Tomculb

I decided to work on the foremast next. The basic assembly and painting was pretty straightforward . . . ….. with one exception. There was a discussion some months ago about how the loose end of the running rigging was secured near the base of the mast. There was general agreement that tying the lines to eyebolts in the deck, as OcCre would have you do it, was not realistic. Once the original ship was discovered a couple of years ago, a photo surfaced which showed a pin rail ring around one of the masts. You have to look carefully to see it in the first picture below. I was concerned that if I tried to fabricate something like that, the model’s too-fat belaying pins would make the whole thing stick out too far from the surface of the mast to look right. Earlier this year I had the good fortune to pay a visit to San Diego’s wonderful maritime museum. The second photo is of a spider band around one of the masts of the clipper ship Star of India, which is birthed there. I thought maybe I could duplicate that, and even if it is not quite authentic, the bulk of it would be hidden by rope coils, and the end result might look pretty good. I bent some wire to make cleats, glued the cleats to the mast using wood glue, wrapped some medium thick thread around them, and doused the thread with white school glue to better secure everything. It looks a little ugly now, but should look much better when rope coils are added.

Anchor deck and aft deck stanchions and railings completed. With regard to the anchor deck, as you can see below, there are photos out there that both show a railing running between the two ladders and show no railing there. The latter railing must have been added later in the voyage. I opted to put that railing in. Obviously the no-railing photo was taken in a port, but I have no idea where. The stanchions for the aft railing are closer together than the other ones, in order to maintain the curve around the stern. After completing the aft railings I noticed a big mistake I made. There is a wooden cap that is the top of that railing, which I had seen but forgot about. I simply did what OcCre did. Whether I go back and redo it remains to be seen, but if it happens, it won’t be anytime soon. I am delaying working on the railings for the deck immediately forward of the aft deck. I need to think about the order in which I install the shrouds and ratlines, the dog kennels and those stanchions and railings. One will likely get in the way of the other, and the railings are fragile, susceptible of being snagged when I’m tying the ratlines, for instance.

Thank you George. I just now looked at your Discovery and Kearsarge builds, which are coming along nicely. I don't know how I'd find the time to do two simultaneously.

Deckhouse stanchions and railings completed. OcCre has the stanchions placed quite a bit closer together generally than they are spaced on the planks between the deckhouse and the deck behind it. I decided to space the rest of the stanchions as they are on those planks, about 31 mm apart. I just thought that looked better. On those planks I tried to cut off the loose ends using scissors, and I wasn’t very pleased with the result. On the deckhouse, I used (gently) a brand new X-acto blade with much better results. Deckhouse, planks and stairs are still only dry fit. I don't see how rigging could be secured to the lower part of the mainmast with those things glued in place.

Thank you SHJ. I always appreciate your comments. As I look at the Hurley photos, it appears that the railings between the stanchions are sometimes wire cable and sometimes a fixed rod or bar. By using thread, I’m choosing to simulate cable throughout. Thus the railings at the bow and stern will run straight between stanchions and will not match the curve of the hull at deck level. Not so obvious at the bow, but will probably be noticeable at the stern. But I can live with that.

It’s been almost a month since I last posted. Summer weather (no heat dome here yet) and other interests have slowed down work in the shipyard. I finished the channels, deadeyes and chainstays on the starboard side. Pretty much like the port side, but I learned how to do it a little bit more efficiently. Stanchions up next. Comments: As many others have done, I purchased brass stanchions which look a lot more realistic than the photo etched ones furnished by OcCre. I got them from Cromwell Model Boats in the UK. Cost and time to ship to the US were quite reasonable. Both one and two hole stanchions are 15mm above the deck, which is 3mm and 5mm taller (2 hole and 1 hole respectively) than OcCre’s stanchions. The difference is acceptable (at least to my eyes) as to the 2 hole stanchions and can be remedied by cutting the base and mounting pin off the 1 hole stanchions. For whatever reason, to me the stanchions look more realistic if they aren’t bright white, and I mixed up some light gray paint to use instead. To each their own I guess. Similarly I used gray thread for the cables running between stanchions. I used a loop of thin thread to pull a loop of the thicker thread through the hole in the stanchion, then with the thin thread in place, pulled the thicker thread taut, and pulled the thinner thread clear leaving a tiny bit of the thicker thread’s loop showing. I sealed the deal (I hope) with a drop of diluted white school glue. Finally, after trimming the loose ends, I added a drop of light gray paint to the slightly exposed part of the thicker thread’s loop. These pictures should be clearer than what I just wrote. . . I started with the planks running between the deck house and the deck behind it. This close up makes the trimmed ends much more evident than they are from a normal viewing distance. The deck house will be next.

