JerseyCity Frankie

Today was such a beautiful day here (sorry for all you New Englanders and northern folks) 80 degrees and bright clear sunshine. This was an opportunity to photograph the Morgan outside, so I'm taking the opportunity to show her off a little. I also made the Mizzen Top Mast, finishing it and making the Main Topmast. I used my Proxxon DB 250 Lathe to turn the Mizzen and Main Top masts and Royal. This is done from one dowel so I set it up in the lathe and used sandpaper to reduce the diameters down to the proper size. One nice advantage of this lathe is that the longer dowels can go through the center of the motor freely. You could stick a 5' or longer piece through it and just turn the area you want.

Its an era that is underrepresented in the hobby. There is certainly a need for more information about this transitional period as it is fascinating and has some real oddball pairings of ships and rigs. I wish I could remember the name but I recently saw a modelers plan of an early 20th century ocean liner that had square rigged sails AND a catapult for a seaplane. I would LOVE to imagine a scenario where the seaplane pilot is aloft helping to furl the sail, then gets the word the ship is in range and he must  return to the deck, suit up and fly the mail ahead to New York.

Its an era that is underrepresented in the hobby. There is certainly a need for more information about this transitional period as it is fascinating and has some real oddball pairings of ships and rigs. I wish I could remember the name but I recently saw a modelers plan of an early 20th century ocean liner that had square rigged sails AND a catapult for a seaplane. I would LOVE to imagine a scenario where the seaplane pilot is aloft helping to furl the sail, then gets the word the ship is in range and he must  return to the deck, suit up and fly the mail ahead to New York.

Some of my sails looked whiter than others after some water/PVA washes for shaping. I wanted to show weathering so I did some more washes with tea. This time I added baking soda to the tea. It fizzed a little at first so I added more until it stopped fizzing. Hope this works- never did it this way before. Also borrowed an idea from CaptainSteve. I dry brushed some paint & smeared it with my finger to look like water staining running down from the grommets. I like the way they turned out.
 
 
 
 

Very near finishing the Scottish Maid. Wishing Keith was around to see me complete it. Since I'm so near to the end I'm taking another look at the details around the ship. I noticed the reef points on the port side of the Main Mast Boom Sail. I have the sail catching wind from the starboard side, billowing out on the port side. The way this makes the sail shaped the reef points should not be laying sloppily against the sail on that side. I painted each one with watered PVA & clipped them to dry so they would hang down.
 
 
 

Doing a little at a time. Rigging sheet & clew lines. Added the stay & flying jib sails.
 
 

Plenty of discussion on this topic here. If you read my two cents you will see I am saying it's a lashing.  http://modelshipworld.com/index.php/topic/9027-puddened-gripes/

Found this link on Reddit, looks like13 pages from a sketchbook have been reproduced.  http://www.cherini.eu/etnografia/IND/index.html
the root website doesn't translate to English but if you click on the hotlinks there is treasure:  http://www.cherini.eu/and I do mean TREASURE, I have not seen so much information on delightful non-Western rigs before.

Found this link on Reddit, looks like13 pages from a sketchbook have been reproduced.  http://www.cherini.eu/etnografia/IND/index.html
the root website doesn't translate to English but if you click on the hotlinks there is treasure:  http://www.cherini.eu/and I do mean TREASURE, I have not seen so much information on delightful non-Western rigs before.

Found this link on Reddit, looks like13 pages from a sketchbook have been reproduced.  http://www.cherini.eu/etnografia/IND/index.html
the root website doesn't translate to English but if you click on the hotlinks there is treasure:  http://www.cherini.eu/and I do mean TREASURE, I have not seen so much information on delightful non-Western rigs before.

Gary,
 
I have found many examples of missing rigging on MS plans (e.g. my Topsail "Eagle" 1847 plans showed no bowsprit or jib boom guys). I just add what I believe would have been used based on period practice.
 
Regards,
Pete

The Build Continues
 
Planking is complete. That is, the first planking is complete! I‘m not very proud of it, but for reasons explained below, while it has to be competent, it doesn’t have to be tiptop.
 
Much to my surprise this ship build has 2 skins of planking, the second laid directly on top of the first, the only difference is that second build also covers the bulwarks, inner and outer. Being a newcomer I don’t know how common this is. My first ship, the Albatros only had the one layer of planking.
 
The bulwarks themselves were added, and all the bulwark tabs exposed over deck level had to be removed. This boring and lengthy sanding job was made infinitely easier with my new toy; after much research I purchased a Dremel 7700 cordless rotary tool. I like it! It made jobs like removing the tabs blissfully easy, although one had to be careful obviously. (It features in one of the images, at the stern of the ship in the shot looking downwards at the deck. It’s actually going back and being replaced, as the battery unit doesn’t sit securely in either the charger or the actual tool, which can’t be as intended).
 

