Ian_Grant

Glad to. The lower deck beams as molded are 239 (not 242), 240 (not 241), 242 (not 240), 241 (not 239), 238, 237 from bow to stern. It becomes obvious the first time you try a dry fit. And while I'm at it, in Section 19 "Fitting the Bowsprit" the bowsprit bees 216/217 have been swapped. As for block sizes, Longridge always quotes them in his description for each rope. Just divide by 100 to get the scale size. I used Syren blocks spanning the range 2mm to 1/4". I have no idea if the supplied plastic blocks are the right sizes; they can't all be because I used 7 or 8 sizes of wood blocks. Same goes for the thread. Calculate scale diameter from the circumferences he quotes. Main stay & preventer work out to 1.6/1.3mm; same for fore stay & preventer; fore and main topmast stays/preventers 0.75/0.5mm; fore and main shrouds 1mm; etc, etc Actually I think I still have an excel spreadsheet I created by sifting through Longridge for Victory's scale thread sizes, and scale block sizes and quantities, on my older laptop. I could email to you if interested. PM me with your email coordinates 😉.

I believe blackening gives a better "grip" surface for the paint than shiny brass.

Bill, there is at least one Blackening discussion in the forum "Metalwork, Soldering and Metal Fittings". Just browse forums and scroll down 'til you see it.

I assumed the traveller(s) was(were) used to shift the sail(s) forward or back to move the wind's Centre of Effort (COE) on the sail. This would allow reduction of the helmsman's effort to keep the ship on course. For example, sailing in whatever direction with the desired sails set, if the ship wants to luff up and the helmsman is constantly fighting to keep her head off the wind, then moving the traveller forward would tend to make the sail push the bow more off the wind and provide the helmsman some relief. It's all a question of balancing the overall COE on the total sails set, with the "Centre of Lateral Resistance" (CLR) of the underwater hull. In my sailing dinghy, obviously there is no traveller to shift the sail COE, but if necessary I can shift my bum forward or back, tending to move the bow down or up, thus shifting the CLR of the hull and achieving a better balance. In RC model yachts, the jib stay can be pinned in any of several locations over say a 2-3" distance, to optimize the COE.

Wondered where in the world can I buy sodium hydrogen sulfate, whatever the heck that is? Apparently "pHdown" for pools is exactly that, and I have a large container sitting in my garage, unused, since my pool's pH always seems to be low every spring, never high. Awesome!!

Longridge doesn't go into detail on the boats, other than the very small drawings on the Plan No. 3 fold-out. He does at least quote their respective lengths, and you can see how the pinnace differs from the other work-a-day boats. There was quite some discussion about the Heller boats on the old Pete Coleman Victory web site. They're not actually accurate in terms of length and/or shape. If I recall correctly, the only one with a beamy "launch" shape was about 3/4" too short, or so???? You can measure their lengths and try to decide which is supposed to be which. Some people tried to find third-party sets of accurate sized boats. Some people bashed them; for example cutting the "launch" in half athwartships, reattaching the halves with 3/4" of evergreen strips between them, then suitably modding the gunwales and thwarts. Some people had boats left lying around from other kits, notably the Revell "Constitution". I had some of the Constitution boats myself, plus I remember shortening one of the Heller boats and its gunwales/seats. You can buy very fine evergreen strips for the ribs; at these tiny cross sections they're very pliable. Cut to rough length, apply a smear of CA and press across the boat interior holding in place on the bottom for a few seconds. Then trim the ends below where the thwart will be and CA the ends. I just spaced them by eye as I went along. At the very bows you need two pieces for the ribs as the bend at the keel is too sharp for a single piece to follow. The floorboards are slightly bigger evergreen strips, CA'ed to the ribs. I used some brass etch gratings I had in my parts box, trimmed to fit. In the case of the launch, the windlass and kedge anchor davit are made from evergreen cut and filed to shape. Colours wre another topic of debate. The barge was painted according to the taste of the captain or admiral so it's your choice. I painted the barge and pinnace at my whim, but made all the other "working" boats the same colours, to avoid too much of a "flying circus" look.