Putting together and gluing in place the next 13 deadeye/chainplate assemblies on the port side took no more time than the first four. Practice didn’t make perfect, but it did contribute a lot to efficiency. Another contribution was using a foot of 2x4 for a roomier jig. Putting together four of these at one sitting is about my limit. 😐 First the mainmast channel. . . For the foremast, OcCre has you simply tie the deadeyes to eyebolts in the caprail, then run the chainstays over the edge of the caprail down to a nail in the hull. That doesn’t look very realistic to me. Also, I remember a discussion in one of the Endurance build logs which raised the subject of a foremast channel, and the consensus was that Endurance did have narrow foremast channels. Without going back to find that discussion and without looking for a photo of the foremast chainplates (not a smart way to proceed), I decided to make my own foremast channels, paint them black and white like the others (but using only a single strip of wood instead of two) and glue them to the white rubrail like the others. One concern I have is that the narrower channels will leave too little room between the deadeyes and the hull to thread the lanyards that connect the lower and upper deadeyes. A challenge for another day.

Question Josh, did you do anything special to the brass stanchions before you painted them? And did you use acrylic paint? Your paint job really looks great. And my apologies if you already covered this in your log. My stanchions arrived in the mail today, and getting them ready may provide a nice diversion from working on the channels, chain plates and dead eyes. Thanks

Latest work is on channels, deadeyes and chainplates. OcCre supplies laser cut pieces for part of the mizzen and main channels, including half circle cutouts for the chainplates to pass through. Each channel is to be completed with a 2mm x 2mm strip. Convenient to use two pieces since the laser cut part is to be painted black and the strip white. However the cutouts in the laser cut piece are way too small, as can be seen in the first picture below. I used a 1/16” drill bit and a rat tail file to make the holes larger, but after fabricating a chainplate/deadeye assembly, I found that even 1/16” was too small, and I enlarged the holes a bit more with the file. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how I was going to make my chainplate/deadeye assemblies. OcCre’s instructions are uncharacteristically unclear at this point, other than they show 0.5mm thread between the deadeye and the nail which secures the lower end to the hull. I interpreted the instructions' photo as wrapping the thread around the deadeye, then twisting the two lengths of thread down to the nail where they would be tied together. The OcCre video (which I looked at only much later) shows simply tying one end of the thread to the deadeye and the other to the nail, and securing the knots with what appears to be CA glue. The best photo I could find of the real chainplates shows straight parallel rods or cables, and Josh (@theoracle09) did a masterful job of soldering wire to duplicate that. I have virtually no experience with soldering and ended up using thread. I started with some leftover thread that was a little thinner than OcCre’s 0.5mm, and took one loop around a sewing pin, then seized the two parts together with thin Gutterman brand thread (also left over). The seizing was simply three hitches. I then pinned the deadeye about 22mm away, looped one thread of the chainplate around the deadeye, brought the other thread up to the deadeye, and created a throat by seizing these now three threads with five hitches of the thinner thread, as can be seen (with some difficulty) in the second photo below. The first two deadeyes I rigged were upside down, and when I first posted this photo, I mistakenly wrote that the deadeyes in the photo were upside down. Not so; I had taken a picture of the do over. Before trimming any of the thread, I doused everything with a generous portion of diluted white glue, my go-to approach to securing knots. I then painted everything black. Only after all of that dried did I trim the ends. The combination of glue and paint makes it all pretty stiff and hopefully assures that none of the seizing will come undone. (I added an extra knot at the throat of the two deadeyes on the left, which I later decided was unnecessary and which I did not do with the other two.) After gluing the channel to the white rub rail, I put a 6mm dowel in the mast hole after marking where the upper ends of the shrouds will be. I then ran some thread from those marks down through the holes in the channels, so I would have some idea how to align the chainplates with the shrouds, which won’t be installed for some time. Despite these efforts, I don’t think I did a very good job of properly aligning the chainplates. Hopefully the fact that the black chainplates don’t show up all that well against the black hull will mean that discrepancies won’t be very evident from a normal viewing distance. But maybe that’s just confirmation of my optometrist’s advice that my eyes are prime candidates for cataract surgery. 😵‍💫 Only time will tell. At this time I have only 4 of these assemblies completed. That’s out of a total of 34. It’s definitely going to take some time before this part of the build completed.

