shipmodel

Thanks for all the nice compliments. 
 
Michael -  I will trade some of my carving skills for your metalworking expertise.  I just finished reading your log of the Bristol cutter and was blown away. 
 
Ken -  yes, the jaw is the major problem, but the width of the eye sockets also seemed too broad.  Here is the face after narrowing.  The lion is coming along nicely, but has a ways to go.  If my artistic skills are up to it, I want to get a ferocious expression, but that may be hoping for too much. 
 


 
After putting the lion to bed for a while, the next independent pieces that I turned to were the mast tops.  By 1710 in France they were circular but without the earlier raised rim.  They are built with the usual overlapping plank construction, a flat rim and radial cleats.  Here are Budriot’s plans, which are almost identical to Lees’ and Marquhardt’s.  This is the main top, but the fore is identical, other than being scaled down just a fraction.  The mizzen top is smaller, but the construction method for all three is identical.
 

 
To build them, the first piece to be made was the square filler piece.  It is just a piece of 1/8” thick scrap, sized to the lubber’s hole on the plans.  The cryptic symbol on this one is left over from its use as a jig for a previous model.  I cut this carefully on the Preac, as it will guide the rest of the construction.
 

 
The planks are 1mm thick birch, cut to width and long enough to span the diameter of the top.  On the real ship they would have been cut thick then carved down to make the lap joints, leaving a raised portion in the center.  Instead, I took a piece of the planking and cut sections the length of one side of the filler guide.  These were then glued to the center of the planks with the edges matched up.  When the glue was dry one edge was colored with a black marker.  A completed one is just above the filler guide piece.
 
The cleats in the lower left are mass produced since the fore and main tops take 16 each and the mizzen top takes 12.  I cut a rectangle of 1mm cherry sheet with the grain going in the short dimension.  Then I glued another strip on top of one edge with an overhang equal to the width of the rim with the grain also running in the short direction.  Now I could part off 1/16” wide cleats with a narrow blade in the table saw until I ran out of material. The cleats are left raw at this point and will be shaped and tapered later.
 
To start the platform construction, four of the lap planks are positioned around the filler guide.  Two of them (top/bottom) have the thick section turned up and the other two (left/right) have the section facing down.  They are glued at their overlaps and clamped tightly around the filler guide.
 

 
When they are solid it is easy to lay in the other down facing planks and glue them to the underneath planks and to each other.  After the clamps are removed the platform was flipped over and the remaining planks were glued across the first sets of planks.
 

 
The center of the filler piece was located and the outer perimeter of the top was drawn with a compass.  This was cut close on the band saw and left rough, to be taken down to the line on a disc sander after the rim is installed.
 
With the compass still set for the perimeter size, an arc was drawn on a rectangle of the cherry sheet, this time with the grain running the long way.  The compass was closed the width of the rim and a second curve was drawn inside the first but with the same center.  Three more pieces of cherry were stacked under the first and glued together at the upper corners and lower center only, not where the rim pieces will come from.
 

 
The inside curve was cut on the band saw then smoothed to the line with a sanding drum in the drill press.  The outer curve was cut large, to be sanded down after installation on the platform.  After completing the second cut the pieces separated automatically.  The rim pieces were cut to one quarter of the circumference of the platform using the plans to make the initial cuts, the fine tuning being done during assembly.
 
With the platform, rims and cleats made, I assembled them with neutral pH PVA glue.  Care has to be taken to see that the cleats are equally spaced and the rim pieces match up to each other, but otherwise construction is pretty straightforward.
 
The shafts of the cleats were made overlong so their tails extended into the lubber’s hole.  These tails were clipped off and the shafts tapered from the rim to the hole with a flap-wheel sander.
 
All of the corners and edges were cleaned up and rounded with a sanding stick then the top was given its first coat of finish.
 

 
Here I used Floquil clear flat, but with a few drops of my stain mixture (50% Natural, 25% Cherry, 25% Early American) added.  The finish enhanced the color of the cherry while the light stain brought the tone and hue of the birch into the same color family.  It even slightly enhanced the grain of the birch, as if it were older wood.  This is exactly the effect that I was looking for.  I think that I will be using this color palette a lot as the build continues.
 
The trestletrees and crosstrees were cut to length from 3mm x 6mm pear.  I used the Preac to cut the notches in the trestletrees to accept the crosstrees.  Tapers were sanded on all eight arms as shown on the plans, then they were installed on the underside of the platforms.
 

 
Holes for the crowsfoot lines were drilled through the forward rim.  I spaced them a bit closer together at the center to account for the anticipated narrowing effect as the top curves away from the euphroe.  I’ll see how that works out when it is rigged.
 
The elongated holes for the upper deadeye strops were roughly cut by drilling two holes side by side then using the drill bit to nibble out the wood between them.
 

 
Finally, I indicated the nails that hold the two layers of planking together where they overlap.  As with the boats, these were indicated by drilling shallow holes with a #80 (0.012”) drill.  A wash of stain mix was flooded over the holes and immediately wiped off.  It darkened the holes without changing the color of the planks.  This is a technique that I will use again as well.
 

 
There will be additional holes to mount a number of blocks under the tops, but I have not studied the rigging plan enough yet to locate them.  For now, here are the six tops ready for storage till needed.
 

 
I'm up in the country this weekend, so hopefully I will soon have some progress to share on the hulls.
 
Dan
 
  

Hello again -
 
Just back from the doctor, who says that a 'trigger finger' problem that I am having with my right thumb is related to the repetitive nature of the carving work.  He told me to lay off for a while, and gave me a cortisone shot into the base of the thumb.  Ouch !    And then it didn't work!  I don't have much more to do on the first figurehead, so I am going to finish it in easy stages, then work on some larger pieces before going back to the second lion.
 
Here is a short report on where I am now -
 
This next phase of the carving is mostly a process of refining the shapes that were defined last time.  For this I mostly use a series of diamond abrasive burrs of various shapes.  Here is the set, purchased from Micro-Mark some time ago when Chinese tool makers hadn't started taking short cuts with quality.  They have held up very well for more than a decade.  The long cone in the Dremel is very useful.  I use the point for lining out and small details, while the larger diameter of the base of the burr smooths and shapes larger surfaces.
 

 
The carving process with these burrs is the same as for the larger bitts - I first define the edges and planes, then refine them by rounding the corners and adjusting the angles of the planes.  Raised body parts like the tail and upper arm are given some dimensionality by undercutting them slightly to create a shadow line.  
 
All of the carving is all done by eye at this stage - the Michelangelo method - I just remove whatever doesn't look like the image in my head.  Here are a series of shots with the work rotating starboard to port.
 





 
The major issue right now is the shape of the head.  It is still too broad.  In some photos it looks more like a lizard than a lion.  You can see that quite clearly in the first enlarged photo below.  This was taken with the macro setting on the camera, and some of the problem is exaggerated, but you can see what I mean.  In the lower photo I used Photoshop to narrow the image about 15%, and now it looks much more leonine.  I will carve it down to get that general shape.
 


 
If you haven't figured it out, the teeth are created by simply drilling a series of small holes which define the negative space between the teeth.  I may use a small triangular file to refine them, or just leave them as is, since they are all but invisible uness a camera is used to magnify them. 
 
Happy Thanksgiving to all.
 
Dan

Hello again -
 
Just back from the doctor, who says that a 'trigger finger' problem that I am having with my right thumb is related to the repetitive nature of the carving work.  He told me to lay off for a while, and gave me a cortisone shot into the base of the thumb.  Ouch !    And then it didn't work!  I don't have much more to do on the first figurehead, so I am going to finish it in easy stages, then work on some larger pieces before going back to the second lion.
 
Here is a short report on where I am now -
 
This next phase of the carving is mostly a process of refining the shapes that were defined last time.  For this I mostly use a series of diamond abrasive burrs of various shapes.  Here is the set, purchased from Micro-Mark some time ago when Chinese tool makers hadn't started taking short cuts with quality.  They have held up very well for more than a decade.  The long cone in the Dremel is very useful.  I use the point for lining out and small details, while the larger diameter of the base of the burr smooths and shapes larger surfaces.
 

 
The carving process with these burrs is the same as for the larger bitts - I first define the edges and planes, then refine them by rounding the corners and adjusting the angles of the planes.  Raised body parts like the tail and upper arm are given some dimensionality by undercutting them slightly to create a shadow line.  
 
All of the carving is all done by eye at this stage - the Michelangelo method - I just remove whatever doesn't look like the image in my head.  Here are a series of shots with the work rotating starboard to port.
 





 
The major issue right now is the shape of the head.  It is still too broad.  In some photos it looks more like a lizard than a lion.  You can see that quite clearly in the first enlarged photo below.  This was taken with the macro setting on the camera, and some of the problem is exaggerated, but you can see what I mean.  In the lower photo I used Photoshop to narrow the image about 15%, and now it looks much more leonine.  I will carve it down to get that general shape.
 


 
If you haven't figured it out, the teeth are created by simply drilling a series of small holes which define the negative space between the teeth.  I may use a small triangular file to refine them, or just leave them as is, since they are all but invisible uness a camera is used to magnify them. 
 
Happy Thanksgiving to all.
 
Dan

Hi again -
 
Good to see and talk to some of you at the NRG conference.  Had a good time and the speakers on Saturday were great.
 
Not much to report.  A good deal of work went into doing the second boat, but it replicates the building of the first one, so it was not the subject of a build log entry.  Here are the two, side by side.  The second was made of cherry, so it is much darker than the first.  Since they will be on separate models that will not be displayed together, they do not have to be identical.  I actually prefer the first.  The lighter color of the wood lets the caulking and fastening details stand out a bit more.  But the darker one is closer to the color of old, unpainted boats that I have seen. 
 



 
I won't get to work on the hulls for another week, so I am starting on the figureheads.
 
The Advice Prize draught does not have a figurehead of any kind.  Although the actual ship probably did, the Admiralty was not interested in decorations.  They just took off the hull lines so that later English ships could benefit from any foreign design advances.  Budriot has a lion for Le Mercure, shown here.
 


 
This is going to be the basis of my figureheads, but a number of others are being studied.  Here are three from models in the NMM collection.
 



 
All of these are too florid and intricate, I believe, for what would have been a pretty basic ship.  I am also studying the lion that was carved for the Gotheborg replica ship. 
 

 
Finally, I am using a cast lion fitting from a ship model company that I used to own.  It is the wrong size so I can't simply cast two duplicates, but it should be a good carving aid since I can turn it in my hand to get any view that I want.
 

 
Construction began with three pieces of hard pear wood glued together.  All are 3/8" thick, with the outer ones much longer than the middle one, forming a channel that is the width of the stem.  A properly sized copy of the Budriot lion was printed out and glued to one side.  The basic outline was then cut on a band saw.
 

 
The saw marks gave me horizontal landmark for the eyes, nose and mouth and they were pencilled in.  The lower body is narrower than the mane, so some of the wood was band sawn off.  The crown was similarly defined in a rough way.  A false stem of basswood was made which has a tight friction fit between the lion's legs.  It will act as a handle and will support the fragile feet and legs as the carving progresses.
 

 
Next time the carving begins.
 
Be well
 
Dan
 

Hi all –
 
Thanks for your comments and suggestions.  I plan to incorporate them into the second iteration of the boat which will be built when the hardwood strips arrive from the supplier.
 
When we left the shipyard the hull of the boat had been fully planked with the shutter planks fitted on both sides.  The hull had been marked out in pencil for the rib locations in preparation for the nails which would have fastened the planks to the ribs.  Here you can see the lines for all of the ribs that sit square to the keel as well as for the two cant ribs, drawn on the port side of the hull.
 

 
For the fasteners I had to find a way to make them look right without devoting an excessive amount of time to the task.  Since there are 11 planks on each side, 25 rib or transom/stem lines that the planks cross, and two fasteners per crossing, the math says that there have to be 1100 fasteners for the exterior of each boat.  Add in some more for the interior work and you can see the magnitude of the problem. 
 
The original boat probably had the planks nailed to the ribs, with the ends peened over to clinch them.  I experimented with a plank/rib mockup and could never get the holes in the planks to come through the ribs in the proper places.  Instead, I decided to drill the holes through only the planks and worry about indicating the nails on the inside of the ribs later.
 
I first drilled all the holes.  Here you can see how there are two in each plank in an offset pattern.  I used a 0.012” drill, which scales up to 1/2”, which would be about right.
 

 
At first I tried inserting pieces of annealed iron wire into the holes, clipping them short, painting them with glue, then filing the tops flush with the face of the planks.  This was incredibly time consuming and fiddly.  I then decided to try the technique of leaving the holes empty, sanding the planks to fill the holes with sawdust, then painting on a finish to hold in the sawdust.  This looked good and I don’t believe that anyone can tell the difference with this short cut.
 
  *   *   *
Aarrrgh, scalawag that ye are!  Ye’ll not be taking any modern short cuts with me boats.  I be Dread Pirate Peter, and I’ll have yer guts fer garters if ye dinna do a manly and proper piece of work. 
 

