Doug McKenzie

We are starting with the mainmast for two reasons -First, It is thinner than the foremast and therefore a good way to test construction tecniques. The second reason to start with the mainmast is that it folds down independent of the foremast whereas the foremast folds down on top of the mainmast. I sanded a 3/32" x 3/32" piece strip of balsa down to the 1.6mm size at the parners using a sanding stick. My gut says that balsa wood soaked in very thin CA glue will be a) Easy to size and taper and b) Also have plenty of strength, so that is my first try. That same guy Marty suggested using the thin CA to make the card bulwarks strong so we just adapted the idea to the spars. Having tapered the lower main with a square cross section down to 1mm at the head, I realized that drilling the various holes might be easier if I kept the square cross section. Unfortunately, this increases the visual diameter by 41% (the diagonal of the square being the new visual diameter. So what I'm going to try is leaving rougly the top half square, breaking the corners for a bit below and in the lowest part, rounding it off. Making the main topmast the same way and joing them at the doubling gives Pic 2 which is before soaking the mast in CA glue. The toothpick is 1.8 mm in diameter (5/64'). After the very thin CA is applied and sanded, the nice yellow color seems appropriate (Pic 3) for the final appearance of the spars. The glue brought up a lot of the balsa fiber and so a good fine sanding was needed because I imagine that to raise the masts in the bottle easily, we don't want the rigging to be catching on rough fibers on any of the spars. Next we'll be constructing the main top and then start rigging the mainmast.

The 4 parts of the hull, that will be inserted into the bottle separately, have been prepared with toothpicks to be properly aligned when glued together - Pic 1. . The toothpicks, of course, need to be trimmed! Credit for this solution goes to my friend Marty Nusbaum - I didn't want to drill down from the top and mar the roofs but I couldn't drill from the bottom because the model wouldn't sit securly on the drill press. Marty pointed out that if I drilled down from the top, I could just fill the holes (which I did with toothpick plugs) and paint over! Work was delayed about 2 weeks until this problem was solved. The main fife rail has been added along with the gallows (to support the main staysail boom) - Pic 2). The heads of the bilge pumps have also been added (black, just forward of the gallows). And the wheel shelter has been added with two little life buoy rings painted on the aft bulkhead. The 'Leon' name plate is on the transom - (Pic 3). And, lastly, a moderately successful attempt has been made to show the wale emphasizing the lovely sheer curve - (Pic 4). A thin wire + glue was used. I've included the dime not so much to show scale but to make excuses for the not-exactly perfect wale. The hull is now complete and we can begin work on the spars and rigging - oh boy, I can only hope that lady fortune will be with us when we try to produce scale spars!

The windlass supports were so out of scale I just had to improve them. In the last post, those supports are about 23" thick. The best estimates I could make from various drawings was that they would be somewhere between 6" and 12" thick. So I sanded them down to about 12". Next we have the wheel-shelter and the main fife-rail and the hull will be complete.

For starters, I won't be fixing the anchor after bulkhead - I've just ignored it!. In the meantime, the wash-strake around the anchor deck, capstan, catheads, pawl bitt and anchor windless have all been added - Pic 1

The aft house is complete. As is the taffrail and the 3 hatches Pic1 . 2 errors have been found: The first is that a painted door was made on the forward bulkhead of the aft house and this is incorrect - there probably was no door so that has been removed. The second error is a bit more difficult to fix. The anchor deck has been cut as if there was an aft bulkhead, Referring to my research notes for the 4' Leon model, however, this is not correct in two ways: first, there was probably no bulkhead and second, the after edge of the anchor deck was not straight but rather followed the angle of the catheads. Future posts will document how this error was corrected - you know, once I figure out how to correct it!