Syren makes one: https://syrenshipmodelcompany.com/serving-machine.php I looked at this, then made the equivalent out of meccano.

A serving machine makes it easy! I recommend you buy or build one. You'll be glad to have it when you need to serve the entire length of the first shroud on each side at the lower masts, or the entirety of the lower yard slings.🙂

Yes, on the old Pete Coleman web site "Blue Ensign" had many invaluable detailed entries on various topics, one of which was his beautiful work on the boats. After seeing things like that, one cannot but follow along and spend the extra time to enhance one's own build. A blessing or a curse?? Meanwhile, Blue Ensign has branched out from ships into 17th century womens' fashion 😁😁😁 **** **** see his "Queen Anne Royal Barge" build.

Bill, Since someone is looking at what was a pretty dormant log, I added a few more pics which show details that may interest you. Things like extra anchors that Heller omitted, enhanced detail to improve the ship's boats' appearance, and the vastly better appearance of ropes served where appropriate (not sure if you have served threads before, or not 😐).

Ahh......my long dormant blog has awakened! 😀 Since I'm helping answer Bill's questions for his Victory build, inspired by looking through the instructions and Longridge again I thought I would add some more random shots. First my serving machine since people have been amused by it.....my childhood meccano plus brass tubing. Progress......fore yard slung Third party stream anchor lashed to sheet anchor. Anchor buoy lashed to bower anchor. Main top at completion. Note the topgallant shroud lashings inside the topmast shroud deadeyes. Last step - stern lanterns attached. Bit of a bother to paint though. 🤪 Evergreen ribs, floorboards, windlass, anchor davit, etc added to launch, compared to typical boat hull as received. Completed set of ship's boats. Blue pinnace was especially interesting to bash. Placed Admiral's barge on skids. Other boats displayed beside ship to allow view through to main deck. Shot off the bow.

Lovely model!

Bill, the above shot reminds me that while you wait for stuff to arrive, you could also consider moving the anchor support block from its erroneous position between the 1st and 2nd fore chains, to between the 2nd and 3rd. A bit odd to me, with correct placing right above a gun port, not really where you want an anchor dangling down??!!, but there it is.... Its Heller location is too close to the cathead with the result that with the anchor fluke in the slot, the anchor ring is forward of the cathead which looks awkward given that it's supposed to be a very heavy object slung by the cat tackle, or however you choose to rig the anchors, when you get there. Longridge shows it in the correct location, Figure 57 pg 96 in my edition. I believe Daniel scraped the old one away and fashioned a new one, somewhere in his build log. Here it is on the 1:1 ship....... Or you could I suppose shorten the anchor shank a tad. I did not know this until I was rigging the anchors, far too late to contemplate taking a file to it.

Bill, I've been away at the cottage for a while. Nice work on the guns, and you'll find Longridge an essential companion. I don't know how many times I read through the rigging chapters. E50-55: These are where Heller claims the bowsprit shrouds attach to the hull. They want you to pre-attach the thread ends through the non-existent holes, for later use. Heller's way of doing rigging "instruction" is to give the two ends of a rope the same label, on whatever pages the ends appear. If you look at Step 11 of the instructions ("Fitting the Bows") you'll see E50-55 attaching to hearts used to tighten up the bowsprit shrouds. Now that you know this, forget it. They got it wrong; perhaps why the holes are absent...........and forget about the Heller instructions for any and all rigging. Longridge describes these shrouds succinctly on pg 226 (my 1972 edition) "Bowsprit Shrouds". There are many places on this model where you are best to drill a hole and glue in an eye. But plastic eyes can break and lead to heartache as you know. You can either make your own, or buy copper eyes which are almost exactly the same size as Heller's plastic ones. https://www.cornwallmodelboats.co.uk/acatalog/4703-Eyepin-Copper-2mm--100--A4703.html#SID=367

Beautiful area. And I recognize your dog from previous postings.