 
No, no, it will be OK.  Really it will.  Here, this is what the nail holes look like after filling and staining.  I have had several critical people, including my wife, compare them to the ones with the iron nails in them and no one could tell the difference.  In fact, the slightly spread discoloration of the wood grain closely mimics the way old wood stains when a nail rusts into it.
 

 
*   *   *
Tis all very well and comely, but rest ye not on yer laurels, lest ye rest on yer ****.  I be watching ye. . .
 
*   *   *
Soooo, with that out of the way, I turned to fitting out the interior.  First the missing ribs were bent and fitted into the interior.  These were the two cant ribs at the bow and the aftmost rib at Station 21 that had been left off to make planking easier. 
 
The first interior piece to be installed was the tapered central plank of the flooring.  It strengthens the keel and is the location for the lifting rings and mast step.
 

 
To each side the rest of the floor planks were installed.  They are not tapered but fit against the tapered center plank due to the curvature of the hull.  They are held in place while the glue dries by inexpensive hair clips from the cosmetics section of the drug store.  They initially look like the one at the lower left, but are easily bent by hand to the shape in the lower right.  This now allows them to reach around the hull to apply pressure at the tips.
 

 
Next to be installed are the sheets, the planked platforms at the bow and stern.  They will appear in later photos, but I did not take pictures as they were being built.  Construction is straightforward.  Planks were glued to a pair of battens underneath to make a flat sheet larger than needed.  A paper pattern is cut to fit the space and the wood sheet is cut to that shape.  The edges are bevelled to match the curve of the hull and it is glued in place to the ribs.
 
Now the thwart stringers are installed.  I first bent one piece of  stripwood to shape and glued it in on the starboard side at the height indicated on the plans.  The matching strip was bent and trimmed for the port side and held in place temporarily while I balanced pieces of stripwood across from side to side and set perpendicular to the keel.  These are known in woodworking as ‘winding sticks’ although I don’t know why.  Looking across their tops you can easily see any variation from side to side and any tipping compared to the centerline and the edge of the sheets.  Once I was satisfied with the levels, the port stringer was glued in place. 
 

 
The plans show square section wood pieces running side to side just under the thwart stringers near the bow and stern.  They have a short section in the center that has a round cross section.  I do not know what they were for, but perhaps the rounded section would have a halyard led around it when the sail was raised, sort of a non-turning sheave.  Whatever they are they were shaped, fitted and glued in.
 
The lifting rings and mast step were located and attached to the central floor plank.  I also drilled the nail holes for the floors and sheets as I did for the hull planks.  My one regret is that I did not do this for the ribs at this point when they were exposed.  It turned out to be too crowded later – a detail that will be corrected on the next boats.
 
The thwarts were cut from 1mm thick stock, with the middle one being wider in the center and having added knees.  It holds and supports the metalwork that acts as the mast partner.  This fitting is made from brass strip which is chemically blackened, then glued and pinned with wire nails to the edge of the thwart.  A decorative beading was scribed into the edges of the thwarts, then they were installed on top of the stringers with spacers between them.
 

 
Unfortunately, once the thwarts were installed it was clear that they were sitting too high in the boat.  No rowers could have sat on them and had their feet reach the floor for leverage.  Here the flexibility of the Lineco glue came to my rescue.  With the tip of a #10 blade I was able to pry up the thwarts from the stringers and then remove the stringers without any damage to the hull or ribs.
 

 
The stringers were lowered 6 scale inches and reinstalled, followed by the thwarts, which looked much better after the adjustment.  I went back to the plans and determined that the problem was there and not in my measuring or building.  Just one of those problems that had to be built to be discovered.
 

 
Fitting out the rest of the interior is self-explanatory.  Working up from the thwarts the stern seats were planked up over battens.  They sit on top of the thwart stringers and the aftmost thwart.  The foremost thwart has a pair of knees set on top.
 
Square section stringers were fitted and glued to the inner sides of the sheer strake so their tops matched, and were strengthened at the bow by a breasthook and at the stern by two transom knees.  Thole blocks were set on top of the sheer strakes and stringers and will be drilled for the thole pins to be added later.  The locations of several of these had to be adjusted from the plans, which did not have them at a consistent distance from the associated thwart.
 

 
The only difficult woodworking came at the bow where the curved and carved fairleads on either side of the stem were joined with a double-dovetailed cross-support.
 


 
With the boat all but complete the rudder was fashioned to match the plans.  Two planks were fitted and tapered, then cut to the proper profile.  The pintle straps were made from brass strip, pinned through with iron wire and chemically blackened.  The tiller is brass bar that was tapered and blackened, with an epoxy bulb at its tip.
 

 
Top and bottom gudgeons were fashioned from blackened brass strip.  The upper one simply slipped into a hole drilled into the aft face of the sternpost, while the lower one had to be bent in several directions before being pinned against the sides of the sternpost.  It only remained for the thole pins to be installed and the boat was complete.
 

 
*    *    *
So ye think ye be quite clever, do ye? Quite the boat builder?  I be the judge of that.  I also bring me great-great-great grandson Peter who says he has worked with ye before.  He be a great galoot of a puppy, but he be useful to judge yer work.  He set up this temporary mast and I grant ye that said boat be mightily even side to side.
 

 
He sits well in the stern and nothing pulls my eye to say that he could not reach and steer the tiller, should he take it into his head to do some work, the lazy lout that he be.
 

 
It shivers me innards to grudge ye my approval, but i’ faith I canna find much to dislike.  But be warned that I will no be put off with such minor success.  Ye must do as well or better, or feel me wrath fall upon ye like to the Trump of Doom.
 


 
Well, there you have it.  The second boat will be made from hardwoods now that most of the construction problems have been identified, although I am sure that new ones will appear and demand solutions.  Those may be harder to find while looking over my shoulder all the time; Dread Pirate Peter seems to have very high standards, and a very short temper.
 
Till then, be well.
 
Dan

Thanks for the feedback -
 
AVS in Jerome (sorry, don't know your name) -    I am following the research done by those better at that than I, and with better access to primary documents.  If you go to the Queen Anne's Revenge website you can access the reports by these researchers as well as graduate dissertations that synthesize and analyze them.  From these it is pretty clear that the ship was built in a French (possibly Dutch, but unlikely) shipyard for a private business run by the Montaudoin family.  Here is the link to the doctoral dissertation by Mark Wilde-Ramsing.  http://wayback.archive-it.org/org-67/20120515002435/http://www.qaronline.org/techSeries/QAR-R-09-02.pdf
 
Druxey -     I find spiling by eye to be so much faster and easier than trying to do it mechanically and mathematically.  I used to do the whole proportional divider and tick strip thing, only to find that I was fairing the resulting planks by eye anyway.  Now I just select my basic plank width at the point of maximum breadth and adjust from there.  Actually, this is quite close to how full sized wooden boats are built, even up to 100 foot yachts such as the Coronet, now being restored at the International Yacht Restoration School in Newport, RI (a wonderful detour if you are down that way).  You can read about this process in a very funny and captivating book about the Benjamin & Gannon shipyard on Martha's Vineyard called "Wooden Boats" by Michael Ruhlman, who is now a well-known food writer.
 
As for the ribs, I had the same thought, but this is not the light pinnace or Admiral's launch, but a heavy workboat that had to withstand being knocked around and grounded on strange shores.  All of the scantlings were probably a bit thick.  As you will see, once the floors, thwarts and seats are installed the ribs look well proportioned.  At least I think so.   
 
Dan

Hello to all -
 
Those of you who followed my building of the Swan 42 racing yacht may experience some temporal whiplash as the Wayback Machine moves the shipyard some 300 years into the past.  Even though the scale will be about the same, the materials, methods, and style will have little or nothing in common with the last project.   We leave the clean lines and millimeter accuracy of a rich man's toy for the rough outlines and incomplete draughts of a pre-Colonial pirate ship.
 
Queen Anne's Revenge was the flagship of the notorious pirate Edward Thatch (incorrectly called Teach), known as Blackbeard.  In barely more than a year and a half, from the summer of 1717 to November 22, 1818, he and two other pirate leaders put together a large fleet that took numerous merchant ships, looting them and holding any worthwhile captives for ransom while taking any willing sailors into his piratical crew.  He was hardly the most notorious or bloodthirsty pirate, but he captured the popular imagination with his large fierce black beard and his habit of placing lit rope matches for his weapons into his hair during a battle.
 

 
The origins of the ship herself are not definitively known.  It is thought that she was built in about 1710 as a small frigate of about 300 tons known as La Concorde, with her first cruise as a French privateer during Queen Anne's War in 1711.  When the war ended in 1713 with the Treaty of Utrecht her owners sent her into the slave trade.  She made two profitable cruises between 1713 and 1717, taking slaves from West Africa to the French colonies in the Carribean and capturing prizes on the return leg back to France.  On November 28, 1717, during her third slaving cruise, she fell afoul of Blackbeard with two armed sloops.  Her crew was sick and many of the cannon had been removed to make more room for slaves so she was captured easily.  Below is a drawing of a similar light frigate from the early 1700s.
 

 
After renaming her Queen Anne's Revenge and adding significantly more cannon, she became Blackbeard's flagship and was used to capture numerous ships and even to blockade the port of Charleston for a week.  Turning north from there  in company with several smaller pirate ships on June 10, 1718 they tried to enter a shallow anchorage known as Topsail Inlet (or Old Topsail Inlet), now called Beaufort Inlet in North Carolina.  Although several other ships entered safely, the larger Queen Anne's Revenge grounded on the sand bar at the entrance, as did another ship that came to her aid.  After removing the valuables she was abandoned and left to the cruel mercies of the sea.  Blackbeard himself lasted barely another six months until his death in November of 1718 during a battle with the Royal Navy. 
 
The ship was rediscovered in 1996 and is now being excavated underwater in project managed by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Affairs and the North Carolina Maritime Museum, part of East Carolina University.  Numerous artifacts, including several cannon, coins, navigational equipment, and hundreds of everyday items have been recovered and are being conserved.  You can see photographs of the artifacts, view interactive maps of the ship's history and the wreck site, and read the archaeologists' and researchers' detailed reports if you go to the Queen Anne's Revenge website at http://www.qaronline.org/Home.aspx   It is a little gem of a site and well worth looking into.
 
I have been asked to build two display models of the QAR for the Maritime Museum.  They will be at the large scale of 1:36, yielding a model of some 48" LOA from the tip of the jib boom to the ensign staff at the stern.  It will rise some 44" from the keel to the main truck with a main yard of some 22" with stunsail booms rigged but not extended.   The hull is to be solid below the gun deck but open and fully detailed above.   She is to have a full suit of sails with all sail handling lines, although several will be furled so the deck can be more easily viewed.
 
There are no plans or illustrations of the ship, so her apearance is a bit conjectural.  As a basis for the model I have been given two sets of plans.  The first is a simple, one-page rendering of the lines and profile of a similar small French frigate which was captured by HMS Advice and which is known therefore as Advice Prize.
 

 
I am also working from a set of drawings done by Jean Budriot of yet another light French frigate of the period known as Le Mercure.   He has written a monograph that is illustrated with numerous detailed drawings of all of the bits and pieces of the ship including several profiles, cross-sections and longitudinal sections, and sail and rigging plans.  However, as is his custom, there is no station lines plan from which to derive the hull shape.
 

 
These two sets of plans have to be reconciled, not only with each other, but with the known historic facts.  For example, it was reported in contemporary accounts and court-martial testimony that the Queen Anne's Revenge had 20 large cannon on board when she went down.  Le Mercure is pierced for 10 guns on each side, but the Advice Prize has only 9.  The Mercure drawings have the channels for the fore and main shrouds set below the gunports, while the Advice Prize has them above.  Le Mercure is shown with a square, open beakhead bulkhead, while the plans for the Advice Prize shows a closed in forecastle.  At the stern Le Mercure has a large quarter gallery, rather than the small quarter badge of the Advice Prize.  But that quarter badge is set very high, with an indication that the Advice Prize had a poop deck above the quarterdeck.  These and many other details, large and small, will have to be reconciled as construction continues.
 
To begin with, a tenth gunport was added to the Advice Prize and their spacing was adjusted accordingly.  The quarter badge was lowered and it is this resulting profile that will be used to build the models.
 

 
On this plan you can see a horizontal red line.  This is my line of demarcation between the solid hull below and the open gundeck above.  It is set at the level of the gundeck for the forward four ports.  A tapered piece will be added at the rear half of the ship to account for the sheer rise of the gundeck towards the stern.  But this line is also used as my registration plane for setting up the templates for the hull shape at the various stations shown on the plans. 
 
As I was working out the hull construction the first of what will surely be many problems arose.  In the scale that is required, the maximum breadth of the model works out to just over 9 inches and the station lines work out to, mostly, 3 inches separation.  To work from the centerline I would need wood of at least 4.5 inches wide and 3 inches thick.  However, wood of that size is not easily or inexpensively acquired.  Instead, I found basswood planks 4 inches wide and up to 2 inches thick.  I decided therefore to piece together the hull. 
 