Some time out of town and other activities have slowed things down in the shipyard, and I’m falling behind in my posts to this log . . . A couple of weeks ago I took a break from deck furniture and put a bowsprit together. Two things deserve comment. First, the instructions provide that the bowsprit is to be made from a 6mm dowel, which after some tapering certainly looks like the right size. However, the slot it’s to slide into in the false keel is only 4mm, same as the thickness of the false keel. A long time ago cheeks were glued on either side of that slot, to make a 4mm hole into which the 6mm bowsprit dowel is to fit. Bowsprits and masts frequently have a square base, so I used my Dremel to try to have my 6mm dowel transition to a 4mm square. I made a real mess of things trying and ended up cutting the mess off. I then found some 4mm square stock, and glued it to the inboard end of the now shorter 6mm dowel. Up close it doesn’t look great, but I think from a normal viewing distance it won’t be too noticeable. In any event, I think this is a significant gaffe on OcCre’s part, as it should have provided for a 6mm square slot into which the bowsprit dowel can be snugly fit. Second, without looking at the instructions I installed bands and eyebolts as attachment points for the forestays, and later noticed that the instructions’ photos show the forestays wrapping around the bowsprit. I haven’t found a Hurley photo (but haven’t looked very hard yet) that shows how those forestays were actually attached. Also, the innermost block will have to be attached with a lanyard, so that the line which runs through it has a straight path to the belaying pins, without being dragged across the bow railing.

Hi Bill, thanks for dropping by. One of my gripes about OcCre's kit (I assume all of their kits) is that there aren't really any plans. If you download the instructions from OcCre's website, you'll see everything in the kit that's on paper. There is a deck plan, split in two, but that's about it. I do recall seeing though somewhere on these boards hull lines for Endurance, but I don't recall whose log that was in. My recollection is that whoever posted that was showing that the OcCre hull has some inaccuracies. Building the kit exactly as envisioned by OcCre results in a very nice model, but as you can probably tell from my log, I'm enjoying doing some kit bashing. Good luck with your build! Tom

Several weeks ago I built and put in place a couple of anchor davits. But they lacked cleats to secure the working end of the tackle, a project I left for another day. Another day (actually a week or so) arrived recently, as I pondered away many an hour wondering how I would make a couple of cleats. While not simple getting there, the solution I finally came up with was quite simple. I took about ¾” of an inch of small gauge wire and bent the outer third at each end about 30°. I then lashed the cleat to the davit with some relatively thick thread. I “secured” the thread with a hitch at each end; otherwise the two pieces were simply wrapped together. I doused the thread with diluted white glue, and when that had dried, I painted it white. The glue and paint meant all was secure, not merely “secure”. After cleating the tackle in place, I cut it short and added diluted white glue. Finally I created two rope coils using tweezers as a jig. You might recognize the block the tweezers are lying on: that is the piece I cut off from the wooden core of the funnel, described in my recent postings. Incidentally, the small clothespin you see in the first photo below was part of a great Amazon find . . . dozens of cheap, very light weight, 1” clothespins, that I have found to be an invaluable aid in rigging.

Thanks Craig. Like you I have assembled a pretty good collection of photos, mostly bookmarked, some downloaded, and some in a Frank Hurley book I bought. But I have never taken the time to organize or catalog them, so it takes me forever to find what I'm looking for (if I find it at all). I really appreciate what you have shared.