 
Once the bulwark tabs had been removed and sanded down to deck level, the second planking could commence. This is going to be a long job. I’ve elected to start it from the deck; up the bulwarks, then down over the outer bulwarks and down the side of the ship. One photo shows the inner planking in progress. Note my patent pending struts, under tension, helping keep the planking in position as the glue dries.  All the apertures in the bulwarks; gun ports etc. have to be kept clear obviously. This is where my set of needle files came in.
 
The second planking continues. I may well lay the deck planking at the same time when I feel the need for a break in the hull planking.
 

so I finally finished the second planking, there still have a few holes in the stern to Resolved. Then he put the final board on the back and drag the entire keel including veneer bow. And then hooray for grinding paint coloring, yet I'm not sure if I'll stain the side linden wood yellower tint to make it better and excel board ultimately about possibly fill the varnish or some oil to achieve a more realistic appearance.

This is how. 
 
 

Making tools to get at stuff on the inside of the bottle need not be a huge challenge if you select a bottle with the right ratio of neck diameter to neck width. The inside diameter of the bottle also plays a roll and some geometries won’t allow you to have an influence anywhere inside the bottle. Usually you don’t need anything more than a bit of wire twisted over the end of a wooden dowel or bamboo skewer and up till now I had not needed to build special tools more complex than a piece of razor blade attached to a stick. But this project has had some special challenges.  This tool is simply a tweezers tied to a threaded rod. I use metal rod since the leverage you put onto the end of the tool that you can grasp has a strong effect within the bottle and wood can break or bend more often than you would think. 

Thinking ahead to getting the creature AND the ship into the bottle and letting them exist in there when I seal it up at the end. I realized the ship and the creatures arms are an inch above the surface of the sea and I started to worry about the high center of gravity. All my other ships in bottles are seated IN the clay, not hovering above it, so I never gave much thought to keeping those other ships from rolling over onto their sides. But I can imagine a hot day in the summer and the clay softening and the ship slowly toppling over onto its side within the bottle. So before I put in the clay "sea" I determined to put in a foundation. I cut piece of brass strip and soldered a brass pin into it. Onto this brass pin I will glue the creatures body and with the brass strip under the clay "Sea" I hope I will have provided enough support for the ship and the Kraken arms raised aloft.

The ship building and preparing will reach a point where I will need to start using the bottle in the planning and prep. I will need this round bottle to be stable so I should at this point build the base for the bottle and I may as well build the base I intend to display the model in rather than make a temporary jig that would be discarded later. A square bottle is nice since it will sit on the workbench but this one has the word "KRAKEN" embossed on it and two nice loops (presumably so that it may better be grasped with tentacles) so I want it to sit exactly at the right position. I need two brackets to conform to the profile of the bottle so I trace the bottle onto the timber I want to use and cut out the arcs. I learned the trick of finessing the cut to fit the bottle by wrapping some sandpaper around the bottle and sanding into the rough cut to make a nice fit even nicer.

With everything dry you can cast off from the building jig and fold the masts over to check for fit in the neck of the bottle. Drop the model right in with confidence since you can pull it back out again via the stays. If its a tight squeeze, sand file or shave off some of the bottom of the hull. In a conventional ship in a bottle, you are making a waterline hull anyway and shaving off the bottom is no big deal. Another conventional ship in a bottle practice is to attache the yards and have them stay with the masts through the insertion and erection inside the bottle. I have done this in the past but the yards add a TREMENDOUS amount of bulk and complexity and you have to finagle them back out of their inevitable cockbilled disposition once the masts are up.  I am opting to attach the yards AFTER the ship is in and the masts are up and glue them on one at a time.

Shrouds and Stays: The masts flop around chaotically without anything holding them up so there is some degree of frustration in this step. When the shrouds and stays are tight the masts are rigid and behave themselves. But with JUST the shrouds or JUST the stays they will flop around. This is where the belaying pins on the base come in so handy since you can make one handed adjustments with the line while you hold the mast at the proper angle with the other hand. (As on a real ship, you can belay a line with just three figure eight turns around the top and bottom of a pin) I tie the stays onto the masts first and give them a drop of glue. Then I put the shroud gang on under the caps (each pair of shrouds middled and overhand knotted just under the top and a drop of glue) and leave their ends long. I hold the mast at the proper position and make off the stay on a pin at the base. Please note that the line you cut to make the stays has to be very long in order to reach outside the bottle later. With the stays belayed I move the shrouds, one opposing pair at a time, into their positions against the hull. I pass the ends of the shrouds to opposite sides under the keel to keep them flat against the hull and tape them temporarily in place. Once all is as I could wish it I white glue them onto the hull in one of those instances in which you want a REALLY SECURE GLUE JOB since the shrouds will be out of reach within the bottle when you erect the masts and you DO NOT WANT THEM TO COME FREE when you are tugging on the stays. The stays are going to be the only rigging outside of the bottle and they are opposed only by the shrouds. I put on some paper deadeyes made with a paper punch. A bit out of scale but I can live with them and I like adding any sort of detail I can at this small scale. After the glue has dried I cut off the tails of the shrouds. 