As you can see in the wood blocking plan below, I started with a vertical central piece 3/8" thick to match the width of the keel.  This was sandwiched on each side by a vertical lift 1/2 inch thick, then by the side pieces whch would be cut to the profiles of the appropriate station lines from the plans.
 

 
As usual with vertical station line lifts, they were cut to the profile of the appropriate station line.  For each three inch station segment a two inch lift and a one inch lift were used.  I also decided that the hull should be partially hollow, not only to reduce weight, but to give the stresses somewhere to go other than outward when the wood swelled with changing humidity.  My solution was to take each lift and cut out the center, leaving a crescent of wood about 1 inch thick.  Construction began with the gunport deck piece cut to shape and the three vertical central pieces glued to it using carpenters' squares for alignment.  Then the station line lift crescents were glued in place and secured with dowels.  Here you can see the first three segments glued and pinned, with the fourth made ready for installation.
 


 
This was continued from the center out to the bow and stern, with the final lifts left solid and clamped to the growing hull block.  The completed hull block was left to dry for a week before the bamboo dowels were trimmed off.
 


 
Now the carving and shaping had to begin to reduce the stepped shape of the lifts.  The model is so large that the usual woodworking tools were inadequate in any reasonable time frame.  I therefore purchased an angle grinder and set it up with coarse 50 grit sanding discs.  This was followed by a random orbit sander, also with coarse grit paper.
 

 
As you can imagine, this makes a hellish racket and leaves a hellish mess,  Eye, ear and respiration protection are a must, and if you are not going to do all of it outside, you need three other things - an empty room in the basement; a big shop vacuum; and most importantly, an understanding wife.  I am glad to say that I have the first two and am blessed with the third.
 

 
In this photo you can see how far the shaping has progressed.  From here there still has to be a lot of hand work that is checked and rechecked as usual with station line templates.  The next segment will take us through that process.
 
Be well
 
Dan
 

Hi all -
 
Two days of carving and the first figurehead is rounding into shape.  Here is how I am going about it. 
 
I do almost all of my carving with a rotary tool and a series of ever smaller burrs and bitts.  Here they are for the first stage of the carving.  It includes a 1/4" diameter sanding sleeve for the Dremel plus a set of Disston burrs. Over the years I have added to the set when I found other shapes that could be useful. 
 

 
Here are the ones I use most often.  The sanding sleeve is at the top.  From left to right we have a straight bit with a rounded tip; a straight bit with a square tip; a reverse cone; and in the Dremel is a sharp cornered reverse rounded cone.  This last one is very useful for 'drawing' thin lines onto the wood that serve as landmarks for deeper carving with the other bitts.
 

 
The first carving was done with the sanding sleeve to round off the square corners and planes left by the band saw, and to get the basic side to side shape.
 

 
Now the arms are defined, which will fair into the basic shape of the lower body.  The mane is rounded, which will frame the shape of the face.
 

 
The tail was pencilled in on both sides and defined, which then set the depth of the lower body.  The crown was detailed, which adjusts the top of the mane.  The mane was given its initial texture, which then required reducing the height of the shoulder, etc. etc.  This is how I carve, with each step or detail that is worked on leading to a further defining of the adjacent detail. 
 

 
So here is the current look of the first figurehead.  The head is still too broad, but that is OK, as it gives me the depth of material that can be carved away for the final detailing of the face.
 


  
 
Next time, the final detailing.
 
Be well
 
Dan

Hi all –
 
Here is the latest installment of the build log.  No pirate talk, just building - - -
 
Some work has been done on the hulls since the last build log, but not enough to show. Instead, the next of the independent subassemblies was completed.  These are the anchors.
 
Queen Anne’s Revenge carried four anchors of different sizes, all of which have been discovered.  They range from the largest, with a shank length of 13 foot 7 inch and a weight of 3,141 pounds to the smallest at only 8 feet and 642 pounds.  The others had shank lengths of 13 foot and 11 foot 4 inches. Here is the archeological drawing of one of them.
 
Image 1
 
Budriot has drawings of several sizes of anchor for Le Mercure, but the drawings are all identical other than size, and none quite fit the ones discovered.  I took his drawing and sized it up or down in Photoshop to make drawings that fit the sizes needed.
 
Image 2
 
An anchor is a fairly simple construct, with only a few parts:  the shank with its arms and the flukes pinned to the arms; the wooden crosspiece called the stock, and a metal ring through the shank above the crosspiece.  Here they all are for a pair of 11 foot anchors.
 
Image 3
 
You can see that they are in various stages of completion.  The wood used here is pear, throughout.  I did not cast the shank/arms because there were 4 pair of different sizes rather than 8 of the same size.  It would have taken longer to make 4 masters and then cast them.
 
The first piece to be shaped is the shank.  A piece of pear was cut on the Preac saw to a square cross section of the appropriate size and then cut to length.  The drawings show that it had a square head where it went through the crosspiece, then became round below the head, which widened and returned to square with rounded corners where it mated with the arm for the flukes at the throat.  A round tenon at the foot was secured through a hole in the arm piece.
I first milled the tenons on either end.  This is easily done while the wood is still square.  Here you can see the setup on the Preac.  The miter guage is used to keep the wood square to the blade and the fence is used as a depth stop. 
 
Image 4
 
The height of the blade is set by using an adjustable fitting that sits under the hinged blade holder.  It is a screw in a wider sleeve with a red plastic cap on the end of the screw.  The hole in the bottom of the sleeve conveniently fits around one of the bolt heads on the blade unit.  It is a cumbersome and fiddly arrangement, but I am used to it after 20 years.
 
Image 5
 
To cut the tenon I set the blade to the desired height, testing by making passes on a piece of scrap basswood.  I first cut the shoulders of the tenon, then nibbled away the rest of the wood using a wide blade.  The final pass is always sideways across the top of the blade to smooth the side of the tenon.
 
Image 6
 
The final result is a perfectly centered and square tenon on each end of the shank blank.  The tenon that will go through the fluke arm piece is narrower than the head tenon and will later be rounded by trimming the corners then twisting it through progressively smaller holes in a drill plate.
 
Image 6a
 
With the head tenon cut the square hole in the wooden crosspiece has to be cut to match.  This is possible because the stock is built up from two pieces.  Again using the Preac the blade was adjusted till the cut was exactly half the depth of the tenon.  I tested this by cutting grooves in two pieces of scrap that when mated allowed the tenon to fit smoothly but not too tightly.  You can see this in the upper part of the photo.  Below it is the first side of the stock with the tenon fit into the channel that was milled out.
 
Image 7
 
And here you can see how the two stock pieces fit together around the tenon.
 
Image 8
 
With the channels cut the side of one of the stock pieces is colored with black ink and the pieces are glued together and clamped using one of the shank pieces to locate and match the pieces.
 
Image 9
 
After the glued dried the drawing of the stock was cut from a printout of the sized drawing.  I used Scotch Spray Mount to temporarily attach it to the stock blank.  With the blank still having a square face the holes were drilled for the treenails and bolts that were used to hold the two halves of the stock together. (You may notice that this piece does not have a square hole for the shank.  I forgot to take a photo during construction, so this is a scrap piece made up later for the log).
 
Image 10
 
The stock was cut close to its profile on the band saw and then smoothed using a sanding drum in the drill press since I do not have a spindle sander.
 
Image 11
 
The rest of the construction is pretty straightforward.  Going back to the photo of the pieces, you can see that the sides of the stock were tapered as shown on the drawings and the treenails inserted and sanded smooth.  The shank was fitted to the arm piece and both were smoothed to shape and to fit together at the throat.  This was done with the tenon just friction fit in the arm piece. 
 
image 3 repeat
 
Once the throat joint was smooth the arm was removed and a step was cut into it for the heel of the fluke.  The flukes were cut from 0.025” thick brass sheet, ground to final shape, and then peened to a shallow dish form.  They were fitted to the arms and pinned through using iron wire which was clipped short and peened on both ends to rivet the fluke to the arm.
 
Image 12
 
The stock was given its four iron strapping bands and a coat of stain.  The final wood selected for the stock was beech, which looks remarkably like oak in this scale.  The shank was painted matte black and was fitted to the stock.  The six bolts at the center of the stock were made from iron wire cut a little proud of the surface and filed smooth but not flat.  The cut ends will age over time to a generic metallic look that will contrast with the look of the treenails.  The ring is made from brass rod that was wound round a dowel, clipped and flattened, then chemically blackened.  Here is the completed 13 foot pair.
 
Image 13
 
Until I built these anchors I had little idea how large they really were.  Compared to my scale figure the 13 ½ foot anchor is massive, and even the 8 foot one would have been a handful.  The entire set of four anchors weighed over 8,000 pounds.
 
Image 14
Image 15
 
I’m off to the NRG conference next week, so it may be a bit until my next posting.  Until then, let me know if you have any questions about my methods and/or my madness . . .
 
Dan

Hi again -
 
Good to see and talk to some of you at the NRG conference.  Had a good time and the speakers on Saturday were great.
 
Not much to report.  A good deal of work went into doing the second boat, but it replicates the building of the first one, so it was not the subject of a build log entry.  Here are the two, side by side.  The second was made of cherry, so it is much darker than the first.  Since they will be on separate models that will not be displayed together, they do not have to be identical.  I actually prefer the first.  The lighter color of the wood lets the caulking and fastening details stand out a bit more.  But the darker one is closer to the color of old, unpainted boats that I have seen. 
 



 
I won't get to work on the hulls for another week, so I am starting on the figureheads.
 
The Advice Prize draught does not have a figurehead of any kind.  Although the actual ship probably did, the Admiralty was not interested in decorations.  They just took off the hull lines so that later English ships could benefit from any foreign design advances.  Budriot has a lion for Le Mercure, shown here.
 


 
This is going to be the basis of my figureheads, but a number of others are being studied.  Here are three from models in the NMM collection.
 



 
All of these are too florid and intricate, I believe, for what would have been a pretty basic ship.  I am also studying the lion that was carved for the Gotheborg replica ship. 
 

 
Finally, I am using a cast lion fitting from a ship model company that I used to own.  It is the wrong size so I can't simply cast two duplicates, but it should be a good carving aid since I can turn it in my hand to get any view that I want.
 

 
Construction began with three pieces of hard pear wood glued together.  All are 3/8" thick, with the outer ones much longer than the middle one, forming a channel that is the width of the stem.  A properly sized copy of the Budriot lion was printed out and glued to one side.  The basic outline was then cut on a band saw.
 

 
The saw marks gave me horizontal landmark for the eyes, nose and mouth and they were pencilled in.  The lower body is narrower than the mane, so some of the wood was band sawn off.  The crown was similarly defined in a rough way.  A false stem of basswood was made which has a tight friction fit between the lion's legs.  It will act as a handle and will support the fragile feet and legs as the carving progresses.
 

 
Next time the carving begins.
 
Be well
 
Dan
 

Hi again -
 
Good to see and talk to some of you at the NRG conference.  Had a good time and the speakers on Saturday were great.
 
Not much to report.  A good deal of work went into doing the second boat, but it replicates the building of the first one, so it was not the subject of a build log entry.  Here are the two, side by side.  The second was made of cherry, so it is much darker than the first.  Since they will be on separate models that will not be displayed together, they do not have to be identical.  I actually prefer the first.  The lighter color of the wood lets the caulking and fastening details stand out a bit more.  But the darker one is closer to the color of old, unpainted boats that I have seen. 
 



 
I won't get to work on the hulls for another week, so I am starting on the figureheads.
 
The Advice Prize draught does not have a figurehead of any kind.  Although the actual ship probably did, the Admiralty was not interested in decorations.  They just took off the hull lines so that later English ships could benefit from any foreign design advances.  Budriot has a lion for Le Mercure, shown here.
 


 
This is going to be the basis of my figureheads, but a number of others are being studied.  Here are three from models in the NMM collection.
 



 
All of these are too florid and intricate, I believe, for what would have been a pretty basic ship.  I am also studying the lion that was carved for the Gotheborg replica ship. 
 

 
Finally, I am using a cast lion fitting from a ship model company that I used to own.  It is the wrong size so I can't simply cast two duplicates, but it should be a good carving aid since I can turn it in my hand to get any view that I want.
 

 
Construction began with three pieces of hard pear wood glued together.  All are 3/8" thick, with the outer ones much longer than the middle one, forming a channel that is the width of the stem.  A properly sized copy of the Budriot lion was printed out and glued to one side.  The basic outline was then cut on a band saw.
 

 
The saw marks gave me horizontal landmark for the eyes, nose and mouth and they were pencilled in.  The lower body is narrower than the mane, so some of the wood was band sawn off.  The crown was similarly defined in a rough way.  A false stem of basswood was made which has a tight friction fit between the lion's legs.  It will act as a handle and will support the fragile feet and legs as the carving progresses.
 