Craig, as I look at the second photo you posted, it looks to me like the guys may be attached to the boat davits. Which makes no sense since the plans I have found online and OcCre position the davits aft of the funnel. Maybe sometime late in the journey the davits were moved forward to be in line with the funnel? All of this assumes I have my shipboard geography right. As I look at that photo, it is facing aft from just forward of the main mast, and the sort-of-round things in the middle are, moving aft in the picture, the mainmast forward gaff, the main mast, and the funnel. Further aft you can’t see the mizzen mast, but you can see its ratlines. This assumes that the intake funnels have been rotated to face aft, unlike the first photo where they face forward and seaward. Any thoughts?

What bent pipe?? 😀 Thank you Josh for the inspiration and the picture.

The funnel . . . The kit includes a 12mm dowel to use for the funnel, but I decided to try to make something that better represents the real thing. Rather than round, Endurance’s funnel is more like a rectangle with rounded corners. I took two 1/4” square strips, and two 1/8” x 1/4” strips, laminated them together to form a 3/8” by 1/2” column of the height of the funnel, and sanded the edges round. I suppose if I had metric dimensioned wood strips, the column would have fit better in the laser cut hole in the deck. I had to use my Dremel tool to enlarge the hole a little. To simulate a hollow funnel, I cut about 1/2” off one end of this wood column, and then wrapped the column in paper. It took me quite a while to find paper that was stiff enough for the top but didn’t crease when bent around the corners. What worked pretty well (even though it was orange) was a divider page in a very old spiral bound notebook. Frank Hurley photos show flat bands around the funnel, which OcCre simulates with brass wire. I used Tamiya’s masking tape for curves instead, each strip being wrapped twice around the funnel. I painted the funnel white; more than one coat was required to hide the orange. I then painted the hollow inside at the top black. At least with my aging eyes, it's hard to see that only the top 1/2” is hollow. Obviously the kit’s laser cut round base wasn’t going to work. I made a base gluing together several short 1/8“ x 1/16” strips, then sanding to get the desired shape. OcCre shows a bent pipe on the forward side of the funnel . . . I’m not sure what it is, but I decided to include it anyway. I used spackling paste to fill in the inside corners of the base, the same stuff I used in great quantities as filler when finishing the hull. The small intake funnels in the pictures below are supplied by the kit. OcCre shows them facing aft, but they face forward and out in the Hurley photos I looked at. Finally, those photos show cables leading from the funnel down to the deck. I attached eyebolts on the funnel for that. I won’t rig them until I have installed the dog kennels, when I’ll have a better idea where to attach the other ends of the cables. I also finally got around to gluing in place the previously assembled large skylight.

I've long thought of "work" as a nasty four-letter word. Not that I wasn't fortunate enough to enjoy what I did, but I always enjoyed (and now enjoy without interruption) the alternatives better.

Josh, I know absolutely nothing about 3D printing, but I can see that such a printer could be invaluable when it comes to making custom ship model fittings. Google searching I see that a printer can cost anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to a few thousand. Any advice you could give to me and your other followers? Perhaps point us in the direction of a useful and informative site on the web for 3D printing 101? Thanks. And Travis (@Cenizas), I echo Josh's encouragement that you start a build log for your Endurance; I see that you started one for your Polaris build. You private messaged me (and others I assume) with good questions, but I suspect you would have gotten better answers if you asked your questions publicly. The wonderful thing about these MSW boards is how willing people are to help. And no matter how long some of us may have been building, I think most of us feel that we're still just beginners, with a whole lot more to learn.

Thanks Josh and Mike. Josh, I too pondered over the photo you posted and decided that the port ladder was probably a portable one they moved around from place to place. That would explain the longer than necessary rails. Of course that's purely speculation on my part.

OcCre supplies at least a couple dozen tiny photo etched pieces to make Endurance’s ladders. I detached a few of those pieces and tried working with them, then like @theoracle09 decided I would make my own ladders out of wood. Over 40 steps had to be cut, but that was easy, much easier than cutting them out of the brass plate they came in and then filing down the attachment tabs. I also decided to make my steps (or treads) about 30% shorter, making the assembled piece narrower and looking more like a ladder than a staircase. The photo below shows the jig I made from pieces of scrap I had lying around. Although it can't be seen in the photo, the slide in the middle is sloped at the front, so that the individual steps will be glued in place at the correct angle. The first ladders I made were the short ones at the stern. Once glued together and I pulled the first one out of the jig, I realized that I hadn’t slid one of the rails all the way forward in the jig, resulting in rails that were misaligned by about a millimeter. But I also saw that the plans I so often refer to, and the cutaway drawing I have posted previously, show only one ladder back there, just to the starboard of the companionway. It was my good fortune to make my big mistake on a ladder I wouldn’t need! OcCre’s rails are parallelograms, meaning that the top of the ladder meets the wall it rests against at a sharp point. I cut the top of each rail so that that juncture was a short flat surface. I then rounded the opposite point at the top, all with a goal of making the tops of these ladders look a bit more realistic. Somewhat difficult to describe, but should be evident from the one close-up photo below. The ladders to the roof of the deck house are not glued in place yet since the deck house isn’t glued in place yet.