For the gun decks I just rigged one continuous thread along all the guns on a side as breech ropes, glued to deck between guns. This just to ensure that if you hit a protruding muzzle you don't lose a loose cannon into the hull. But it's your model and your choice what to do in terms of hidden detail.

I've already learned how critical the geometry is, just from building this jig. I drew a scale diagram but I'll need to be even more careful next time. This jig does not have the upper oars at quite a steep enough angle for their blades to reach the same presumptive waterline as the lower oars. In an actual model I would put a servo at each end of each beam, connected on a Y-harness, for the up/down drive. A servo in the middle works well enough for the jig. Also, I did not get the full extent of the sweep I planned for because my servos move less than 90 degrees overall at least with my ancient 75 MHz setup. I do have a newer 2.4 GHz transmitter, but no receiver as it was built into my ARF airplane. The big question is: how much power is actually required on the sweep to move a model. This jig just uses standard futaba servos. Would they be enough to overcome the resistance of the hull's skin against the water? Don't really know, might need a giant scale servo or maybe just a standard sail-arm servo. With only servo drive the boat cannot be too large. I'd love to build a sextere with its two archery towers but this is a broad, deep ship whose model would probably need a lot of ballast to load to waterline. That would be a lot of inertia to overcome. The jig as built requires a beam at the waterline of 7 inches. I figure I could lose 1/2" overall off the oar beams by changing the mounting of the lower oars. This jig has oar looms of 2.5"; if I could reduce that without overloading the servos that would reduce the ship's beam too, perhaps significantly. A quadrireme at 1/32 scale would have waterline beam 6.75" (9" overall) and length about 4'-6", draft 1.7" which sounds reasonable. A sextere at 1/48 scale would have waterline beam 8" (8-1/2" overall) and length about 3'-10", draft 2.1" which might be a lot of displacement to ballast. Most of the hull amidships would be the "engine room" filled with the moving oar beams and oar looms. There could be no lateral hull bracing in this area. Further, any deck beams will have to be removable to allow "engine" repairs and maintenance. I'm assuming I could fit batteries, receiver, arduino near the stem, and rudder servo at the stern of course. Note that I haven't built an RC boat in 40 years, or skinned a hull in individual planks in, well, ever! And plans for these ships are non-existent. Pitassi gives the engine room cross section, and top views of deck outline and waterline, but that's about it. Would have to merge Olympias's stem and stern onto this, somehow. Lots to think about.