 
Next time the carving begins.
 
Be well
 
Dan
 

Hi all –
 
Thanks for your comments and suggestions.  I plan to incorporate them into the second iteration of the boat which will be built when the hardwood strips arrive from the supplier.
 
When we left the shipyard the hull of the boat had been fully planked with the shutter planks fitted on both sides.  The hull had been marked out in pencil for the rib locations in preparation for the nails which would have fastened the planks to the ribs.  Here you can see the lines for all of the ribs that sit square to the keel as well as for the two cant ribs, drawn on the port side of the hull.
 

 
For the fasteners I had to find a way to make them look right without devoting an excessive amount of time to the task.  Since there are 11 planks on each side, 25 rib or transom/stem lines that the planks cross, and two fasteners per crossing, the math says that there have to be 1100 fasteners for the exterior of each boat.  Add in some more for the interior work and you can see the magnitude of the problem. 
 
The original boat probably had the planks nailed to the ribs, with the ends peened over to clinch them.  I experimented with a plank/rib mockup and could never get the holes in the planks to come through the ribs in the proper places.  Instead, I decided to drill the holes through only the planks and worry about indicating the nails on the inside of the ribs later.
 
I first drilled all the holes.  Here you can see how there are two in each plank in an offset pattern.  I used a 0.012” drill, which scales up to 1/2”, which would be about right.
 

 
At first I tried inserting pieces of annealed iron wire into the holes, clipping them short, painting them with glue, then filing the tops flush with the face of the planks.  This was incredibly time consuming and fiddly.  I then decided to try the technique of leaving the holes empty, sanding the planks to fill the holes with sawdust, then painting on a finish to hold in the sawdust.  This looked good and I don’t believe that anyone can tell the difference with this short cut.
 
  *   *   *
Aarrrgh, scalawag that ye are!  Ye’ll not be taking any modern short cuts with me boats.  I be Dread Pirate Peter, and I’ll have yer guts fer garters if ye dinna do a manly and proper piece of work. 
 

 
No, no, it will be OK.  Really it will.  Here, this is what the nail holes look like after filling and staining.  I have had several critical people, including my wife, compare them to the ones with the iron nails in them and no one could tell the difference.  In fact, the slightly spread discoloration of the wood grain closely mimics the way old wood stains when a nail rusts into it.
 

 
*   *   *
Tis all very well and comely, but rest ye not on yer laurels, lest ye rest on yer ****.  I be watching ye. . .
 
*   *   *
Soooo, with that out of the way, I turned to fitting out the interior.  First the missing ribs were bent and fitted into the interior.  These were the two cant ribs at the bow and the aftmost rib at Station 21 that had been left off to make planking easier. 
 
The first interior piece to be installed was the tapered central plank of the flooring.  It strengthens the keel and is the location for the lifting rings and mast step.
 

 
To each side the rest of the floor planks were installed.  They are not tapered but fit against the tapered center plank due to the curvature of the hull.  They are held in place while the glue dries by inexpensive hair clips from the cosmetics section of the drug store.  They initially look like the one at the lower left, but are easily bent by hand to the shape in the lower right.  This now allows them to reach around the hull to apply pressure at the tips.
 

 
Next to be installed are the sheets, the planked platforms at the bow and stern.  They will appear in later photos, but I did not take pictures as they were being built.  Construction is straightforward.  Planks were glued to a pair of battens underneath to make a flat sheet larger than needed.  A paper pattern is cut to fit the space and the wood sheet is cut to that shape.  The edges are bevelled to match the curve of the hull and it is glued in place to the ribs.
 
Now the thwart stringers are installed.  I first bent one piece of  stripwood to shape and glued it in on the starboard side at the height indicated on the plans.  The matching strip was bent and trimmed for the port side and held in place temporarily while I balanced pieces of stripwood across from side to side and set perpendicular to the keel.  These are known in woodworking as ‘winding sticks’ although I don’t know why.  Looking across their tops you can easily see any variation from side to side and any tipping compared to the centerline and the edge of the sheets.  Once I was satisfied with the levels, the port stringer was glued in place. 
 

 
The plans show square section wood pieces running side to side just under the thwart stringers near the bow and stern.  They have a short section in the center that has a round cross section.  I do not know what they were for, but perhaps the rounded section would have a halyard led around it when the sail was raised, sort of a non-turning sheave.  Whatever they are they were shaped, fitted and glued in.
 
The lifting rings and mast step were located and attached to the central floor plank.  I also drilled the nail holes for the floors and sheets as I did for the hull planks.  My one regret is that I did not do this for the ribs at this point when they were exposed.  It turned out to be too crowded later – a detail that will be corrected on the next boats.
 
The thwarts were cut from 1mm thick stock, with the middle one being wider in the center and having added knees.  It holds and supports the metalwork that acts as the mast partner.  This fitting is made from brass strip which is chemically blackened, then glued and pinned with wire nails to the edge of the thwart.  A decorative beading was scribed into the edges of the thwarts, then they were installed on top of the stringers with spacers between them.
 

 
Unfortunately, once the thwarts were installed it was clear that they were sitting too high in the boat.  No rowers could have sat on them and had their feet reach the floor for leverage.  Here the flexibility of the Lineco glue came to my rescue.  With the tip of a #10 blade I was able to pry up the thwarts from the stringers and then remove the stringers without any damage to the hull or ribs.
 

 
The stringers were lowered 6 scale inches and reinstalled, followed by the thwarts, which looked much better after the adjustment.  I went back to the plans and determined that the problem was there and not in my measuring or building.  Just one of those problems that had to be built to be discovered.
 

 
Fitting out the rest of the interior is self-explanatory.  Working up from the thwarts the stern seats were planked up over battens.  They sit on top of the thwart stringers and the aftmost thwart.  The foremost thwart has a pair of knees set on top.
 
Square section stringers were fitted and glued to the inner sides of the sheer strake so their tops matched, and were strengthened at the bow by a breasthook and at the stern by two transom knees.  Thole blocks were set on top of the sheer strakes and stringers and will be drilled for the thole pins to be added later.  The locations of several of these had to be adjusted from the plans, which did not have them at a consistent distance from the associated thwart.
 

 
The only difficult woodworking came at the bow where the curved and carved fairleads on either side of the stem were joined with a double-dovetailed cross-support.
 


 
With the boat all but complete the rudder was fashioned to match the plans.  Two planks were fitted and tapered, then cut to the proper profile.  The pintle straps were made from brass strip, pinned through with iron wire and chemically blackened.  The tiller is brass bar that was tapered and blackened, with an epoxy bulb at its tip.
 

 
Top and bottom gudgeons were fashioned from blackened brass strip.  The upper one simply slipped into a hole drilled into the aft face of the sternpost, while the lower one had to be bent in several directions before being pinned against the sides of the sternpost.  It only remained for the thole pins to be installed and the boat was complete.
 

 
*    *    *
So ye think ye be quite clever, do ye? Quite the boat builder?  I be the judge of that.  I also bring me great-great-great grandson Peter who says he has worked with ye before.  He be a great galoot of a puppy, but he be useful to judge yer work.  He set up this temporary mast and I grant ye that said boat be mightily even side to side.
 

 
He sits well in the stern and nothing pulls my eye to say that he could not reach and steer the tiller, should he take it into his head to do some work, the lazy lout that he be.
 

 
It shivers me innards to grudge ye my approval, but i’ faith I canna find much to dislike.  But be warned that I will no be put off with such minor success.  Ye must do as well or better, or feel me wrath fall upon ye like to the Trump of Doom.
 


 
Well, there you have it.  The second boat will be made from hardwoods now that most of the construction problems have been identified, although I am sure that new ones will appear and demand solutions.  Those may be harder to find while looking over my shoulder all the time; Dread Pirate Peter seems to have very high standards, and a very short temper.
 
Till then, be well.
 
Dan

Hello to all -
 
Those of you who followed my building of the Swan 42 racing yacht may experience some temporal whiplash as the Wayback Machine moves the shipyard some 300 years into the past.  Even though the scale will be about the same, the materials, methods, and style will have little or nothing in common with the last project.   We leave the clean lines and millimeter accuracy of a rich man's toy for the rough outlines and incomplete draughts of a pre-Colonial pirate ship.
 
Queen Anne's Revenge was the flagship of the notorious pirate Edward Thatch (incorrectly called Teach), known as Blackbeard.  In barely more than a year and a half, from the summer of 1717 to November 22, 1818, he and two other pirate leaders put together a large fleet that took numerous merchant ships, looting them and holding any worthwhile captives for ransom while taking any willing sailors into his piratical crew.  He was hardly the most notorious or bloodthirsty pirate, but he captured the popular imagination with his large fierce black beard and his habit of placing lit rope matches for his weapons into his hair during a battle.
 

 
The origins of the ship herself are not definitively known.  It is thought that she was built in about 1710 as a small frigate of about 300 tons known as La Concorde, with her first cruise as a French privateer during Queen Anne's War in 1711.  When the war ended in 1713 with the Treaty of Utrecht her owners sent her into the slave trade.  She made two profitable cruises between 1713 and 1717, taking slaves from West Africa to the French colonies in the Carribean and capturing prizes on the return leg back to France.  On November 28, 1717, during her third slaving cruise, she fell afoul of Blackbeard with two armed sloops.  Her crew was sick and many of the cannon had been removed to make more room for slaves so she was captured easily.  Below is a drawing of a similar light frigate from the early 1700s.
 

 
After renaming her Queen Anne's Revenge and adding significantly more cannon, she became Blackbeard's flagship and was used to capture numerous ships and even to blockade the port of Charleston for a week.  Turning north from there  in company with several smaller pirate ships on June 10, 1718 they tried to enter a shallow anchorage known as Topsail Inlet (or Old Topsail Inlet), now called Beaufort Inlet in North Carolina.  Although several other ships entered safely, the larger Queen Anne's Revenge grounded on the sand bar at the entrance, as did another ship that came to her aid.  After removing the valuables she was abandoned and left to the cruel mercies of the sea.  Blackbeard himself lasted barely another six months until his death in November of 1718 during a battle with the Royal Navy. 
 
The ship was rediscovered in 1996 and is now being excavated underwater in project managed by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Affairs and the North Carolina Maritime Museum, part of East Carolina University.  Numerous artifacts, including several cannon, coins, navigational equipment, and hundreds of everyday items have been recovered and are being conserved.  You can see photographs of the artifacts, view interactive maps of the ship's history and the wreck site, and read the archaeologists' and researchers' detailed reports if you go to the Queen Anne's Revenge website at http://www.qaronline.org/Home.aspx   It is a little gem of a site and well worth looking into.
 
I have been asked to build two display models of the QAR for the Maritime Museum.  They will be at the large scale of 1:36, yielding a model of some 48" LOA from the tip of the jib boom to the ensign staff at the stern.  It will rise some 44" from the keel to the main truck with a main yard of some 22" with stunsail booms rigged but not extended.   The hull is to be solid below the gun deck but open and fully detailed above.   She is to have a full suit of sails with all sail handling lines, although several will be furled so the deck can be more easily viewed.
 
There are no plans or illustrations of the ship, so her apearance is a bit conjectural.  As a basis for the model I have been given two sets of plans.  The first is a simple, one-page rendering of the lines and profile of a similar small French frigate which was captured by HMS Advice and which is known therefore as Advice Prize.
 

 
I am also working from a set of drawings done by Jean Budriot of yet another light French frigate of the period known as Le Mercure.   He has written a monograph that is illustrated with numerous detailed drawings of all of the bits and pieces of the ship including several profiles, cross-sections and longitudinal sections, and sail and rigging plans.  However, as is his custom, there is no station lines plan from which to derive the hull shape.
 

 
These two sets of plans have to be reconciled, not only with each other, but with the known historic facts.  For example, it was reported in contemporary accounts and court-martial testimony that the Queen Anne's Revenge had 20 large cannon on board when she went down.  Le Mercure is pierced for 10 guns on each side, but the Advice Prize has only 9.  The Mercure drawings have the channels for the fore and main shrouds set below the gunports, while the Advice Prize has them above.  Le Mercure is shown with a square, open beakhead bulkhead, while the plans for the Advice Prize shows a closed in forecastle.  At the stern Le Mercure has a large quarter gallery, rather than the small quarter badge of the Advice Prize.  But that quarter badge is set very high, with an indication that the Advice Prize had a poop deck above the quarterdeck.  These and many other details, large and small, will have to be reconciled as construction continues.
 
To begin with, a tenth gunport was added to the Advice Prize and their spacing was adjusted accordingly.  The quarter badge was lowered and it is this resulting profile that will be used to build the models.
 

 
On this plan you can see a horizontal red line.  This is my line of demarcation between the solid hull below and the open gundeck above.  It is set at the level of the gundeck for the forward four ports.  A tapered piece will be added at the rear half of the ship to account for the sheer rise of the gundeck towards the stern.  But this line is also used as my registration plane for setting up the templates for the hull shape at the various stations shown on the plans. 
 
