Ian_Grant

Kevin, thank you for the kind words. Yes, these big steel windjammers are quite picturesque. I especially like the elevated storm gangways, for some reason. And from some of the photos I've seen of these ships in a storm I can see why they were needed! Her hull is about 9" longer than Victory's, but the bowsprit is very much shorter than Victory's. A model of her at 1/100 would be magnificent and fun to build. Yes the scale is smaller, but her rigging is much less intricate than 18th century practice, albeit with everything repeated five times on her five masts which does get a bit tedious. The repetition will get even worse when I start hanging six yards on each mast! I haven't looked for build plans, but a chap named Neville Wade has built an RC model of her so he must have found them somewhere. Here are Neville's ships, not as detailed as some but very pretty on the water. After I get the galley working I'd like to build an RC square rigger next. http://www.cocatrez.net/Water/NevilleWadeShips/index.html https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?2205250-Neville-Wade-s-Radio-Controlled-Square-riggers Thanks for the Newby book tips - I'll have a look for them. And do look for "The Last Grain Race" for yourself. It's interesting, vividly written, and funny at times.

Bill, just thought of the head sail rigging. Granted it's on the axis of the ship but the halliards need to be belayed on deck. You could usefully complete the various downhauls and halyards before moving to yards and other running rigging. In my case I am nearly done the standing rigging on my "Preussen", but in accordance with "The Ian Grant Method of Ship Rigging" all the running rigging is already belayed on deck to prevent a lot of special words while trying to tie off after all the backstays are in. See all the coils hanging over her bulwarks, here. Some from mast bitts, some from bulwark rails, some lower sheets and tacks.

3D printing is amazing, the way of the future for sure. I can't get over how quiet she is! I last launched an electric RC boat in the 70's using brushed Decaperm motors of the times; you could easily hear the motor whine from shore. I was thinking of maybe refurbishing my old WW I battlecruiser (which last sailed in 1980) with ESC's to replace the rheostat speed controllers but maybe I should change the motors too, having seen this. The Decaperms were geared motors; do you need to add a reduction box for these new brushless motors?