First improvement is stem and stern post and then painting the hull so that the lines on the 3x5 card are not visible. In junction with Jeppe, I selected topsides white and bottom copper as she was coppered in 1890. The deck is tan. Houses will be white. The hull has been sawn into two pieces at the WL. Pic 1 This gives the spars a little more room in the neck of the bottle as the bottom slice will be installed first. LWL is 4.25" (10.8 cm). LOA is 4.75" (12.2 cm). Pic 2. The midship house, Pic 3, is completed but it will not be glued in place until after the hull and spars have been installed in the bottle. This is because the foremast, which passes through the midship house, will pivot close to the main deck rather than the top of the house to make entry into the bottle neck easier. The house will be split down its centerline and then glued around the upright foremast. The black stack is the galley stove vent. The aft house has been started. When it is completed it also will not be glued in place until after the hull and spars have been installed in the bottle. The main mast will be about 3/4" (19 mm) forward of the aft house. To allow it to pivot down to the taffrail, a grove will be filed in the forward part of the poop deck and the the aft house will cover the groove.

Starting the hull with the sheer and deck cuts. Pic 1 shows the block after the two bandsaw cuts. The pencil line shows where the wale will be is. I made the sheer cut first so that the maximum amount of flat wood would be on the bandsaw table as possible. The "waterline' that I used is about the 80% full load waterline because, in my opinion, when she's fully loaded (as in the picture above) she looks pretty deep in. The deck cut was easier because the entire water line surface is on the table. Pic 2 shows the shape of the waterline. As a start to shaping the hull to match the section curves, I'll make cuts that connect the waterline shape with this wale. The only exception to this is forward of station 4, at the bow, the cuts will connect the waterline shape with the fo'csle deck. These cuts will minimize that amount of material that has to removed with a roto tool to complete the matching to the section curves. Pic 3 shows the stern after the cuts (and subsequent wood removal) and Pic 4 shows the stern after some roto work. It turns out that it would have been easier to just roto out the stern without using the cuts except that the cuts enabled me to see the shape of the stern pretty clearly before using the roto tool. I should have mentioned before that my carving and roto tool experience is very very limited and so this part of the modeling effort caused me some anxiety. Pic 5 shows the exposure of the main deck with the fo'cs'le and poop decks still intact. All of the instructional material that I have seen recommend chiseling out the main deck. The problem with this is that the bulwarks would be too thick. The main rail on Leon was about 6" wide which scales down to about 0.5 mm (for my skills, impossibly thin). I have 3x5 cards, however, that are 0.3 mm thick which will make lovely bulwarks. The 2 challenges with this technique will be to 1) reproduce the proper sheer line and 2) fair the bulwarks into the hull nicely. In Pic 6, the bulwarks are on with the sheer curve roughly correct and the fairing issue is clearly illustrated. Everyting on this model will, of course , be painted. For me, this is unusual, because unless the model is for sailing it is ALWAYS left as wood with a clear satin finish - not this one. Even Little Leon, the 22' psuedo model of Leon, which does sail, had a clear gloss finish! Enough for this post. Next I need to clean the hull up, add the stem and stern post and prepare for all the deck fixtures.

It's missing photos and text and... because I messed up. I am about to remedy those lacks shortly

This will be my third rendition of Leon - one might surmise that I'm rather fond of this ship! The first attempt was a 2 1/2 year build with launch in about 2007 of about a 1:8 scale model (about 22' sparred length). Pic 1 shows her with the wind off her port beam with a crew of 3. I described her construction in a now defunct website. She nows lives on a lake somewhere in Kansas. She's a model of Leon like a movie that is based on a book. The only picture known of the real boat is shown in Pic 2. The second model was a 1:48 scale model about 3.5' sparred length documented here on the NRG MSW website and shown in Pic 3. An interesting aspect of this model is that it is based on some contemporary documents such as an 1890 DMV survey as well as Underhill's book "Plank-On-Frame Models". These contemporary documents were found and translated by Jeppe Jul Nielson while the model was being built. The two most intriguing unexpected details (to me) uncovered in these documents was 1) Leon's use of "diagonal hanging knees" for the deck beams rather than the more conventional hanging knee and lodging knee combination and 2) her windmill pump for 'automatically' pumping out the bilge. She lives now in the Colin Archer's House Museum in Larvik, Norway where the original Leon was built in 1890. Colin Archer designed and built Leon. The third model, and the one that will be documented here, will be a 1:300 scale ship-in-a-bottle. I've never enjoyed the commercial ships-in-a-bottle that I've seen because they seem not to be in scale with spars and rigging too heavy and beams too narrow. Also, I've mostly not been interested in sails (just a personal preference). So when the idea appeared of building a true scale model in a bottle, I thought that might be fun to round out the scales of models of Leon. The first job was to find bottle. A search in my local liquor store yielded this Woodward Reserve whiskey bottle (Pic 3) which had a slightly larger neck opening (3.1 cm) than most of the other bottle. In addition, the height to length measurements were an almost perfect for Leon. The narrow width of the bottle (5.2 cm) will not be a problem since, without sails, Leon will be at dock and her yards will be braced around. There will be plenty of engineering and modeling challenges ahead and ain't that great!