As I was working out the hull construction the first of what will surely be many problems arose.  In the scale that is required, the maximum breadth of the model works out to just over 9 inches and the station lines work out to, mostly, 3 inches separation.  To work from the centerline I would need wood of at least 4.5 inches wide and 3 inches thick.  However, wood of that size is not easily or inexpensively acquired.  Instead, I found basswood planks 4 inches wide and up to 2 inches thick.  I decided therefore to piece together the hull. 
 
As you can see in the wood blocking plan below, I started with a vertical central piece 3/8" thick to match the width of the keel.  This was sandwiched on each side by a vertical lift 1/2 inch thick, then by the side pieces whch would be cut to the profiles of the appropriate station lines from the plans.
 

 
As usual with vertical station line lifts, they were cut to the profile of the appropriate station line.  For each three inch station segment a two inch lift and a one inch lift were used.  I also decided that the hull should be partially hollow, not only to reduce weight, but to give the stresses somewhere to go other than outward when the wood swelled with changing humidity.  My solution was to take each lift and cut out the center, leaving a crescent of wood about 1 inch thick.  Construction began with the gunport deck piece cut to shape and the three vertical central pieces glued to it using carpenters' squares for alignment.  Then the station line lift crescents were glued in place and secured with dowels.  Here you can see the first three segments glued and pinned, with the fourth made ready for installation.
 


 
This was continued from the center out to the bow and stern, with the final lifts left solid and clamped to the growing hull block.  The completed hull block was left to dry for a week before the bamboo dowels were trimmed off.
 


 
Now the carving and shaping had to begin to reduce the stepped shape of the lifts.  The model is so large that the usual woodworking tools were inadequate in any reasonable time frame.  I therefore purchased an angle grinder and set it up with coarse 50 grit sanding discs.  This was followed by a random orbit sander, also with coarse grit paper.
 

 
As you can imagine, this makes a hellish racket and leaves a hellish mess,  Eye, ear and respiration protection are a must, and if you are not going to do all of it outside, you need three other things - an empty room in the basement; a big shop vacuum; and most importantly, an understanding wife.  I am glad to say that I have the first two and am blessed with the third.
 

 
In this photo you can see how far the shaping has progressed.  From here there still has to be a lot of hand work that is checked and rechecked as usual with station line templates.  The next segment will take us through that process.
 
Be well
 
Dan
 

Hi all –
 
Here is the latest installment of the build log.  No pirate talk, just building - - -
 
Some work has been done on the hulls since the last build log, but not enough to show. Instead, the next of the independent subassemblies was completed.  These are the anchors.
 
Queen Anne’s Revenge carried four anchors of different sizes, all of which have been discovered.  They range from the largest, with a shank length of 13 foot 7 inch and a weight of 3,141 pounds to the smallest at only 8 feet and 642 pounds.  The others had shank lengths of 13 foot and 11 foot 4 inches. Here is the archeological drawing of one of them.
 
Image 1
 
Budriot has drawings of several sizes of anchor for Le Mercure, but the drawings are all identical other than size, and none quite fit the ones discovered.  I took his drawing and sized it up or down in Photoshop to make drawings that fit the sizes needed.
 
Image 2
 
An anchor is a fairly simple construct, with only a few parts:  the shank with its arms and the flukes pinned to the arms; the wooden crosspiece called the stock, and a metal ring through the shank above the crosspiece.  Here they all are for a pair of 11 foot anchors.
 
Image 3
 
You can see that they are in various stages of completion.  The wood used here is pear, throughout.  I did not cast the shank/arms because there were 4 pair of different sizes rather than 8 of the same size.  It would have taken longer to make 4 masters and then cast them.
 
The first piece to be shaped is the shank.  A piece of pear was cut on the Preac saw to a square cross section of the appropriate size and then cut to length.  The drawings show that it had a square head where it went through the crosspiece, then became round below the head, which widened and returned to square with rounded corners where it mated with the arm for the flukes at the throat.  A round tenon at the foot was secured through a hole in the arm piece.
I first milled the tenons on either end.  This is easily done while the wood is still square.  Here you can see the setup on the Preac.  The miter guage is used to keep the wood square to the blade and the fence is used as a depth stop. 
 
Image 4
 
The height of the blade is set by using an adjustable fitting that sits under the hinged blade holder.  It is a screw in a wider sleeve with a red plastic cap on the end of the screw.  The hole in the bottom of the sleeve conveniently fits around one of the bolt heads on the blade unit.  It is a cumbersome and fiddly arrangement, but I am used to it after 20 years.
 
Image 5
 
To cut the tenon I set the blade to the desired height, testing by making passes on a piece of scrap basswood.  I first cut the shoulders of the tenon, then nibbled away the rest of the wood using a wide blade.  The final pass is always sideways across the top of the blade to smooth the side of the tenon.
 
Image 6
 
The final result is a perfectly centered and square tenon on each end of the shank blank.  The tenon that will go through the fluke arm piece is narrower than the head tenon and will later be rounded by trimming the corners then twisting it through progressively smaller holes in a drill plate.
 
Image 6a
 
With the head tenon cut the square hole in the wooden crosspiece has to be cut to match.  This is possible because the stock is built up from two pieces.  Again using the Preac the blade was adjusted till the cut was exactly half the depth of the tenon.  I tested this by cutting grooves in two pieces of scrap that when mated allowed the tenon to fit smoothly but not too tightly.  You can see this in the upper part of the photo.  Below it is the first side of the stock with the tenon fit into the channel that was milled out.
 
Image 7
 
And here you can see how the two stock pieces fit together around the tenon.
 
Image 8
 
With the channels cut the side of one of the stock pieces is colored with black ink and the pieces are glued together and clamped using one of the shank pieces to locate and match the pieces.
 
Image 9
 
After the glued dried the drawing of the stock was cut from a printout of the sized drawing.  I used Scotch Spray Mount to temporarily attach it to the stock blank.  With the blank still having a square face the holes were drilled for the treenails and bolts that were used to hold the two halves of the stock together. (You may notice that this piece does not have a square hole for the shank.  I forgot to take a photo during construction, so this is a scrap piece made up later for the log).
 
Image 10
 
The stock was cut close to its profile on the band saw and then smoothed using a sanding drum in the drill press since I do not have a spindle sander.
 
Image 11
 
The rest of the construction is pretty straightforward.  Going back to the photo of the pieces, you can see that the sides of the stock were tapered as shown on the drawings and the treenails inserted and sanded smooth.  The shank was fitted to the arm piece and both were smoothed to shape and to fit together at the throat.  This was done with the tenon just friction fit in the arm piece. 
 
image 3 repeat
 
Once the throat joint was smooth the arm was removed and a step was cut into it for the heel of the fluke.  The flukes were cut from 0.025” thick brass sheet, ground to final shape, and then peened to a shallow dish form.  They were fitted to the arms and pinned through using iron wire which was clipped short and peened on both ends to rivet the fluke to the arm.
 
Image 12
 
The stock was given its four iron strapping bands and a coat of stain.  The final wood selected for the stock was beech, which looks remarkably like oak in this scale.  The shank was painted matte black and was fitted to the stock.  The six bolts at the center of the stock were made from iron wire cut a little proud of the surface and filed smooth but not flat.  The cut ends will age over time to a generic metallic look that will contrast with the look of the treenails.  The ring is made from brass rod that was wound round a dowel, clipped and flattened, then chemically blackened.  Here is the completed 13 foot pair.
 
Image 13
 
Until I built these anchors I had little idea how large they really were.  Compared to my scale figure the 13 ½ foot anchor is massive, and even the 8 foot one would have been a handful.  The entire set of four anchors weighed over 8,000 pounds.
 
Image 14
Image 15
 
I’m off to the NRG conference next week, so it may be a bit until my next posting.  Until then, let me know if you have any questions about my methods and/or my madness . . .
 
Dan

Nice save with the new tool.  When I saw the first photo I could not imagine how you were going to get the clay removed from the inside walls of the bottle.  There are some intricate tools developed by Ralph Preston for bottling models that you can read in Ship Modelers' Shop Notes II from the Nautical Research Guild.  The articles may give you some ideas.  Ralph is one of the top ship-in-a-bottle modelers in the US.
 
Dan

Mij -
 
That's what we pay for rubber cement that we use for the same purpose.  Just another example of how we are two countries divided by a common language.
 
Dan

Hi all –
 
Here is the latest installment of the build log.  No pirate talk, just building - - -
 
Some work has been done on the hulls since the last build log, but not enough to show. Instead, the next of the independent subassemblies was completed.  These are the anchors.
 
Queen Anne’s Revenge carried four anchors of different sizes, all of which have been discovered.  They range from the largest, with a shank length of 13 foot 7 inch and a weight of 3,141 pounds to the smallest at only 8 feet and 642 pounds.  The others had shank lengths of 13 foot and 11 foot 4 inches. Here is the archeological drawing of one of them.
 
Image 1
 
Budriot has drawings of several sizes of anchor for Le Mercure, but the drawings are all identical other than size, and none quite fit the ones discovered.  I took his drawing and sized it up or down in Photoshop to make drawings that fit the sizes needed.
 
Image 2
 
An anchor is a fairly simple construct, with only a few parts:  the shank with its arms and the flukes pinned to the arms; the wooden crosspiece called the stock, and a metal ring through the shank above the crosspiece.  Here they all are for a pair of 11 foot anchors.
 
Image 3
 
You can see that they are in various stages of completion.  The wood used here is pear, throughout.  I did not cast the shank/arms because there were 4 pair of different sizes rather than 8 of the same size.  It would have taken longer to make 4 masters and then cast them.
 
The first piece to be shaped is the shank.  A piece of pear was cut on the Preac saw to a square cross section of the appropriate size and then cut to length.  The drawings show that it had a square head where it went through the crosspiece, then became round below the head, which widened and returned to square with rounded corners where it mated with the arm for the flukes at the throat.  A round tenon at the foot was secured through a hole in the arm piece.
I first milled the tenons on either end.  This is easily done while the wood is still square.  Here you can see the setup on the Preac.  The miter guage is used to keep the wood square to the blade and the fence is used as a depth stop. 
 
Image 4
 
The height of the blade is set by using an adjustable fitting that sits under the hinged blade holder.  It is a screw in a wider sleeve with a red plastic cap on the end of the screw.  The hole in the bottom of the sleeve conveniently fits around one of the bolt heads on the blade unit.  It is a cumbersome and fiddly arrangement, but I am used to it after 20 years.
 
Image 5
 
To cut the tenon I set the blade to the desired height, testing by making passes on a piece of scrap basswood.  I first cut the shoulders of the tenon, then nibbled away the rest of the wood using a wide blade.  The final pass is always sideways across the top of the blade to smooth the side of the tenon.
 
Image 6
 
The final result is a perfectly centered and square tenon on each end of the shank blank.  The tenon that will go through the fluke arm piece is narrower than the head tenon and will later be rounded by trimming the corners then twisting it through progressively smaller holes in a drill plate.
 
Image 6a
 
With the head tenon cut the square hole in the wooden crosspiece has to be cut to match.  This is possible because the stock is built up from two pieces.  Again using the Preac the blade was adjusted till the cut was exactly half the depth of the tenon.  I tested this by cutting grooves in two pieces of scrap that when mated allowed the tenon to fit smoothly but not too tightly.  You can see this in the upper part of the photo.  Below it is the first side of the stock with the tenon fit into the channel that was milled out.
 
Image 7
 
And here you can see how the two stock pieces fit together around the tenon.
 
Image 8
 
With the channels cut the side of one of the stock pieces is colored with black ink and the pieces are glued together and clamped using one of the shank pieces to locate and match the pieces.
 
Image 9
 
After the glued dried the drawing of the stock was cut from a printout of the sized drawing.  I used Scotch Spray Mount to temporarily attach it to the stock blank.  With the blank still having a square face the holes were drilled for the treenails and bolts that were used to hold the two halves of the stock together. (You may notice that this piece does not have a square hole for the shank.  I forgot to take a photo during construction, so this is a scrap piece made up later for the log).
 
Image 10
 
The stock was cut close to its profile on the band saw and then smoothed using a sanding drum in the drill press since I do not have a spindle sander.
 
Image 11
 
The rest of the construction is pretty straightforward.  Going back to the photo of the pieces, you can see that the sides of the stock were tapered as shown on the drawings and the treenails inserted and sanded smooth.  The shank was fitted to the arm piece and both were smoothed to shape and to fit together at the throat.  This was done with the tenon just friction fit in the arm piece. 
 
image 3 repeat
 
Once the throat joint was smooth the arm was removed and a step was cut into it for the heel of the fluke.  The flukes were cut from 0.025” thick brass sheet, ground to final shape, and then peened to a shallow dish form.  They were fitted to the arms and pinned through using iron wire which was clipped short and peened on both ends to rivet the fluke to the arm.
 