Servo selection done - the sweep servos will be Hitec's model HS-755MG, a "giant scale" or "1/4 scale" (depending on who you talk to) analog servo where "MG" stands for metal gears. The other contender was the HS-645MG standard-size servo, which would have had less margin over the expected RMS torque. The 755 rotates 90 degrees with the typical RC set's 1000 to 2000 usec pulse range but can rotate up to 200 degrees given a wider range (570 to 2400 usec is the extreme, according to Servocity). Since I have the Arduino controlling it I can easily provide 870 to 2130 usec or whatever, to get it to rotate 120 degrees. Then as discussed previously the arm can be short, minimizing the torque. The final nail in the 645's coffin was that the 755's different motor actually draws less current while providing 50% more torque. I think I said earlier that I'd rather have a bigger motor loafing along than a smaller motor labouring; with the bigger motor drawing less power it's a no-brainer. I then needed to design the oar position angles for power and return strokes. Pulling out my Pitassi I was reminded that his quadrireme interpretation had 88 oars, not 80, so my remes will be 22 not 20. This will increase torque 10% but I had already decided on smaller blades for appearance so torque is only about 3/4 of what I said in earlier posts. I spent some time manually drawing the oar angles wrt the waterline given the outrigger size. I found that it's not easy to have both remes of oars in the water for the power stroke and still have decent clearance above the water for the upper reme of oars during the return stroke; in a real ship the rowers in the upper reme could just lift their blades more than their buddies in the lower reme, but my mechanism will move the looms of both sets of oars the same distance vertically. It seems I will need to have the lower reme come up to horizontal in order to have clearance for the upper reme. Also, I'd like to have a little more freeboard than scale (which is only 3/4") but this makes the oar angles steeper which increases the above difficulty. I finally came up with a drawing with lower oar hole centres 1.25" above the water, with upper oar tholes spaced 13/16" higher, and 1.25" more outboard. This will lead to an upper deck somewhat higher than ancient writers imply for a quadrireme, but what the hell. I was surprised to find that I only need about 1/2" of vertical movement at the looms. Here is the drawing: I could go on forever making manual drawings so I decided to use tinkerCAD to model the mechanism with Servocity parts. I still can't figure out how to import Servocity's STEP files into tinkerCAD, and I don't want to spend months swearing at Fusion360, so I just drew the parts manually in tinkerCAD. Still required a few special words. 😁 I drew it with linear bearings since the available 2" long bearing now seems about right. My main purpose is twofold: (1) see how far below the waterline the drawer slides need to be, in order to design the central bulkheads, and (2) determine how far towards hull centreline the mechanism reaches i.e. how much space in the middle (needed!) for battery or servos? Here's what I have to this point. This drawing shows two upper reme oars and one lower reme oar with blades in water. Also two lower reme oars in horizontal position. Oar angles when in the water are 17 and 26 degrees respectively, a bit higher than Pitassi's 12 and 19, because I have the extra freeboard. From the bottom, we have the red drawer slides, a yellow "low side channel", an orange clamping hub, a blue SS shaft clamped in it, a green linear bearing, white clamping mounts around the bearing, a blue "back plate" which forms one end of the oar beam and which slides up and down the shaft thanks to the bearing, purple hinges connecting yellow u-channels to the beam, orange oar pivots within the u-channel, and orange oars. I haven't represented the other end (similar), or the L-channel beams which will connect them. The hinges on the upper reme will connect to the beam via standoffs (not shown) which will place the upper oar looms correctly relative to the lower (given the outrigger dimensions). So far I've concluded that the bottom faces of the drawer slides only need to be about 2mm below waterline, not as much as I had feared. The mechanism intrudes about 2.6" into the hull meaning that I only have about 1.8" free in the middle of the 7" beam hull. Probably ok for a battery and maybe the lift servos. I'm also finding that it is not so easy to place the second reme's hinges exactly as required; I had blithely assumed that if I tweaked the spacing from beam to hinges, and used washers as necessary between hinge and u-channel, I could get the oar looms to be anywhere I liked. Not quite that simple. Further tinkering required. It would be cool if I could animate this. Dream on.

Hey, I was born in Paisley! Parents emigrated when I was four. My brothers and I went to see our old address when we went backpacking years ago.

Me again. Just thought about the mainstay tackles. They make an interesting little addition to the model. I don't think Longridge describes them in text, but there they are in the "Standing Rigging" pull-out, dangling from the main stay. If you want to add them, it may be easier now than with all the yard ends poking out at you. 😉

Bill, one thing that comes to mind is the numerous lines that tie off on "shroud cleats" especially at the fore mast. You should figure out what you're going to do about them. I formed shroud cleats from etched cleats and very small pieces of evergreen and tied the lines to them before attaching to shrouds; my usual reverse-rigging method. This avoids having to reach across the ship to tie the lines off. Of course you could just tie them to the shroud. At the end of the day it's very hard to see.

That would be interesting to read about!

Over 3m long........gorgeous.........now we're talking. I drool over such large RC models in "Introduction to RC Scale Sailing Models" by Vaughn Williams.

All the guys I see at my local model shops are older. By and large the new generation just isn't interested, or has no exposure to dad at home making things. Nor do they get shop classes at school any more, at least here in Canada. Around 1970 or so, we were brazing with oxy-acetylene torches in grade 7 or 8 shop class. Today, nada; liability you know......... The world has moved on. My dad's trade of tool and die maker now features CAD'ed CNC-everything, not the experienced tradesman cutting from a drawing in such a way that the gear backlash effect is minimized. And you're now considered a cabinetmaker if you can lift melamine panels off the router table and run the edger machine to tape the exposed edges. There are maybe six people in Ottawa who make sailing ship models; I don't know any firsthand. I doubt manufacturers could recoup their tooling investment if they made a new ship model. It's sad, but 3D printing is on its way to help those interested. Soon we will make our own kits with software. Just the same route blazed in so many other areas.

