model!

Somewhere on this site exists Chuck Passaro's tutorial on edge-bending strip planking. Might help you with your walnut!

Ready for trials!  If not detailed yet.  Didn't have time today as I was repairing some stuff at a client's house. Tomorrow is the plan, wind permitting. Will be naming her after my wife when I find some adhesive vinyl lettering.

I need to make a better-designed stand.

Very interesting!  👍

Keith - My definition of "pretty poor" differs from yours apparently. That prop looks great!

Well, I received my two figures a little ahead of promised delivery date. They were both from Etsy and advertised as 1/24 scale, though from different vendors. Girl from Poland, guy from somewhere else.

Here they are:  HaHaHa!!

I knew something was wrong as soon as I saw the small narrow shipping box for the helmsman figure. As far as I can measure in attempting to estimate their heights if they were standing up straight, she's a little tall and he's quite a bit short. She is much more nicely molded than he is. The Polish vendor at the time asked what pose I would like the helmsman to be in but I had ordered this guy with a view to amputating then reattaching his arms to hold the helm. I have now asked the vendor, Andrii, if he can make me a helmsman the same size as the passenger.

In the immortal words of the Polish Spitfire pilot to "Moggy" in "Piece of Cake"......."Is cock-up". 🤣

Bill; as always, consult Longridge. Plate 31 shows the heel of Victory's bowsprit tenoned (though you can't see it) to a rather massive timber upright "attached to deck beams above and below".

Me again. Check out this pic I found; zooming in shows that Occre is correct.

Bill, that certainly looks much better than Occre's butt end just sitting there. From the Occre diagram extract, the bowsprit heel would meet the foremast above deck. I assume you increased the steeve (angle) of the bowsprit for it to plunge through the deck ahead of the foremast. Perhaps Occre got the steeve wrong and someone didn't know what to do.....

On the other hand, look at the picture of the replica below. The bowsprit certainly looks like it would meet the foremast above deck....🤔

Did you check other build logs?

Ferrus, you are setting a world record on time for this model. Wow!

Steven, your carved figures are getting very good; I was admiring the hair/beards on Rustico and Buono.

Lovely model!

On 8/25/2024 at 12:09 AM, gak1965 said:

One question for the experts out there. This is a barque with a 450 hp steam engine. She carries 3 masts, 2 square rigged, each with a course, split topsails, and a topgallant (so 4 yards per mast) and a fore-and-aft mizzen. Discovery has relatively narrow, non-built masts - much smaller in diameter to the massive built masts on my last ship, the Flying Fish. I was wondering about why they could get away with masts like that, and had speculated that a clipper like that would carry a lot more canvas (I mean the Fish had 3 square rigged masts with course, top, topgallant, royal, and skysails) plus all of the clipper extras (studding sails, ringtail, etc.). However, when I look up the size of their rigs, we find that the Fish carried "8250 yards of canvass [sic] in a single suit." The Discovery had a sail area (in 1901) of 12,296 sq ft. So, is the 8250 "yards" square yards, or is there some arcane convention that can be used to convert to square feet? Crothers goes into great detail on these ships about everything but their sail plans (which I realize changed a lot over time). Any help greatly appreciated.

 

As always, thanks for looking in!

 

Regards,

George

 

George, I took a look and yes indeed Flying Fish is recorded as having 8250 "yards" of canvas, but as canvas came in I believe 3-foot wide "bolts" to be sewn together into a sail, each "yard" of a yard-wide bolt is in fact one square yard. Vastly larger than Discovery's sail area.

On 8/25/2024 at 4:05 AM, GeorgeKapas said:

Good morning! So the rigging process has progressed. I have been trying to improve the accuracy of my rigging work with this model, but the scale and the small size of the model is a bit of a hindrance. The current state of the rig is as follows: 

 

George, astoundingly neat work especially at that scale! It doesn't look like you were "hindered". 😉 As to the upper sail rigging, it would make sense to me to pass ropes through the lubber's hole IF their pins were inboard of the shrouds. Windjammers did this and had fairleads along the shrouds to prevent loose ropes from tangling with each other. But if the pin is aft of the shrouds then to me it makes sense to run the lines straight as you have....why have them rubbing the edge of lubber's hole?

On 8/25/2024 at 12:09 AM, gak1965 said:

 

Ian,

     I took a look at Fram. Every time I read about these expeditions, I have a flashback to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - "Who are these guys"? That is one tiny ship to be taking on an expedition to the South Pole - 128 feet. Discovery is half again as long and carried three times the crew. Amazing. I will note that there is also an MS Fram that does cruises to polar regions and a SpaceX mission called Fram that is due to launch this year and have a polar orbit.

 

"Who are these guys" indeed. It was known that driftwood from Siberian forests was sometimes found in Greenland. Fram was specially built with an egg-shaped u/w hull to withstand being trapped in ice; pressure would just lift the hull not crush it. The plan was to sail north from Norway and get as far as possible before being trapped in ice, then just sit there and wait for the ice drift to take them to the Greenland area via the north pole (?!!). After a long while (a year and a half? two? can't recall the details) it became apparent that they were on a trajectory to miss the pole by a large margin, so two men, Nansen and Johansen, decided they would take some of the dogs and sled to the pole then attempt to rendezvous with the ship at an estimated future position....they reached over 84 degrees north, some 150 miles north of the then record, but ended up missing the ship on swinging back and had to return south on their own (again, ?!!) in a 15 month ordeal of sleeping in a rotting reindeer sleeping bag and other misery until bumping in to another expedition. There is a great book, unbelievable reading on the level of Shackleton's Endurance expedition, entitled "Farthest North" by Fridtjof Nansen. Riveting reading.

 

Love it!  For some reason well deck gangways really enhance the looks of a ship, to me.

Access to mast bases was an issue on my Preussen too, especially the jigger mast which is completely surrounded by the aft well deck gangway, the aftmost boat skid, and the hen coop aft of it. With the insane number of backstays blocking side access I ended up belaying all the running rigging at bitts and belaying rails and will rig all of it in reverse. Preussen has been on pause for two years; back to it this winter.

Speaking of overlooked polar ships, what of "Fram"?  I have fond memories of seeing her, and the viking ships, when in Oslo.

Yes, scale models like this are best served by low speed motors with lead acid. As opposed to fast runabouts.

Another beautiful model!  Congrats Steven!

Seems to me like a representation of the sliding truss for the upper topsail yard in its lowered position, with a wire to glue into a hole in the yard. But it's awfully close to the mast cap, where the lower topsail yard's pivoting truss would be located. At any rate, perhaps the builder only got around to adding the first such truss.