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JerseyCity Frankie

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Everything posted by JerseyCity Frankie

  1. Ive got a great idea! Let’s just stick to the topic and refrain from personal nonsense? The greatest aspect of MSW is the openness of the discussions on the many topics pertaining to ship model building.
  2. Wouldn’t it be better to attack the points I’ve made rather than make a personal attack on the person making the points? What aspects of my opinions of ship model restoration are wrong, in your opinion?
  3. I think it’s a case of English practice verses French practice. I HIGHLYdoubt the people behind the Hermione project could get their rigging wrong, everything on that ship is superb. The English practice was to have bothe stays on the Starboard side of the foremast and nearly all the ship modeling reference material available in English is based on British historical practice. I don’t know much about French practice because I’m only reading books in English. But the image from the painting I posted above is from a contemporary French painting.
  4. Here’s some photos and my interpretation of what is going on......as you can see there are four elements visible forward of the mast. Your kit diagram shows only two.
  5. Here’s shots of modern Niagara in which her sweeps are visible stacked on a pair of crutches. Frequently the crutch is incorporated into the fife rail as depicted in the drawings. Many ships of all sizes would carry spare topmasts and if the ship was too small to feature a hatch with skid beams large enough to acomodate those spars lying on deck, they were sitting on the crutches. Often the ships boats were in turn lashed onto the spare topmasts. Many ship models can be seen with the spare topmasts but few of them also include the sweeps.
  6. Neither her gunports or her oarports can be shut, they have no covers and can’t be closed. On Niagara those ports are six feet above the waterline, and they’re all slightly higher than the MUCH LARGER gunports anyway so they represent no greater significant way for water to get aboard. Niagara was designed as a lake boat and not optimized for blue water ocean sailing so her low freeboard isn’t necessarily a drawback. This would be an entirely different story were she intended for ocean sailing though and all her ports would likely be closeable and very likely she’d have higher freeboard designed in. In fact I’ve heard talk that the modern day Niagara is financially constrained by her inability to safely transit deeper ocean waters under the stability certification she holds from the US Coast Guard and her owners are considering structural changes-including raising the height of the bulwarks-to make her more seaworthy. This would certainly include portlids. As things stand on Niagara I’ve never seen photos of water coming aboard as she sails healed over. Sailors love the excitement of sailing in intense conditions and there would certainly be photos of Niagara “burying the rail” if it’d ever happened. But instead you can’t even find photos of Niagara healing at all,she appears to be remarkably stiff.
  7. Here’s a photo of some pine tar out of a can. It’s very thick as can be seen and opaque. But the opacity is lessened when it’s painted onto a porous surface. It’s very sticky and very thick and viscous but it thins easily with turpentine. Painted onto some rope, it behaves enough like paint as to be brushablewith a brush or you can wipe it on with a rag. Asingle aplication to fiber rope will not render the rope black but successive coats eventually will. The successive coats eventually stop soaking into the rope and a crust is then formed and at that point it becomes opaque and nearly (but not 100%) black in color. The gloss only lasts until it dries after which point it loses it’s shine and can appear almost chalky after prolonged UV exposure. Here’s a shot taken on Niagara. Under the crew’s arm is a stay that’s been served with twine then given many coats of pine tar. The stay’s location low down on the Bowsprit means it’s often getting chafed by the sails and it’s a constant handhold for the crew. As a result it’s surface is scuffed and worn and it can not be said to be 100% Black in color, it’s a very dark brown or grayish-brown. It would only have appeared “very black” for a few weeks after its last aplication of tar. Aplying tar would happen fairly regularly as a daily chore on a sailing ship, but the tarring would be piecemeal not comprehensive. So most of the standing rig wouldn’t be black it would be this dark color.
  8. Bright white should be avoided. Not only does it look “too clean” it doesn’t resemble actual natural fiber rope at all. It’s possible to find modern sailing ships with rigging that is very white, but these are all manmade fiber ropes made of Dacron or nylon, materials unavailable before WWII.
  9. I’m a “paint everything” person there’s very little wood with the grain showing on my models. But I can appreciate the “only wood “ guys since they can’t use fillers and the craftsmanship thing is often amazing. But I DO have a problem when plywood is left unpainted this just takes me right out of the illusion and I feel a little sad that all that work went into the making of it but there’s the plywood’s edge ruining the effect.
  10. I found shaping the tagalants very trying. I forget how many I made but more than two! I’d either make them wrong or break them while trying to taper them. It’s one of those things where I wonder if it wouldn’t be easier doing it full scale. Particularly at the very top of the mast, shaving it thinner and thinner and saying to myself “this is where it will break one day if it’s too thin”.
  11. Brady’s Kedge-Anchor has details about rigging footropes on the jibboom: https://books.google.com/books?id=YihFAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=kedge-anchor&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiQpvHC27jkAhWIiOAKHZ9IBw0Q6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=kedge-anchor&f=false
  12. This magic trick allows you to tie a series of evenly spaced overhand knots on a line. But you can do it the old fashioned way by just hand-tying individual knots. Headrig footropes are simply pairs of lines hanging down at such a height that a crewperson standing on them has the spar at navel hight. The two ends are hitched over the spar or tied to an eyebolt. They do need to be in pairs though, Port and Starboard. A single rope won’t sufice.
  13. The caronades on my Model Shipways Niagara kit were also too thin. In my case I was looking at (and aiming to replicate) the existing caronades to be found on the present day sail training Niagara and in photos found on the web they were clearly thicker than the white metal kit supplied guns. To alter the kit supplied guns I wrapped tape around their barrels which added girth and then primed and painted them. You can see the process in my Niagara build log.