Image 12
 
The stock was given its four iron strapping bands and a coat of stain.  The final wood selected for the stock was beech, which looks remarkably like oak in this scale.  The shank was painted matte black and was fitted to the stock.  The six bolts at the center of the stock were made from iron wire cut a little proud of the surface and filed smooth but not flat.  The cut ends will age over time to a generic metallic look that will contrast with the look of the treenails.  The ring is made from brass rod that was wound round a dowel, clipped and flattened, then chemically blackened.  Here is the completed 13 foot pair.
 
Image 13
 
Until I built these anchors I had little idea how large they really were.  Compared to my scale figure the 13 ½ foot anchor is massive, and even the 8 foot one would have been a handful.  The entire set of four anchors weighed over 8,000 pounds.
 
Image 14
Image 15
 
I’m off to the NRG conference next week, so it may be a bit until my next posting.  Until then, let me know if you have any questions about my methods and/or my madness . . .
 
Dan

Hello to all -
 
Those of you who followed my building of the Swan 42 racing yacht may experience some temporal whiplash as the Wayback Machine moves the shipyard some 300 years into the past.  Even though the scale will be about the same, the materials, methods, and style will have little or nothing in common with the last project.   We leave the clean lines and millimeter accuracy of a rich man's toy for the rough outlines and incomplete draughts of a pre-Colonial pirate ship.
 
Queen Anne's Revenge was the flagship of the notorious pirate Edward Thatch (incorrectly called Teach), known as Blackbeard.  In barely more than a year and a half, from the summer of 1717 to November 22, 1818, he and two other pirate leaders put together a large fleet that took numerous merchant ships, looting them and holding any worthwhile captives for ransom while taking any willing sailors into his piratical crew.  He was hardly the most notorious or bloodthirsty pirate, but he captured the popular imagination with his large fierce black beard and his habit of placing lit rope matches for his weapons into his hair during a battle.
 

 
The origins of the ship herself are not definitively known.  It is thought that she was built in about 1710 as a small frigate of about 300 tons known as La Concorde, with her first cruise as a French privateer during Queen Anne's War in 1711.  When the war ended in 1713 with the Treaty of Utrecht her owners sent her into the slave trade.  She made two profitable cruises between 1713 and 1717, taking slaves from West Africa to the French colonies in the Carribean and capturing prizes on the return leg back to France.  On November 28, 1717, during her third slaving cruise, she fell afoul of Blackbeard with two armed sloops.  Her crew was sick and many of the cannon had been removed to make more room for slaves so she was captured easily.  Below is a drawing of a similar light frigate from the early 1700s.
 

 
After renaming her Queen Anne's Revenge and adding significantly more cannon, she became Blackbeard's flagship and was used to capture numerous ships and even to blockade the port of Charleston for a week.  Turning north from there  in company with several smaller pirate ships on June 10, 1718 they tried to enter a shallow anchorage known as Topsail Inlet (or Old Topsail Inlet), now called Beaufort Inlet in North Carolina.  Although several other ships entered safely, the larger Queen Anne's Revenge grounded on the sand bar at the entrance, as did another ship that came to her aid.  After removing the valuables she was abandoned and left to the cruel mercies of the sea.  Blackbeard himself lasted barely another six months until his death in November of 1718 during a battle with the Royal Navy. 
 
The ship was rediscovered in 1996 and is now being excavated underwater in project managed by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Affairs and the North Carolina Maritime Museum, part of East Carolina University.  Numerous artifacts, including several cannon, coins, navigational equipment, and hundreds of everyday items have been recovered and are being conserved.  You can see photographs of the artifacts, view interactive maps of the ship's history and the wreck site, and read the archaeologists' and researchers' detailed reports if you go to the Queen Anne's Revenge website at http://www.qaronline.org/Home.aspx   It is a little gem of a site and well worth looking into.
 
I have been asked to build two display models of the QAR for the Maritime Museum.  They will be at the large scale of 1:36, yielding a model of some 48" LOA from the tip of the jib boom to the ensign staff at the stern.  It will rise some 44" from the keel to the main truck with a main yard of some 22" with stunsail booms rigged but not extended.   The hull is to be solid below the gun deck but open and fully detailed above.   She is to have a full suit of sails with all sail handling lines, although several will be furled so the deck can be more easily viewed.
 
There are no plans or illustrations of the ship, so her apearance is a bit conjectural.  As a basis for the model I have been given two sets of plans.  The first is a simple, one-page rendering of the lines and profile of a similar small French frigate which was captured by HMS Advice and which is known therefore as Advice Prize.
 

 
I am also working from a set of drawings done by Jean Budriot of yet another light French frigate of the period known as Le Mercure.   He has written a monograph that is illustrated with numerous detailed drawings of all of the bits and pieces of the ship including several profiles, cross-sections and longitudinal sections, and sail and rigging plans.  However, as is his custom, there is no station lines plan from which to derive the hull shape.
 

 
These two sets of plans have to be reconciled, not only with each other, but with the known historic facts.  For example, it was reported in contemporary accounts and court-martial testimony that the Queen Anne's Revenge had 20 large cannon on board when she went down.  Le Mercure is pierced for 10 guns on each side, but the Advice Prize has only 9.  The Mercure drawings have the channels for the fore and main shrouds set below the gunports, while the Advice Prize has them above.  Le Mercure is shown with a square, open beakhead bulkhead, while the plans for the Advice Prize shows a closed in forecastle.  At the stern Le Mercure has a large quarter gallery, rather than the small quarter badge of the Advice Prize.  But that quarter badge is set very high, with an indication that the Advice Prize had a poop deck above the quarterdeck.  These and many other details, large and small, will have to be reconciled as construction continues.
 
To begin with, a tenth gunport was added to the Advice Prize and their spacing was adjusted accordingly.  The quarter badge was lowered and it is this resulting profile that will be used to build the models.
 

 
On this plan you can see a horizontal red line.  This is my line of demarcation between the solid hull below and the open gundeck above.  It is set at the level of the gundeck for the forward four ports.  A tapered piece will be added at the rear half of the ship to account for the sheer rise of the gundeck towards the stern.  But this line is also used as my registration plane for setting up the templates for the hull shape at the various stations shown on the plans. 
 
As I was working out the hull construction the first of what will surely be many problems arose.  In the scale that is required, the maximum breadth of the model works out to just over 9 inches and the station lines work out to, mostly, 3 inches separation.  To work from the centerline I would need wood of at least 4.5 inches wide and 3 inches thick.  However, wood of that size is not easily or inexpensively acquired.  Instead, I found basswood planks 4 inches wide and up to 2 inches thick.  I decided therefore to piece together the hull. 
 
As you can see in the wood blocking plan below, I started with a vertical central piece 3/8" thick to match the width of the keel.  This was sandwiched on each side by a vertical lift 1/2 inch thick, then by the side pieces whch would be cut to the profiles of the appropriate station lines from the plans.
 

 
As usual with vertical station line lifts, they were cut to the profile of the appropriate station line.  For each three inch station segment a two inch lift and a one inch lift were used.  I also decided that the hull should be partially hollow, not only to reduce weight, but to give the stresses somewhere to go other than outward when the wood swelled with changing humidity.  My solution was to take each lift and cut out the center, leaving a crescent of wood about 1 inch thick.  Construction began with the gunport deck piece cut to shape and the three vertical central pieces glued to it using carpenters' squares for alignment.  Then the station line lift crescents were glued in place and secured with dowels.  Here you can see the first three segments glued and pinned, with the fourth made ready for installation.
 


 
This was continued from the center out to the bow and stern, with the final lifts left solid and clamped to the growing hull block.  The completed hull block was left to dry for a week before the bamboo dowels were trimmed off.
 


 
Now the carving and shaping had to begin to reduce the stepped shape of the lifts.  The model is so large that the usual woodworking tools were inadequate in any reasonable time frame.  I therefore purchased an angle grinder and set it up with coarse 50 grit sanding discs.  This was followed by a random orbit sander, also with coarse grit paper.
 

 
As you can imagine, this makes a hellish racket and leaves a hellish mess,  Eye, ear and respiration protection are a must, and if you are not going to do all of it outside, you need three other things - an empty room in the basement; a big shop vacuum; and most importantly, an understanding wife.  I am glad to say that I have the first two and am blessed with the third.
 

 
In this photo you can see how far the shaping has progressed.  From here there still has to be a lot of hand work that is checked and rechecked as usual with station line templates.  The next segment will take us through that process.
 
Be well
 
Dan
 

Hi all –
 
Here is the latest installment of the build log.  No pirate talk, just building - - -
 
Some work has been done on the hulls since the last build log, but not enough to show. Instead, the next of the independent subassemblies was completed.  These are the anchors.
 
Queen Anne’s Revenge carried four anchors of different sizes, all of which have been discovered.  They range from the largest, with a shank length of 13 foot 7 inch and a weight of 3,141 pounds to the smallest at only 8 feet and 642 pounds.  The others had shank lengths of 13 foot and 11 foot 4 inches. Here is the archeological drawing of one of them.
 
Image 1
 
Budriot has drawings of several sizes of anchor for Le Mercure, but the drawings are all identical other than size, and none quite fit the ones discovered.  I took his drawing and sized it up or down in Photoshop to make drawings that fit the sizes needed.
 
Image 2
 
An anchor is a fairly simple construct, with only a few parts:  the shank with its arms and the flukes pinned to the arms; the wooden crosspiece called the stock, and a metal ring through the shank above the crosspiece.  Here they all are for a pair of 11 foot anchors.
 
Image 3
 
You can see that they are in various stages of completion.  The wood used here is pear, throughout.  I did not cast the shank/arms because there were 4 pair of different sizes rather than 8 of the same size.  It would have taken longer to make 4 masters and then cast them.
 
The first piece to be shaped is the shank.  A piece of pear was cut on the Preac saw to a square cross section of the appropriate size and then cut to length.  The drawings show that it had a square head where it went through the crosspiece, then became round below the head, which widened and returned to square with rounded corners where it mated with the arm for the flukes at the throat.  A round tenon at the foot was secured through a hole in the arm piece.
I first milled the tenons on either end.  This is easily done while the wood is still square.  Here you can see the setup on the Preac.  The miter guage is used to keep the wood square to the blade and the fence is used as a depth stop. 
 
Image 4
 
The height of the blade is set by using an adjustable fitting that sits under the hinged blade holder.  It is a screw in a wider sleeve with a red plastic cap on the end of the screw.  The hole in the bottom of the sleeve conveniently fits around one of the bolt heads on the blade unit.  It is a cumbersome and fiddly arrangement, but I am used to it after 20 years.
 
Image 5
 
To cut the tenon I set the blade to the desired height, testing by making passes on a piece of scrap basswood.  I first cut the shoulders of the tenon, then nibbled away the rest of the wood using a wide blade.  The final pass is always sideways across the top of the blade to smooth the side of the tenon.
 
Image 6
 
The final result is a perfectly centered and square tenon on each end of the shank blank.  The tenon that will go through the fluke arm piece is narrower than the head tenon and will later be rounded by trimming the corners then twisting it through progressively smaller holes in a drill plate.
 
Image 6a
 
With the head tenon cut the square hole in the wooden crosspiece has to be cut to match.  This is possible because the stock is built up from two pieces.  Again using the Preac the blade was adjusted till the cut was exactly half the depth of the tenon.  I tested this by cutting grooves in two pieces of scrap that when mated allowed the tenon to fit smoothly but not too tightly.  You can see this in the upper part of the photo.  Below it is the first side of the stock with the tenon fit into the channel that was milled out.
 
Image 7
 
And here you can see how the two stock pieces fit together around the tenon.
 
Image 8
 
With the channels cut the side of one of the stock pieces is colored with black ink and the pieces are glued together and clamped using one of the shank pieces to locate and match the pieces.
 
Image 9
 
After the glued dried the drawing of the stock was cut from a printout of the sized drawing.  I used Scotch Spray Mount to temporarily attach it to the stock blank.  With the blank still having a square face the holes were drilled for the treenails and bolts that were used to hold the two halves of the stock together. (You may notice that this piece does not have a square hole for the shank.  I forgot to take a photo during construction, so this is a scrap piece made up later for the log).
 
Image 10
 
The stock was cut close to its profile on the band saw and then smoothed using a sanding drum in the drill press since I do not have a spindle sander.
 
Image 11
 
The rest of the construction is pretty straightforward.  Going back to the photo of the pieces, you can see that the sides of the stock were tapered as shown on the drawings and the treenails inserted and sanded smooth.  The shank was fitted to the arm piece and both were smoothed to shape and to fit together at the throat.  This was done with the tenon just friction fit in the arm piece. 
 
image 3 repeat
 
Once the throat joint was smooth the arm was removed and a step was cut into it for the heel of the fluke.  The flukes were cut from 0.025” thick brass sheet, ground to final shape, and then peened to a shallow dish form.  They were fitted to the arms and pinned through using iron wire which was clipped short and peened on both ends to rivet the fluke to the arm.
 
