DARIVS ARCHITECTVS

Your Indefatigable is looking gorgeous! Great workmanship.

As someone who as a young boy was totally fascinated by dinosaurs and prehistoric sea creatures, this is SO COOL!!!! 😃👍

Greeting from another HMS Sovereign of the Seas builder. Best wishes on a successful build of one of the most challenging ship models ever! 👍

Corel models are appealing to me even though they are smaller in scale, and as such don't allow you to make details as easily, but the plans are nice and the wood materials are great quality. But Corel makes more models from the the 17th century than other kit makers. The 3-D printed decorations and parts you made for the Greyhound are fantastic! They add so much tiny details which are very hard to carve at this scale. I'm trying to learn the same thing for my current model, using Aspire and Blender to make decorations and carvings, and am farther down the ladder on learning. There is such a long way to go just learning how the 3-D printer works, starting with taking it out of the box, which hasn't happened yet. Love your work!

CA = cyanoacrylate, commonly known as Superglue.

Rigging tools are not complete without a razor sharp set of scissors which allow you to trim that line after it's belayed to the belaying pin on the fife rail. These have served me so well, I bought a second one.

My compliments to Majq for making such a clean and elegant model of La Couronne as designed by Vincenzo Lusci by way of the Mantua kit. Splendid work! Rraisley, if you are interested in another build of La Couronne, my build log is a heavily modified version of the Corel model for that vessel, located here: La Couronne Build I have a specific interest in early 17th century men of war, and am currently working on HMS Sovereign of the Seas. Let me know if you need specific help with a La Couronne build, particularly with the rigging and sails. Best wishes!

As kits go, Winchelsea is up there among the finest. It deserves to have rigging and sails. For me, a ship is incomplete without them.

Sorry for hijacking the thread! Back to Rattlesnake build talk...

Thanks Ed, but this is only my second ship model. Experience in other craft hobbies translates over very well. It's 1:78 scale, unlike what DeAgostini claims as 1:84 scale. The hull got started as the DeAgostini model, then went totally wild with scratch built bashing. What's really neat is that all three interior gun decks are fully modeled and rigged! Many say it's a shame to hide all these details, but I know they're there, and I have a borescope. Each deck is fully structured like the main deck shown below. Look inside! A 1" long gun looks almost real even at this magnification when properly rigged. The gun tackles use 1.5mm boxwood blocks.

I'm about halfway though a mostly scratch built HMS Sovereign of the Seas, and it's a huge challenge. After it's done in about 6 years (wild guess), privateer Rattlesnake is next. I'm collecting info on the details of Rattlesnake from other Rattlesnake builders to prepare. Rattlesnake is a fine and unique ship, so different from other vessels in the fledgling US Navy.

Hello Ed, I just started following your Rattlesnake build and will be starting my own in a few years after my current model is complete. Congrats on a successful build so far. The discussions on the fitting details are fascinating!

Thank you, Allenyed for the great gun barrel .STL files! I have yet to break open my new printer and learn how to use it.

I am very interested in the STL files of the John Browne guns.

As one who based a model on the DeAgostini kit, I can tell you for certain that the model used in the advertisements in not the one in the kit. The model in the ads is an Italian made scratch built model. The kit is based on that model, with several simplifications to make it easier to build for beginners, which is the target customer base for DeAgostini. The instructions are certainly well made for beginners. This has generated many accusations of false advertising which still ring out today. However, the decorations and other features were changed from what we know the Sovereign featured. The decorations were simplified into multiple stamped out copies spread across the hull in some cases. Many of the decorations are well made, others a big disappointment. The culverin carriages are the wrong type on the upper most decks of the fore and stern castles in that they should be half trucks, not full truck carriages.

The RC looks fantastic, Messis. Clean and neat, and the colors on that ship are striking! 👍

It is not necessary to scratch build to make a beautiful model. No one said that. It IS necessary to scratch build to build a historically ACCURATE model of HMS Sovereign of the Seas.

Chris is right to point out that no kit results in a build of Sovereign of the Seas without gross simplifications (primarily in the decorations) or accuracy in many of this early great ship's original features. As a current builder of SotS, I can attest that the best way to build it accurately (from what little we know of the ship) is scratch building using LOTS of research and study or bashing (modifying) the framework of a kit as a starting point with every increasing replacements of parts with 100% scratch built rigging at the end. I searched high and low for a shortcut that would provide instructions to correctly represent this most decorated of man-of-war, but in the end had to come to grips with the reality that it doesn't exist. Practice on other models before you tackle the Sovereign, and be prepared to spend 90% of your time digging out research sources and reading them instead of building, and do not believe everything you read, but compare information sources. You will have to make hundreds of personal choices taken from the interpretations of others and choose what make most sense to you using your judgement when it comes to the ship's features, and most of them are unsupported as you how correct they are. So, build the ship as best as you can. John McKay's book is a prime example of one interpretation of the ship that contains horribly wrong features from bad guesswork and interpretational choices. The book looks pretty, but aside from the decorations, don't trust the hull structure. If you can survive the frustration and fear that goes with huge amounts of educated guesswork, you may be able to tackle the Sovereign once your crafting skills are at least at an intermediate level. Do your own homework, you'll make a better model, and accept the fact that no matter what, your model will not look precisely like other's models. Below is my 90% scratch build of the Sovereign, starting with the DeAgostini kit hull. Other kit like the Mantua kit can offer a fair starting point, but also require massive hull changes, particularly to the stern. Best source for details on the features are James Sephton's Sovereign of the Seas - The Seventeenth Century Warship, Peter Lely's painting "Portrait of Peter Pett", Sir John Payne's Print of HMS Sovereign of the Seas, Willem van de Velde's sketch of SotS (after the 1658-1661 rebuild), and Hendrik Busmann's Sovereign of the Seas - Die Skulpturen des britischen Königsschiffes von 1637 (rare and expensive out of print book in German on the decorations of the SotS).

Incredible restoration! Such a great model.

Example of a demi-culverin drake on my model of HMS Sovereign of the Seas. One of many. . . 😁 Half trucks used on these carriages were not all that popular on ships, but they were featured prominently on the upper gun deck of the Sovereign. All 102 of the guns on my model are rigged to this level of detail as a personal challenge.

Beautiful Build. Rattlesnake is also on my future build list.

Very nice ! 👍

That display is fantastic. Inspirational!

It's great to be following another one of your builds, EJ!