Thanks Josh. To answer your questions . . . My last build was Model Shipways cross section of the Constitution, and MS supplied 2 or 3 dozen photo etched brass hooks in two sizes. For whatever reason I only used about half of them. When it comes to left over fittings and supplies from old builds, I tend to keep everything, and these hooks were exactly what I wanted. I initially made a bow pin rail with holes for six pins, but it appeared that many close together would be problematic when it came to belaying lines on them. I decided to go with five pins instead, figuring I could either double up on one pin or omit one line. Only time will tell whether that was a wise decision.

I found some relatively thick but malleable wire that I bent to create a couple of simple anchor davits. Using a drafting compass I determined what I thought would be the right size and location for a davit to accomplish its intended purpose. Then I used double blocks to rig a pair of “fish tackle” as described in my prior post. Unfortunately in my excitement to get this done (or perhaps I was half asleep before my first cup of coffee?), with one tackle I rigged both blocks backwards. I haven't re-rigged that one yet, recognizing that sometimes stupid mistakes are best corrected after a bit of a cooling off period. 😃 In the photos below, the port davit (with the incorrectly rigged tackle) hasn’t been glued in place yet. I made a bit of a base for each davit by wrapping some masking tape around the davit before painting them. The tackle tails are only loosely tied around the davits, awaiting my determination as to whether I can buy, or need to fabricate, tiny cleats to secure them to.