  14. Certainly brown wrapping paper is non-archival due to its acidic nature, as is any paper that contains wood pulp. Newspaper, paper bags, gift wrapping paper, butcher paper,and likely any colored paper marketed towards children or school use will contain too much wood pulp to be considered as an archival material. Fortunately there’s a WORLD of paper available that IS archival and acid-free available at art supply stores. its my view that laminating non-archival paper would greatly extend its useful life so probably the Mast Hoops built as described above could have a very long life, but still not as long a life as any acid-free paper would.
  15. A big issue with the use of Gaff Topsails is that it’s impossible to rig them in a way that allows them to be self-tending on either tack. Meaning: the tack of the sail is usually on either the Port or the Starboard side (nearly always Starboard) so you either have to physically lift that tack up and over the Gaff every time you go about OR keep it on one side all the time and just live with the inefficiency of having it awkwardly set pressing against the underlying Gaff and it’s Peak Halyard. The reason I bring this up here is that if you DO want to rig your Topsail so you can reposition the tack of the sail from Port to Starboard then you need two tacks, one for each side. Plus a halyard that opposes them that will lift the whole lower half of the sail high enough to get it over the Peak Halyard each time you go about. This bothersome aspect leaves most people to rig the Topsail with one disposition only, and to live with the inefficiency on half of the tacks. A “Dirty Tack”, some efficiency of the Topsail is lost on the Port Tack due to the sail shape being altered. Schooner Pioneer, the ship I’ve sailed on most. If the tack were run through a lead block it would hopelessly complicate the preparation for setting AND make recovery to the deck in a way that kept the sail out of the water impossible.
  16. Someone needs to write a decent book about fore and aft rigging on period ships because the topic of gaff topsails doesn’t get any attention. I believe your tack will run directly to the fife rail with no lead blocks as I can not recall ever seeing Topsail Tacks run any other way. Leading the tack anywhere other than straight down to the deck would negatively effect the set of the sail. Hand Reef and Steer by Tom Cunliffe and Sailmakers Aprentice by Emiliano Marino have illustrations of tacks going directly to the deck as does Howard Chapelle in American Fishing Schooners. Emeliano Marino includes clear illustrations of SEVEN different types of Gaff Topsails and ALL have tacks running to the deck. And if you give it some consideration you will see why: any kind of lead block a tack would use would need to be well below the point in space where the tack of the Topsail would be situated, and where would that be but directly on the lower mast itself, and what would that do for you that a direct lead to the deck wouldn’t? Also the Tack winds up serving as the Downhaul and you can’t haul the sail through a tack lead block. Here’s a shot of Lynx’s Topsail set.
  17. Likely it’s a good idea to attach that lower sheet block now, your instinct is quite right. If it was me, I’d strop the block using wire and I’d just form an eye over the traveler (often called a Horse) while I was at it. I’m skeptical of the single block shown in the photo, I believe a double block is more likely given the loads involved with the Main Sheet. In my opinion.
  18. I hope this isn’t too off topic but speaking of HMS Pickle I see you’re quoting the figure of 14 guns? “Pierced for 14 gun’s but carrying four”. Wikipedia says eight guns and I’ve also seen Ten guns quoted. Where are you getting the 14 gunports figure? I ask because I’m researching a painting of the Pickle and it turns out I keep changing the gunports as I come across more references.
  19. In my build log of my Constitution restoration/rebuild I tackle the same issue and there’s photos of the steps I took to fake the hull planking. I faked the coppering too. My hull was dented and gouged so I used acrylic modeling paste then two coats of krylon spray primer. I painted the hull with acrylic then scribed the planking details. I put thinned acrylic dark paint over the hull then burnished/buffed it off with a rag when it was 80% dry and this left dark paint down inside the scribed lines which accentuated the planking.
  20. Getting back to the topic I see some people are suggesting that some of the rigging problems in the book can be chalked up to “captains choice” in that variations in real-world use could explain away discrepancies. Yet many of the issues in the book are simply illogical or unworkable, such as the Cutter toprope issue I wrote about in this thread way back in 2017. Glancing again at the book I see the illustration for the Schooners Toprope is ALSO flawed, and the brief blurb saying “two different solutions” suggests that the author was NOT using a single schooner model as an example. One of his odd “solutions “ is to run the Toprope through a block, circled in red, that performs no function whatsoever, the line in this example could not run. And as I mentioned back in 2017, topropes are not fixed parts of the rig, they are in use only when lowering or raising the topmast and so would never be spliced to anything, at either end.
  21. In the context of a block in the age of wooden sailing ships the Strop is the rope that permenantly encircles the block and is the part that provides the attachment point where the block is positioned in the rig. It’s nearly always a Rope Grommet that has the block itself seized within it with its extra length formed into an eye. Often the strops were wormed served parceled and tarred to give them the greatest possible longevityand this made them black. But if you google “stropped block” today you get modern photos of rope stropped blocks which nearly all appear to be made for demonstration or decorative purposes and all of these are just the color of the rope, tarnish brown.
  22. In actual practice they would not be tied to anything. If it was me and I was commited to displaying the oars in their thole pins I would drill and pin them in place using very thin wire.
  23. You can do this: delete all the photos in your post using the EDIT feature at the bottom of your post. Then upload the photos one at a time in the proper sequence. By “one at a time” I mean you have to hit the SUBMIT button after uploading ONE photo at a time, and hitting the EDITbutton again to upload the next photo.
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