Translation from German "Hello Mr. McKenzie, I would like to thank you very much for your construction report, which will help me a lot when building my Colin Archer." You are most welcome, Andreas. I wish you good fortune with your build. Doug

I've always thought the iron bands on spars were used when the spar was coaked to hold the pieces tightly together.

A long pause to finish the trio of Columbus' ships, Pic 1. Santa Maria is set back 14" so that it's 1:78 scale appears similar to the 1:100 scale of Nina and Pinta. These are plastic models modified to the specs of the 1966 book Columbus' Ships by Jose Maria Martinez-Hidalgo and edited by Howard I. Chapelle. The control of the foresail sheets has been installed. Pic 2 is a diagram of the scheme. The sheets come off the winch drum from opposite directions, through holes in the deck and then to the clew of the foresail. As one side is taken in, the other side is paid out and they stay firmly on the drum. To avoid snagging, I wrapped a clear plastic film around the fife rail and tacked it to the mast and the rail. Pic 3 shows the plastic shield but not too clearly since it is transparent. You can see one of the nails (gold) that holds the top of the shield against the mast. This control scheme is preliminary because the foresail cannot be let out much for a beam reach or when running. BUT it has the advantage of not snarling. After I get some experience (remember I have very little) I will change the scheme to permit more complete positions of the foresail. Pic 4 shows the jib. I shortened the leech a bit to bring the clew closer to the luff so that flipping over the forestay would be less likely to snag. I also put the tack of the jib on a turnbuckle attached to the slider ring so that, with the halyard fixed, the jib could be removed along with the main mast for travelling. Since there is no stay for the jib to hank onto I made the luff hem 3 layers thick instead of just 2, as with all the other hems, to support the extra tension neededd to keep the jib luff reasonably straight. The jib control scheme will be similar to the foresail's scheme. I still have to sew the main topsail which thankfully simply follows the main..

Having added 2 sailors to each ship I now post the FINAL photos! Pic 1 shows the 'official' photo and Pic 2 is the same photo with the sailors circled in red. Nina and Pinta have 1:100 figures. Santa Maria has the same figures with 2 modifications: 1) They are on little pedistals and 2) they have been dipped in varnish 5 times (like candles) to beef them up to roughly 1:78 scale.

Thanks all! I just realized this morning that I haven't put any sailors on to show scale - I'll probably fix that soon. Gregg - First I have to complete Colin Archer (radio control) for the Spring sailing season. Then I'm not sure, maybe the Egyptian boat found next to the Great Pyramid or maybe a fancy Mississippi river boat with lights and working paddle wheels and smoke and stuff or maybe something that I haven't thought of yet. Doug

The Santa Maria is now done! Pic 1 shows her slightly aft of the port beam. Pic 2 shows her deck also. The flags seem to be pretty good, flapping in the wind, but the swallowtails hang unconvincingly - I couldn't figure out anything better. To motivate the final mounting, we first show the 3 ships in a line in Pic 3. Nina and Pinta are at a scale of 1:100 while Santa Maria is at a scale of 1:78. As a result Santa Maria is 28% too large compared to Nina and Pinta. To reduce the apparent scale of Santa Maria we move her back about 14" on the shelf and that produces Pic 4 where all three ships appear to be roughly at the same scale.