Several days of unseasonably beautiful weather, then a bit of spontaneous travel, have kept me away from both the shipyard and my computer . . . Posts by John ( @Jim Lad), Keith ( @clearway) and George ( @gak) inspired me to do some more research about anchors and anchor storage during the time of Endurance. If no one makes it to the end of this long winded and slightly off topic post, I won’t be offended. For centuries leading up to the 20th century, anchors were stowed lashed to the bulward and alongside the hull, with the shank more or less horizontal. On weighing anchor, once the head broke the surface, a tackle was hooked to the anchor ring, and the head was brought up level with the bulwark rail. The tackle ran through sheaves at the outer end of the cathead. A line from somewhere aloft was affixed to one of the anchor flukes, and that end was then also brought up more or less even with the bulwark rail, and the anchor was then lashed to the ship. There are probably thousands of photos on these boards of anchors so stowed. Here are a couple of my photos, the first being from my build of the Niagara, done quite a few years ago, and the second being the bow of Surprise, one of several ships at the San Diego Maritime Museum, built for the movie Master & Commander, being the leading ship in Patrick O’Brien’s fabulous series of maritime novels (this picture was taken about 5 years ago). Quite a few years ago I was browsing through a catalog from Dover publications, and I ended up buying a couple of old maritime books, The Art of Rigging by George Biddlecombe, and The Seaman’s Friend: A Treatise on Practical Seamanship, by Henry Dana, Jr. The latter was first published in 1879, and it contains the following description of what I just described. Its use of maritime terminology and late 19th century English is fun to read! I added the footnotes, but the notes’ text is from the glossary Dana put in his book. TO CAT AND FISH AN ANCHOR -- When the anchor is lifted and brought under foot, paul the windlass, keeping a good hold on the chain. Overhaul down the cat-block and hook it to the ring of the anchor. Stretch along the cat-fall and all hands tally on. Set taut on the cat-tackle and pay out a little chain. Hoist away the anchor to the cat-head, and belay the fall. Pass the cat-stopper through the ring of the anchor, through the chock, belay it to the cat-tail, and seize it to its own part. Overhaul down the fish-tackle, hook the lower block to the pennant, and hook the fish-hook to the inner fluke of the anchor. Rig out your fish-davit1 across the forecastle, and put the bight of the pennant into the sheave-hole. Get a guy over it, near the outer end, to keep it down, and another at the inner end, to keep it out. Get the shoe2 over the side, to fend off the bill of the anchor. Hoist the fluke well up, pass the shank-painter under the inner arm and shank, bring it inboard, and belay and stop it to the timber heads. Rig in the davit, unreeve the cat-fall and fish-tackle. 1. Davits. . . . Also, a spar with a roller or sheave at its end, used for fishing the anchor, called a fish-davit. 2. Shoe. A piece of wood used for the bill of an anchor to rest upon, to save the vessel’s side. Later in the 19th century, various forms of stockless anchors were developed, the most famous among recreational sailors currently being the Danforth anchor. Without a stock, the anchor shank can be pulled up into the hawsepipe, enabling the anchor to be stowed tight and flat against the side of the hull. No cathead, no davit, no line from aloft needed. What does this mean for Endurance? She carried a pair of old-fashioned stock anchors, but they were not lashed to the bulwarks as was so commonly done and as OcCre would have you do. Numerous Frank Hurley photos show one or both anchors lying on top of the catheads, with the flukes inboard and horizontal and the stock just outside the bulwarks rail, vertical with one end sticking up. In several of the photos that half of the stock rising skyward is all you can see of the anchor. A davit (as that term is used in contemporary times) would be needed to lift the anchor off the cathead and to swing the fluke end outboard so it could be lowered into the water. The only photo I have found showing such a davit on Endurance is the one in my previous post showing what certainly appears to be a davit, removable and lying on its side on the anchor deck. But there are photos of Endurance’s contemporary Antarctic explorer, RSS Discovery, with anchors stowed on deck on top of the catheads and with such davits in place. I am sure other ships did the same, but I don’t know how many there were or why. With all that in mind, I felt comfortable stowing my Endurance anchors on top of the catheads and installing davits to lift them off and on the deck when laying and weighing anchor. Those davits will be the subject of my next post. Finally, and not related to Endurance at all, I came across a fascinating YouTube video detailing the weighing of anchor on board the Star of India, the San Diego Maritime Museum’s magnificent clipper ship, when she was taken out for a rare sail. Lots of opportunities to lose a finger (or worse) manipulating that enormously heavy chain. Here’s the link.

Go for it Josh! There seems to be no argument that the real Endurance wasn't rigged that way. And as I increasingly find myself doing, I'll follow your lead when I get to that point in my build (which won't be any time soon).

Most of what follows is informed by this Frank Hurley photo, which has appeared a number of times before in Endurance logs, including mine. I have modified the catheads and lashed the anchors to them. I shortened the catheads so they don’t stick out as far from the hull and don’t meet in the center of the anchor deck, as OcCre’s do. I also tapered them top to bottom as they progress inboard. After doing that, I noticed that the two plans I frequently refer to (see for instance posts #39 & #77 above) show the catheads meeting in the middle, so OcCre got it right for some period of time in the life of Endurance. Puzzling that that would be something changed at a later date. I also painted the catheads black, to match the color of the hull. I then installed two small eyebolts toward the inner end and outer ends of each cathead. The outer forward eyebolts are somewhat larger as they will also secure bowsprit stays. Then I cut gaps in the cap rail, so the anchors can lie directly on the catheads. In doing this I made a mistake. Since the catheads extend beyond the side of the hull, the stock of the anchor does as well. But looking closely in this and other photos, the anchor stock is secured up tight against the hull. This was done by securing the anchor at an angle to the cathead, with the stock and that end of the anchor lying aside rather than directly on the cathead. I wish I had noticed this sooner, but at this stage I am not going to go back and do it over. Finally, I cut the chain that has been hanging below the bowsprit for a few months to appropriate lengths and tied the ends to the anchor rings, using thin black fly-tying thread. I like this thread as it is strong and thin, almost indistinguishable from the chain. John’s (@Jim Lad) comment about “fishing the anchor” led me to do some research regarding anchors of this era. I am working on a somewhat lengthy post on what I’ve learned, as well as working on “fish davits” for the anchors.