They look nice Bill! In reality, though, only the gun muzzles will be seen, with the fronts of the carriages barely visible. I wouldn't worry about painting the trucks etc.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This build log is a title change from the previous title "Arduino Rowing Mechanism for RC Galley". The log was originally opened to record my progress on making a servo-driven mechanism to move banks of oars in a realistic manner, for the purposes of building an RC Roman galley, propelled by her oars, at 1/32 scale. An Arduino "Uno" interfaces to the RC Rcvr and four servos which drive the oars on two sides, with author-written software to control the oars according to the "throttle" and "rudder" signals from the Rc Transmitter. Software was developed using the Arduino "Integrated Development Environment" (IDE) and a prototype test jig containing several oars per side. The log got pretty long in the end; readers interested only in the actual ship development should jump to post 164 on pg 6, bypassing the tangled history of the software and rowing mechanism development. Those who might be interested can read the initial pages. *************************************************************************************************************************************** *************************************************************************************************************************************** START OF ORIGINAL BUILD LOG: Lately I have become interested in ancient Greek and Roman galleys, and have been toying with the idea of making one for RC. When I saw Richard Braithwaite's demo mechanism I became even more intrigued with the idea. As opposed to using electric motor(s) and some sort of mechanical drive with pulleys and chains I thought a better way might be to use hobby servos for the job; one servo driving the forward/backward sweep and a second driving the up/down motion of the oar loom beam (per side). And rather than having a four channel set and continuously twiddling the sticks to make the oars row, it seems an ideal application for an Arduino microcontroller running custom software. In this scheme, the Receiver output servo signals for "throttle" and "rudder" are connected directly to, and read by, the Arduino. The rudder signal is also connected to the rudder servo via a y-harness. Arduino software controls the four oar drive servos. This servo-driven scheme has several advantages over electric motor mechanical drive: (1) Since software is driving all four servos, it is simple to keep them all moving in sync, whether going forward, backward, or reversing oars on one side during a turn, at any given speed, (2) Software can use the "rudder" input to decide when to move the two sides differently; for example a slight course correction can be ignored (by the oar servos); a middling rudder angle could halt the oars in the water on the inside of the turn; a large rudder angle could reverse the oars on the inside of the turn (while keeping the start and end of the stroke synchronized on both sides). (3) When slow speed is desired, the software can shorten the stroke as opposed to an electric motor drive which still executes a full stroke making it look like the oarsmen are stretching right out and pulling back, all in slow motion. (4) Software can provide a slight pause at the end of each power and return stroke, as would occur naturally as the oarsmen absorb then reverse the inertia of the oars. (5) Software can make the return portion of the stroke faster than the power portion to better represent actual rowing. The shape of the overall stroke is formed by the dynamic relative movements of the sweep and lift servos; any shape can be formed, eg rectangular, oval, eliptical, circular, by performing a bit of math in software to calculate the next servo position writes. In short, the oars can be made to do whatever one wants, and is capable of writing code for. I decided to build a test jig for code development. Each side of the jig has 5 oars in a bireme arrangement; I'm thinking of making either a Quadrireme (88 oars in two remes of 22 each side), or a sextere (120 oars in two remes of 30 each side). See Michael Pitassi's book "Roman Warships". Here are a few photos....... Each side's "platform" slides on two Slim-Line drawer slides which only occupy 3/8" of vertical space. Much less than ServoCity's X-beam with mini rollers etc which was my first idea. The vertical chunks of wood at the platform ends are dadoed to let the oar beam slide up and down; the ends of the oar beams I wrapped in packing tape to make them "slippery". In an actual model I'd replace these with ServoCity's SS shafts and linear bearings. The dummy oars pass through a "hull section" which defines the spacing between the two remes' "tholes". Here we see the two servos which drive the platforms back and forth. Here we can just see the two servos which drive the oar beams up and down. Here is the Arduino board, and a prototyping board which will be mounted on it and contain connectors for the receiver inputs, servo outputs, etc. My simple two-channel RC set can only drive one side right now, without the Arduino. Tried to upload a video but no joy; will try again later.

I remembered one other thing for the "not necessary but nice" category is to make two "fish davits" (not supplied) and stow on forecastle. Basically just two square timbers with some beveling. I agree with Marc - it's a slippery slope once you start improving the model.

Bill I guess the short answer is "it depends". It depends on what level of detail you would be satisfied with given the required effort. From the look of your other ships I know you can easily complete the Victory. It must be overwhelming having us throw information at you, but know that this kit makes an incredible model. I would say the minimum "bashing" requirement is trashing the supplied blocks and deadeyes, buying more sizes of thread in black and natural, improving the lower chains and the stanchions, thickening the port linings, attaching the yards properly, and adding the "saddle" (another Heller "oopsie") to the mizzen mast to support the driver boom. The hull, guns, decks, masts, and spars are very detailed and accurate. There are many other little changes you can make for further enhancement. Some of the physical mods I made include Daniel's binnacle (which you are getting), Daniel's boarding pike racks (ditto), Daniel's skylight (ditto), poop deck ladder handrails, buying and adding scale stream and kedge anchors, opening up one of the stern flag lockers. You can also spend much time adding the missing internal framing to the ship's boats which really significantly improves them. For those really into extra detail, the poop skylight is slightly too far forward and could be shifted, the bower anchor shoes should be between the 2nd and 3rd chains not the 1st and 2nd, the Prince of Wales feathers on the stern are wrong, the deck plank shift pattern is wrong. I did nothing about any of these, though I would have moved the anchor shoes had I known before it was too late and risky. Once you are armed with Longridge, the rigging is do-able. You need to plan it well though. I omitted all staysail rigging and all slab lines and signal halyards. You could reasonably omit all bowlines too if rigging without sails; I rigged them anyway and hitched them to the yards. I did add anchor buoys at the fore shrouds. I also added fore and main royal yards (not supplied) stowed lashed inside the topmast shrouds, and fore lower stunsail booms (not supplied) stored on the skid beams. I hope this shows you the scope we are talking about. You can choose how obsessive to be about the job.