Being a teenage boy when I built the CS in the 70's, I painted Nanny with flesh colour and dark hair, and two tiny dots of red paint for nipples. Sheesh. If I ever refurbish her (the CS) job one after cleaning will be painting Nanny white. 😀

Thanks gentlemen for mentioning this. I've added a note on pg 1 of my SR instructions, for when (if?) I get to her. Cheers!

Looking great Bill! Happy modelling...........

You asked in Kevin's log about how the stays are attached to the masts. For the lower masts, they are usually double, looped around the mast head and seized together close to it. Also seized near the bottom, close to the rigging screws or whatever each side of the mast ahead. Those on topmasts are double, seized together too. For topgallants, they are single and a tight eye is formed and seized and forced over the masthead. If the Revell instructions show a loop with a knot at its neck, they are correct. They're not meant to be tight to the mast, except in the case of topgallants/royals. You seem to be a guy who wants to produce an accurate model. I recommend "Masting and Rigging the Clipper Ship and Ocean Carrier" by Harold Underhill. Excellent book, many many diagrams.

You are referring to the bulleyes/lanyards on the forestay and bowsprit guys? I can't tell looking at my old CS whether the bulleyes had a groove around them. If not, it might be hard to tie lines to them. I'm not impressed by the big knots my teenage self used to tie these on. Sheeesh! You can buy wood bulleyes, just so you know. Keep up the great work!

Kevin, I lied - upon examination with my headband magnifiers, the spreaders at the topmast crosstrees DID have small square projections meant to represent the cleats. Can't tell if they were accurately placed since, as I said, my teenage self wrapped the backstays one turn around the spreaders thus distorting their run. 🤨

Hi Kevin; I would think the factor to watch out for is that topgallant and royal backstays should just kiss the spreaders while maintaining a straight line to the deadeyes, so you may want to keep track of where Revell had their deadeyes. Looking at my old CS there are no cleats on the spreaders and my teenage self gave the backstays one turn around the spreaders .... 🙄

Fortunately, Revell's rigging instructions are very well drawn and thought out. Which is more than can be said for a certain plastic ship model company whose name begins with "H".

I still like the little Hackney book on "Victory". When all is said and done, Longridge boils down to a couple of chapters on rigging if you are not building a wooden hull, and the Hackney book though lacking the beautiful diagrams is still a fount of information.

Thanks; the shafts would be well above 2mm. My mockup uses 1/4" dowel and doesn't look ridiculous.

Yes I recall using Haynes to work on my '79 Mustang, the last car I felt competent to work on and in which you could get your elbows into the engine compartment 😀.

Kevin, the way I imagine you are picturing the sails is dangling in several arcs below the yard? This could be done by partially clewing up, and partially hauling in the buntlines. I'm not sure if CS clews to the quarters or to the yardarms i.e. straight up but you could look into that. I noticed you mentioned "strong" resin, which my brother also has. He claims that I could use "strong" resin to 3D print 9" oars for my Roman galley and they would be as strong as a CNC'ed part. But I keep seeing references to the "brittleness" of resin parts. What do you think of the strength of these "strong" resins?

Yes she still floats. I cleaned off years of accumulated dust for the picture. I got to thinking it might be fun to run her again, same decaperm motors but with modern battery and brushed ESC's instead of the old rheostatic speed controllers I used to use in her. Well do I remember cleaning the contact area so the copper wiper arm could touch the coils of the partially-uncovered wire-wound resistor element in the rheostats.... no one under 50 knows what I'm talking about... Haha 😃. I think I will consider refurbishing her and taking her to the cottage for the calm evenings. Providing that the other decaperm is in fact in one of my other boats. I even thought it might be nice to pull the drawings out of the tube in the basement and add some more details. Her decks look pretty bare compared to some I've seen on MSW with hatches and scuttles all over. Probably I had trouble reading the drawings back then. LATER EDIT: I pulled out the drawings and wow, did I ever skip a lot of detail. Her decks are indeed full of hatches, ventilators, and scuttles. Also omitted all the light armament, armour belt edges on hull, protrusions on turrets which I assume are rangefinding lenses (?), vent pipes at the stacks, the frames at the top of the stacks (for covers when laid up in port?), all the doors, many many boats, etc etc. ill consider fixing her up but life is short; I still want to do this galley first.