Image 12
 
The stock was given its four iron strapping bands and a coat of stain.  The final wood selected for the stock was beech, which looks remarkably like oak in this scale.  The shank was painted matte black and was fitted to the stock.  The six bolts at the center of the stock were made from iron wire cut a little proud of the surface and filed smooth but not flat.  The cut ends will age over time to a generic metallic look that will contrast with the look of the treenails.  The ring is made from brass rod that was wound round a dowel, clipped and flattened, then chemically blackened.  Here is the completed 13 foot pair.
 
Image 13
 
Until I built these anchors I had little idea how large they really were.  Compared to my scale figure the 13 ½ foot anchor is massive, and even the 8 foot one would have been a handful.  The entire set of four anchors weighed over 8,000 pounds.
 
Image 14
Image 15
 
I’m off to the NRG conference next week, so it may be a bit until my next posting.  Until then, let me know if you have any questions about my methods and/or my madness . . .
 
Dan

Hi all –
 
Here is the latest installment of the build log.  No pirate talk, just building - - -
 
Some work has been done on the hulls since the last build log, but not enough to show. Instead, the next of the independent subassemblies was completed.  These are the anchors.
 
Queen Anne’s Revenge carried four anchors of different sizes, all of which have been discovered.  They range from the largest, with a shank length of 13 foot 7 inch and a weight of 3,141 pounds to the smallest at only 8 feet and 642 pounds.  The others had shank lengths of 13 foot and 11 foot 4 inches. Here is the archeological drawing of one of them.
 
Image 1
 
Budriot has drawings of several sizes of anchor for Le Mercure, but the drawings are all identical other than size, and none quite fit the ones discovered.  I took his drawing and sized it up or down in Photoshop to make drawings that fit the sizes needed.
 
Image 2
 
An anchor is a fairly simple construct, with only a few parts:  the shank with its arms and the flukes pinned to the arms; the wooden crosspiece called the stock, and a metal ring through the shank above the crosspiece.  Here they all are for a pair of 11 foot anchors.
 
Image 3
 
You can see that they are in various stages of completion.  The wood used here is pear, throughout.  I did not cast the shank/arms because there were 4 pair of different sizes rather than 8 of the same size.  It would have taken longer to make 4 masters and then cast them.
 
The first piece to be shaped is the shank.  A piece of pear was cut on the Preac saw to a square cross section of the appropriate size and then cut to length.  The drawings show that it had a square head where it went through the crosspiece, then became round below the head, which widened and returned to square with rounded corners where it mated with the arm for the flukes at the throat.  A round tenon at the foot was secured through a hole in the arm piece.
I first milled the tenons on either end.  This is easily done while the wood is still square.  Here you can see the setup on the Preac.  The miter guage is used to keep the wood square to the blade and the fence is used as a depth stop. 
 
Image 4
 
The height of the blade is set by using an adjustable fitting that sits under the hinged blade holder.  It is a screw in a wider sleeve with a red plastic cap on the end of the screw.  The hole in the bottom of the sleeve conveniently fits around one of the bolt heads on the blade unit.  It is a cumbersome and fiddly arrangement, but I am used to it after 20 years.
 
Image 5
 
To cut the tenon I set the blade to the desired height, testing by making passes on a piece of scrap basswood.  I first cut the shoulders of the tenon, then nibbled away the rest of the wood using a wide blade.  The final pass is always sideways across the top of the blade to smooth the side of the tenon.
 
Image 6
 
The final result is a perfectly centered and square tenon on each end of the shank blank.  The tenon that will go through the fluke arm piece is narrower than the head tenon and will later be rounded by trimming the corners then twisting it through progressively smaller holes in a drill plate.
 
Image 6a
 
With the head tenon cut the square hole in the wooden crosspiece has to be cut to match.  This is possible because the stock is built up from two pieces.  Again using the Preac the blade was adjusted till the cut was exactly half the depth of the tenon.  I tested this by cutting grooves in two pieces of scrap that when mated allowed the tenon to fit smoothly but not too tightly.  You can see this in the upper part of the photo.  Below it is the first side of the stock with the tenon fit into the channel that was milled out.
 
Image 7
 
And here you can see how the two stock pieces fit together around the tenon.
 
Image 8
 
With the channels cut the side of one of the stock pieces is colored with black ink and the pieces are glued together and clamped using one of the shank pieces to locate and match the pieces.
 
Image 9
 
After the glued dried the drawing of the stock was cut from a printout of the sized drawing.  I used Scotch Spray Mount to temporarily attach it to the stock blank.  With the blank still having a square face the holes were drilled for the treenails and bolts that were used to hold the two halves of the stock together. (You may notice that this piece does not have a square hole for the shank.  I forgot to take a photo during construction, so this is a scrap piece made up later for the log).
 
Image 10
 
The stock was cut close to its profile on the band saw and then smoothed using a sanding drum in the drill press since I do not have a spindle sander.
 
Image 11
 
The rest of the construction is pretty straightforward.  Going back to the photo of the pieces, you can see that the sides of the stock were tapered as shown on the drawings and the treenails inserted and sanded smooth.  The shank was fitted to the arm piece and both were smoothed to shape and to fit together at the throat.  This was done with the tenon just friction fit in the arm piece. 
 
image 3 repeat
 
Once the throat joint was smooth the arm was removed and a step was cut into it for the heel of the fluke.  The flukes were cut from 0.025” thick brass sheet, ground to final shape, and then peened to a shallow dish form.  They were fitted to the arms and pinned through using iron wire which was clipped short and peened on both ends to rivet the fluke to the arm.
 
Image 12
 
The stock was given its four iron strapping bands and a coat of stain.  The final wood selected for the stock was beech, which looks remarkably like oak in this scale.  The shank was painted matte black and was fitted to the stock.  The six bolts at the center of the stock were made from iron wire cut a little proud of the surface and filed smooth but not flat.  The cut ends will age over time to a generic metallic look that will contrast with the look of the treenails.  The ring is made from brass rod that was wound round a dowel, clipped and flattened, then chemically blackened.  Here is the completed 13 foot pair.
 
Image 13
 
Until I built these anchors I had little idea how large they really were.  Compared to my scale figure the 13 ½ foot anchor is massive, and even the 8 foot one would have been a handful.  The entire set of four anchors weighed over 8,000 pounds.
 
Image 14
Image 15
 
I’m off to the NRG conference next week, so it may be a bit until my next posting.  Until then, let me know if you have any questions about my methods and/or my madness . . .
 
Dan

Hi all -
 
Yes, an interesting project that is open to some speculation.  Although there is no definitive information on the ship's appearance, we can reason backward from what is known. 
 
A researcher on the project has combed through the French archives and in his 159 page report he convincingly demonstrates that she was built as La Concorde for a private commercial firm, rather than for the French navy.  She is described as being one of the light frigates of 250 to 300 tons, which fits well with other such ships being built for the navy, so her design was probably quite similar.  Budriot, in his major work, "The History of the French Frigate, 1650-1850" has a short chapter on these light frigates with illustrations of several of the naval frigates as well as lines drawings and artistic illustrations such as the one that I included.  There is even a lengthy written description of a "Light frigate armed with 20 6-pounders" which is exactly what the Queen Anne's Revenge was.  I am still working through the dense prose to glean bits of useful information.
 
However, she was not built for the navy, but for a private firm.  As such, she would not have had the elaborate carvings, paint and decorations that a national warship would have carried and which Budriot puts on Le Mercure..  Even if there were originally some touches of color, by the time she finished a privateering cruise and two slaving trips some seven years later I do not believe that any would have remained. 
 
We are on surer ground with the rig.  Masts and spars were pretty well standardized by 1710 for the size of the ship.  Budriot provides a detailed drawing of all of the sticks and fittings in the Mercure drawings, which will be checked against Lees, Petrejus and other writers.  But that is for later - much later.
 
Till then, be well.
 
Dan

Hi all –
 
Here is the latest installment of the build log.  No pirate talk, just building - - -
 
Some work has been done on the hulls since the last build log, but not enough to show. Instead, the next of the independent subassemblies was completed.  These are the anchors.
 
Queen Anne’s Revenge carried four anchors of different sizes, all of which have been discovered.  They range from the largest, with a shank length of 13 foot 7 inch and a weight of 3,141 pounds to the smallest at only 8 feet and 642 pounds.  The others had shank lengths of 13 foot and 11 foot 4 inches. Here is the archeological drawing of one of them.
 
Image 1
 
Budriot has drawings of several sizes of anchor for Le Mercure, but the drawings are all identical other than size, and none quite fit the ones discovered.  I took his drawing and sized it up or down in Photoshop to make drawings that fit the sizes needed.
 
Image 2
 
An anchor is a fairly simple construct, with only a few parts:  the shank with its arms and the flukes pinned to the arms; the wooden crosspiece called the stock, and a metal ring through the shank above the crosspiece.  Here they all are for a pair of 11 foot anchors.
 
Image 3
 
You can see that they are in various stages of completion.  The wood used here is pear, throughout.  I did not cast the shank/arms because there were 4 pair of different sizes rather than 8 of the same size.  It would have taken longer to make 4 masters and then cast them.
 
The first piece to be shaped is the shank.  A piece of pear was cut on the Preac saw to a square cross section of the appropriate size and then cut to length.  The drawings show that it had a square head where it went through the crosspiece, then became round below the head, which widened and returned to square with rounded corners where it mated with the arm for the flukes at the throat.  A round tenon at the foot was secured through a hole in the arm piece.
I first milled the tenons on either end.  This is easily done while the wood is still square.  Here you can see the setup on the Preac.  The miter guage is used to keep the wood square to the blade and the fence is used as a depth stop. 
 
Image 4
 
The height of the blade is set by using an adjustable fitting that sits under the hinged blade holder.  It is a screw in a wider sleeve with a red plastic cap on the end of the screw.  The hole in the bottom of the sleeve conveniently fits around one of the bolt heads on the blade unit.  It is a cumbersome and fiddly arrangement, but I am used to it after 20 years.
 
Image 5
 
To cut the tenon I set the blade to the desired height, testing by making passes on a piece of scrap basswood.  I first cut the shoulders of the tenon, then nibbled away the rest of the wood using a wide blade.  The final pass is always sideways across the top of the blade to smooth the side of the tenon.
 
Image 6
 
The final result is a perfectly centered and square tenon on each end of the shank blank.  The tenon that will go through the fluke arm piece is narrower than the head tenon and will later be rounded by trimming the corners then twisting it through progressively smaller holes in a drill plate.
 
Image 6a
 
With the head tenon cut the square hole in the wooden crosspiece has to be cut to match.  This is possible because the stock is built up from two pieces.  Again using the Preac the blade was adjusted till the cut was exactly half the depth of the tenon.  I tested this by cutting grooves in two pieces of scrap that when mated allowed the tenon to fit smoothly but not too tightly.  You can see this in the upper part of the photo.  Below it is the first side of the stock with the tenon fit into the channel that was milled out.
 
Image 7
 
And here you can see how the two stock pieces fit together around the tenon.
 
Image 8
 
With the channels cut the side of one of the stock pieces is colored with black ink and the pieces are glued together and clamped using one of the shank pieces to locate and match the pieces.
 
Image 9
 
After the glued dried the drawing of the stock was cut from a printout of the sized drawing.  I used Scotch Spray Mount to temporarily attach it to the stock blank.  With the blank still having a square face the holes were drilled for the treenails and bolts that were used to hold the two halves of the stock together. (You may notice that this piece does not have a square hole for the shank.  I forgot to take a photo during construction, so this is a scrap piece made up later for the log).
 
Image 10
 
The stock was cut close to its profile on the band saw and then smoothed using a sanding drum in the drill press since I do not have a spindle sander.
 
Image 11
 
The rest of the construction is pretty straightforward.  Going back to the photo of the pieces, you can see that the sides of the stock were tapered as shown on the drawings and the treenails inserted and sanded smooth.  The shank was fitted to the arm piece and both were smoothed to shape and to fit together at the throat.  This was done with the tenon just friction fit in the arm piece. 
 
image 3 repeat
 
Once the throat joint was smooth the arm was removed and a step was cut into it for the heel of the fluke.  The flukes were cut from 0.025” thick brass sheet, ground to final shape, and then peened to a shallow dish form.  They were fitted to the arms and pinned through using iron wire which was clipped short and peened on both ends to rivet the fluke to the arm.
 
Image 12
 
The stock was given its four iron strapping bands and a coat of stain.  The final wood selected for the stock was beech, which looks remarkably like oak in this scale.  The shank was painted matte black and was fitted to the stock.  The six bolts at the center of the stock were made from iron wire cut a little proud of the surface and filed smooth but not flat.  The cut ends will age over time to a generic metallic look that will contrast with the look of the treenails.  The ring is made from brass rod that was wound round a dowel, clipped and flattened, then chemically blackened.  Here is the completed 13 foot pair.
 
Image 13
 
Until I built these anchors I had little idea how large they really were.  Compared to my scale figure the 13 ½ foot anchor is massive, and even the 8 foot one would have been a handful.  The entire set of four anchors weighed over 8,000 pounds.
 