Yes, that's the one. I should mention that of its 272 pages, the detailed rigging description occupies about 70 pages; the rest deals with scratching a wooden hull and fittings and is very little use to the plastic modeller. There is a much smaller book, "Classic Ships: HMS Victory" by Noel Hackney, which demonstrates how to enhance the smaller Airfix Victory. It goes through all the same rigging stuff with rope and block sizes but has far less detailed diagrams, though adequate. If you are budget conscious I assume this little book would be far cheaper and you still have MSW to assist. For your other question, the truth is that, going by build logs I have seen, most people who start this kit never finish. You have to be pretty dogged to overcome the terrible instructions and know to buy wood blocks and deadeyes. I actually bought my kit in 1983 but life got busy and it was started only a few years ago after my kids got big. Had I started it then, without the internet and its invaluable search tools and forums, I probably would not have finished, or at least it would not have been near as nice. Remember the days when all you had was a local hobby shop (there were good ones) and looking at the ads in "Model Boat" magazine for materials? 😀 How would I ever have learned of Longridge's book? Regarding parrals, here is a pic from Longridge. I just bought some seed beads of appropriate size, filed a piece of maple to the cross section, drilled, then sliced it up with an exacto knife. Then sort through the pieces for the best. And for example here is a page from Hackney's book. Short and sweet. His scale block sizes are for the smaller Airfix model, not for 1/100 but you can convert his actual size to suit.

Bill here is an example of a parral made with seed beads and some tiny slivers of wood, drilled. It's relatively easy to rig the parral with the brass rod retaining the yard in place.

Yes that picture is during my build. You mean the gun rigging? I left off the steady tackles to the deck rings; the rest is pretty standard but I cheated and just attached the breeching rope and train tackles to a single pair of eyelets beside the gunports (now that I think of it, these holes for the eyelets are best drilled before you glue the hull halves. And even before your final exterior paint in case you accidentally drill through 😉. OC is right about increasing mast stiffness. In my case, though, I used wood dowels, but a bicycle spoke inside the mizzen mast because the cavity was a small diameter for a piece of wood. It worked great but got in the way when I drilled a hole in the front of the mast for a piece of brass rod to hold the cro'jack yard while I rigged it. I didn't have any issues with the plastic spars. I planned to make a new flying jib boom from a bamboo skewer but in the end used the plastic part. It is cased after all. Glad you mentioned attaching yards to masts. Wood or plastic, Heller provides no means of doing it. I planned to mention this much later in your build, but to summarize: (1) The lower yards are attached by "truss pendants" (and supported by jeers and sling) which you can find out about in books. However, you'll need to add some eyebolts with attached blocks to the quarterdeck at the foot of each mast and you need to add a couple of cleats to the front of each mast; all this to rig the pendants which Heller ignored. (2) the other yards are attached by "parrals" which you probably already know about from your other ship models.Again, Heller ignores them. You can make them from seed beads later. In my case I drilled and attached short brass rods at the centre of all yards, which were inserted into holes drilled in the masts. I did not glue them to the masts, to allow them to give a little if I bumped them while rigging. The rods hold the yards while you rig their parrals or whatever, and are invisible afterward. Again I emphasize - obtain a copy of Longridge's book which goes into great detail on all specifics of Victory's rigging 🙂. To whet your appetite, here is one of the many fine (and helpful) drawings in it (shroud sequence partially cut off):

Yes, that's it. Thanks for the stroll through memory lane😀. If you can drill large enough for the breeching thread then great! Not sure how it would look. It might be worthwhile to add eyes for the show guns. I've lost the pics from early in my build, but here is about the best I have showing the main deck guns with the rather neat attached eyes for breeching rings.