Finally, after all these months, some actual numbers! Borrowed a fish scale from a neighbour. Testing in my (as yet unopened) pool, it reads about one lb pull when moving the twenty looms in a two inch stroke over one second. That's with blades measuring 5/8" x 1-3/4", and a loom length of two inches which is my desired value given the boat's likely beam. I can extrapolate from there. Force will vary in proportion with blade area, and as the square of the stroke velocity (as I can attest from many many hours pedaling a bike into the wind!). Stroke isn't going to be faster than one second, and will be slower most of the time meaning much less torque (inverse of the square). Each sweep servo will power two remes of oars, so 2 lbs thrust needed. If the servo only moves 60 degrees it will need a 2" arm to give the 2" stroke which represents a torque of 4 lb-in. If it can move 120 degrees then a 1.15" arm will give the 2" stroke, representing a torque of 2.3 lb-in. Obviously a higher-rotation servo is desirable. Since fastest realistic stroke is about 1 second, servo speed is not likely to be a concern. In an earlier video I showed return stroke speed at 1.5 times the power stroke speed which looked pretty good. If I stick to this value then the oars will be in a power stroke 60% of the time, and a return stroke 40% of the time. Sweep torque will be essentially zero during the return stroke. Sweep torque during the power stroke will vary depending on the angle of the servo arm , but let's just assume it is a constant 4 lb-in (to take the smaller-rotation servo case above) to be conservative. Over a cycle, then, the RMS torque will be about 3.1 lb-in (if I calculated that correctly). This value is the equivalent continuous torque. Since I can't get any info on continuous torque from Hitec, I'll need to do some temperature testing at this torque, with the servo arm going back and forth with an appropriate weight on it. If I find a servo that does 120 degrees, then the 2.3 lb-in power stroke torque yields an RMS torque of just 1.8 lb-in. Now I can look through servo specs and make an intelligent choice. I have been unable to pry any info from Hitec regarding continuous torque specs or thermal limitations so I will just have to select a servo whose max torque, "heavily" de-rated, is likely to indicate a continuous torque rating exceeding the above RMS values. So, rookie, your head must really be spinning now! 😃 It's OK everyone, I can tease rookie......he's my brother! Other unknown is what force is required to propel the actual boat? I just happen to have a WW I battle-cruiser I built for RC in high school which has a length, beam, and draft very similar to the proposed galley. I used the fish scale to pull it on the water. From a standing start it needs less than one lb to get going, which is much less than its displacement. Since four remes of oars should provide in the region of 4 lbs thrust, I think maybe I'm making a dragster! 😀 LATER EDIT: I forgot to take into account the oar gearing. For the twenty oars collectively, the 1 lb pull from the servo at the looms yields 0.35 lb at the centroids of the blades. Four remes thus provide 1.4 lbs thrust against the water, far short of the 4 lbs I mentioned above. Here are some pics of the battle-cruiser beside the oars at the proposed scale (fish scale is also seen). Size looks about right! The ship is Admiral Beatty's flagship HMS Lion, which was heavily damaged at Jutland. I got the plans from David MacGregor in the UK. Not a completely detailed build but pretty good for a teenager in the 70's. Powered by twin Decaperm motors (lovely motors, one of which remains) and oversized propellers which pushed it along like a destroyer. The other motor must be in one of my other old RC boats. There's even an old servo in there; might be fun to try it out.

Looking great!