I decided I would have the head of the kraken as one phase of the construction, the hull of the ship as another. The eight arms would be another phase. The Kraken and the arms of the Kraken will be segmented and have brass pins to aid their reattachment inside the bottle. The first two Kraken heads I made would have fit into the neck of the bottle but they would have made for a small Kraken of reduced grandeur, so I am electing to make a larger more fearsome Kraken with a head that is in two pieces, to be joined with pins within the bottle. The eight arms of the Kraken emerge from the head and I have decided to make THIS element a separate piece too, a piece made up of eight tentacle bases. This piece too will be in two sections in order to fit the bottle, and this part tucks into the “neck” of the Kraken- this is viewed in the second photo below. The rest of the legs and the hull of the ship will likely be suspended in the air above this assembly, which in turn will be bedded in the plastecine clay “sea”. The stumps of the legs will all have brass pins to allow the rest of the arms to fit into place. I anticipate a lot of confusion, multiplied by the number eight.

Sculpy is a lot like plastecine clay but it’s a bit softer. It can be made into shapes and then “fired” in your kitchen’s oven, fifteen minutes at 275 degrees Fahrenheit transforms it into a harder more ridged material. Not hard like ceramic, when fired it turns into something with the consistency of a red rubber eraser. It can flex a tiny bit and you can easily cut it with a blade. But you can also sand it with sandpaper or take off material with a file. I began by rolling “snakes” like children have been doing with clay since forever, tapering them to points to make tentacles. Here is a shot of the first Kraken head I attempted. As you will see I have made three so far. Next to the unfired head are segments of tentacle. These are still very soft. Too soft as it turns out. The tentacles were too floppy to support their own weight and I realized I was not going to be able to make a creature, wrap its arms around the model, then fire the whole thing. I was going to have to make the arms one at a time and assemble them all later. Anyway this is the rabbit hole I am now descending into.

To determine the size of the ship I traced the bottle and freehand drew the ship into the bottles outline. Then I traced the hull from that drawing onto tracing paper. I repeated that step three times trying to adjust for the perspective view in the original print AND have a hull  that looked like a plausible ship. usually I do the scaling and drawing in photoshop on the computer, but then again usually I already have a nice plan to work from whereas in this case I had to make my own. So then I drew in a rig, omitting the t'galants as I had imagined I would.  If I had included the loftier spars the entire ship would have been scaled that much smaller, and I want the ship to take up as much interior volume of the bottle as possible. Note that in my tracing paper sketch I drew a circle representing the diameter of the inside of the neck of the bottle- this dimension should NEVER be far from your mind when you are laying out a bottle model!
Next I got a chunk of basswood out and carved away at it with an x-acto. After a few passes I plugged in The Jersey Heartbreaker, chucked in a sanding drum, and took it down to the shape you see here. It will next get some more sanding and  grinding around the stern and the deck will get taken down a bit too. But at this stage I was happy to see that I have a hull size I can live with and that it fits into the bottle.

I had hoped to avoid building an articulated tool but it has become apparent that with all those tentacles I will have to manipulate I was going to have to make something I could bend around inside the bottle. It turns out it was very easy to make this elbow tool and I was done and using it a lot sooner than I imagined, I had set aside the whole night to cobble something together and really all I had to do was drill a hole and bend some wire. There is no glue or solder in use here at all its just bent wire and knots on the string. The inset photo is the tool in its bent mode. It swings through 120 degrees roughly when I pull on one string and ease the other. I’m sure anyone reading this could build one of these and a lot of you could build a more elegant tool, based on some of the build logs and evident competence I see on this site.

The figure comes from the 1/96 Constitution kit(which I have to build yet).
Converted with sword added.
 
Am converting lots of figures for this build and the Connie later.
 
A picture of some of them.

 
Frank.

Then it was the turn of the upper deadeyes and chains.
This time the deadeyes are all the same and the chain lengths, so added the deadeyes to the fret till needed.



Having Dafis hints and tips is a great help, this I downloaded from his site.

With it you cannot go wrong and having the relevant books makes this much easier.

After removing the poop/quarter decks I found one or two problems will also ad some more plastic strip to the hull sides.


Think I have the right planking this time.


Also note the rope at the stern end, this is the rudder/tiller ropes that will pass up through to the ships wheel.
 
Frank