Image 14
Image 15
 
I’m off to the NRG conference next week, so it may be a bit until my next posting.  Until then, let me know if you have any questions about my methods and/or my madness . . .
 
Dan

Hi all –
 
Thanks for your comments and suggestions.  I plan to incorporate them into the second iteration of the boat which will be built when the hardwood strips arrive from the supplier.
 
When we left the shipyard the hull of the boat had been fully planked with the shutter planks fitted on both sides.  The hull had been marked out in pencil for the rib locations in preparation for the nails which would have fastened the planks to the ribs.  Here you can see the lines for all of the ribs that sit square to the keel as well as for the two cant ribs, drawn on the port side of the hull.
 

 
For the fasteners I had to find a way to make them look right without devoting an excessive amount of time to the task.  Since there are 11 planks on each side, 25 rib or transom/stem lines that the planks cross, and two fasteners per crossing, the math says that there have to be 1100 fasteners for the exterior of each boat.  Add in some more for the interior work and you can see the magnitude of the problem. 
 
The original boat probably had the planks nailed to the ribs, with the ends peened over to clinch them.  I experimented with a plank/rib mockup and could never get the holes in the planks to come through the ribs in the proper places.  Instead, I decided to drill the holes through only the planks and worry about indicating the nails on the inside of the ribs later.
 
I first drilled all the holes.  Here you can see how there are two in each plank in an offset pattern.  I used a 0.012” drill, which scales up to 1/2”, which would be about right.
 

 
At first I tried inserting pieces of annealed iron wire into the holes, clipping them short, painting them with glue, then filing the tops flush with the face of the planks.  This was incredibly time consuming and fiddly.  I then decided to try the technique of leaving the holes empty, sanding the planks to fill the holes with sawdust, then painting on a finish to hold in the sawdust.  This looked good and I don’t believe that anyone can tell the difference with this short cut.
 
  *   *   *
Aarrrgh, scalawag that ye are!  Ye’ll not be taking any modern short cuts with me boats.  I be Dread Pirate Peter, and I’ll have yer guts fer garters if ye dinna do a manly and proper piece of work. 
 

 
No, no, it will be OK.  Really it will.  Here, this is what the nail holes look like after filling and staining.  I have had several critical people, including my wife, compare them to the ones with the iron nails in them and no one could tell the difference.  In fact, the slightly spread discoloration of the wood grain closely mimics the way old wood stains when a nail rusts into it.
 

 
*   *   *
Tis all very well and comely, but rest ye not on yer laurels, lest ye rest on yer ****.  I be watching ye. . .
 
*   *   *
Soooo, with that out of the way, I turned to fitting out the interior.  First the missing ribs were bent and fitted into the interior.  These were the two cant ribs at the bow and the aftmost rib at Station 21 that had been left off to make planking easier. 
 
The first interior piece to be installed was the tapered central plank of the flooring.  It strengthens the keel and is the location for the lifting rings and mast step.
 

 
To each side the rest of the floor planks were installed.  They are not tapered but fit against the tapered center plank due to the curvature of the hull.  They are held in place while the glue dries by inexpensive hair clips from the cosmetics section of the drug store.  They initially look like the one at the lower left, but are easily bent by hand to the shape in the lower right.  This now allows them to reach around the hull to apply pressure at the tips.
 

 
Next to be installed are the sheets, the planked platforms at the bow and stern.  They will appear in later photos, but I did not take pictures as they were being built.  Construction is straightforward.  Planks were glued to a pair of battens underneath to make a flat sheet larger than needed.  A paper pattern is cut to fit the space and the wood sheet is cut to that shape.  The edges are bevelled to match the curve of the hull and it is glued in place to the ribs.
 
Now the thwart stringers are installed.  I first bent one piece of  stripwood to shape and glued it in on the starboard side at the height indicated on the plans.  The matching strip was bent and trimmed for the port side and held in place temporarily while I balanced pieces of stripwood across from side to side and set perpendicular to the keel.  These are known in woodworking as ‘winding sticks’ although I don’t know why.  Looking across their tops you can easily see any variation from side to side and any tipping compared to the centerline and the edge of the sheets.  Once I was satisfied with the levels, the port stringer was glued in place. 
 

 
The plans show square section wood pieces running side to side just under the thwart stringers near the bow and stern.  They have a short section in the center that has a round cross section.  I do not know what they were for, but perhaps the rounded section would have a halyard led around it when the sail was raised, sort of a non-turning sheave.  Whatever they are they were shaped, fitted and glued in.
 
The lifting rings and mast step were located and attached to the central floor plank.  I also drilled the nail holes for the floors and sheets as I did for the hull planks.  My one regret is that I did not do this for the ribs at this point when they were exposed.  It turned out to be too crowded later – a detail that will be corrected on the next boats.
 
The thwarts were cut from 1mm thick stock, with the middle one being wider in the center and having added knees.  It holds and supports the metalwork that acts as the mast partner.  This fitting is made from brass strip which is chemically blackened, then glued and pinned with wire nails to the edge of the thwart.  A decorative beading was scribed into the edges of the thwarts, then they were installed on top of the stringers with spacers between them.
 

 
Unfortunately, once the thwarts were installed it was clear that they were sitting too high in the boat.  No rowers could have sat on them and had their feet reach the floor for leverage.  Here the flexibility of the Lineco glue came to my rescue.  With the tip of a #10 blade I was able to pry up the thwarts from the stringers and then remove the stringers without any damage to the hull or ribs.
 

 
The stringers were lowered 6 scale inches and reinstalled, followed by the thwarts, which looked much better after the adjustment.  I went back to the plans and determined that the problem was there and not in my measuring or building.  Just one of those problems that had to be built to be discovered.
 

 
Fitting out the rest of the interior is self-explanatory.  Working up from the thwarts the stern seats were planked up over battens.  They sit on top of the thwart stringers and the aftmost thwart.  The foremost thwart has a pair of knees set on top.
 
Square section stringers were fitted and glued to the inner sides of the sheer strake so their tops matched, and were strengthened at the bow by a breasthook and at the stern by two transom knees.  Thole blocks were set on top of the sheer strakes and stringers and will be drilled for the thole pins to be added later.  The locations of several of these had to be adjusted from the plans, which did not have them at a consistent distance from the associated thwart.
 

 
The only difficult woodworking came at the bow where the curved and carved fairleads on either side of the stem were joined with a double-dovetailed cross-support.
 


 
With the boat all but complete the rudder was fashioned to match the plans.  Two planks were fitted and tapered, then cut to the proper profile.  The pintle straps were made from brass strip, pinned through with iron wire and chemically blackened.  The tiller is brass bar that was tapered and blackened, with an epoxy bulb at its tip.
 

 
Top and bottom gudgeons were fashioned from blackened brass strip.  The upper one simply slipped into a hole drilled into the aft face of the sternpost, while the lower one had to be bent in several directions before being pinned against the sides of the sternpost.  It only remained for the thole pins to be installed and the boat was complete.
 

 
*    *    *
So ye think ye be quite clever, do ye? Quite the boat builder?  I be the judge of that.  I also bring me great-great-great grandson Peter who says he has worked with ye before.  He be a great galoot of a puppy, but he be useful to judge yer work.  He set up this temporary mast and I grant ye that said boat be mightily even side to side.
 

 
He sits well in the stern and nothing pulls my eye to say that he could not reach and steer the tiller, should he take it into his head to do some work, the lazy lout that he be.
 

 
It shivers me innards to grudge ye my approval, but i’ faith I canna find much to dislike.  But be warned that I will no be put off with such minor success.  Ye must do as well or better, or feel me wrath fall upon ye like to the Trump of Doom.
 


 
Well, there you have it.  The second boat will be made from hardwoods now that most of the construction problems have been identified, although I am sure that new ones will appear and demand solutions.  Those may be harder to find while looking over my shoulder all the time; Dread Pirate Peter seems to have very high standards, and a very short temper.
 
Till then, be well.
 
Dan

Well, a few days has turned into a few weeks.  I received my cup burrs.  They do a nice job of smoothing the ends of brass "bolts".  There are several sizes available, depending on the gauge of the wire.  I purchased my from Widget Supply, a company that sells hobby supplies.  While on the site I found a great sanding devise, a 1/2" disc sander for the Dremel with several grits.  I used to get these from Micromark, but they stopped selling them last year.  The disc sander is perfect for outside tapers and when you want a less aggressive sander than the drum sander.  I have no connection to the company, simply a pleased customer.
 

 
I have installed beam set 4.  Notches have been cut into the bulkhead walls for the carlings and ledges.  I am much happier with the bolt head on the fore mast partner after rounding them up and painting them.  Blackening was not possible in situ and I was pleased with how it turned out.  The hole in the deck aft of beam 5 is for the pin of the bit.
 

 

Hi all –
 
Thanks for your comments and suggestions.  I plan to incorporate them into the second iteration of the boat which will be built when the hardwood strips arrive from the supplier.
 
When we left the shipyard the hull of the boat had been fully planked with the shutter planks fitted on both sides.  The hull had been marked out in pencil for the rib locations in preparation for the nails which would have fastened the planks to the ribs.  Here you can see the lines for all of the ribs that sit square to the keel as well as for the two cant ribs, drawn on the port side of the hull.
 

 
For the fasteners I had to find a way to make them look right without devoting an excessive amount of time to the task.  Since there are 11 planks on each side, 25 rib or transom/stem lines that the planks cross, and two fasteners per crossing, the math says that there have to be 1100 fasteners for the exterior of each boat.  Add in some more for the interior work and you can see the magnitude of the problem. 
 
The original boat probably had the planks nailed to the ribs, with the ends peened over to clinch them.  I experimented with a plank/rib mockup and could never get the holes in the planks to come through the ribs in the proper places.  Instead, I decided to drill the holes through only the planks and worry about indicating the nails on the inside of the ribs later.
 
I first drilled all the holes.  Here you can see how there are two in each plank in an offset pattern.  I used a 0.012” drill, which scales up to 1/2”, which would be about right.
 

 
At first I tried inserting pieces of annealed iron wire into the holes, clipping them short, painting them with glue, then filing the tops flush with the face of the planks.  This was incredibly time consuming and fiddly.  I then decided to try the technique of leaving the holes empty, sanding the planks to fill the holes with sawdust, then painting on a finish to hold in the sawdust.  This looked good and I don’t believe that anyone can tell the difference with this short cut.
 
  *   *   *
Aarrrgh, scalawag that ye are!  Ye’ll not be taking any modern short cuts with me boats.  I be Dread Pirate Peter, and I’ll have yer guts fer garters if ye dinna do a manly and proper piece of work. 
 

 
No, no, it will be OK.  Really it will.  Here, this is what the nail holes look like after filling and staining.  I have had several critical people, including my wife, compare them to the ones with the iron nails in them and no one could tell the difference.  In fact, the slightly spread discoloration of the wood grain closely mimics the way old wood stains when a nail rusts into it.
 

 
*   *   *
Tis all very well and comely, but rest ye not on yer laurels, lest ye rest on yer ****.  I be watching ye. . .
 
*   *   *
Soooo, with that out of the way, I turned to fitting out the interior.  First the missing ribs were bent and fitted into the interior.  These were the two cant ribs at the bow and the aftmost rib at Station 21 that had been left off to make planking easier. 
 
The first interior piece to be installed was the tapered central plank of the flooring.  It strengthens the keel and is the location for the lifting rings and mast step.
 

 
To each side the rest of the floor planks were installed.  They are not tapered but fit against the tapered center plank due to the curvature of the hull.  They are held in place while the glue dries by inexpensive hair clips from the cosmetics section of the drug store.  They initially look like the one at the lower left, but are easily bent by hand to the shape in the lower right.  This now allows them to reach around the hull to apply pressure at the tips.
 

 
Next to be installed are the sheets, the planked platforms at the bow and stern.  They will appear in later photos, but I did not take pictures as they were being built.  Construction is straightforward.  Planks were glued to a pair of battens underneath to make a flat sheet larger than needed.  A paper pattern is cut to fit the space and the wood sheet is cut to that shape.  The edges are bevelled to match the curve of the hull and it is glued in place to the ribs.
 
Now the thwart stringers are installed.  I first bent one piece of  stripwood to shape and glued it in on the starboard side at the height indicated on the plans.  The matching strip was bent and trimmed for the port side and held in place temporarily while I balanced pieces of stripwood across from side to side and set perpendicular to the keel.  These are known in woodworking as ‘winding sticks’ although I don’t know why.  Looking across their tops you can easily see any variation from side to side and any tipping compared to the centerline and the edge of the sheets.  Once I was satisfied with the levels, the port stringer was glued in place. 
 

 
The plans show square section wood pieces running side to side just under the thwart stringers near the bow and stern.  They have a short section in the center that has a round cross section.  I do not know what they were for, but perhaps the rounded section would have a halyard led around it when the sail was raised, sort of a non-turning sheave.  Whatever they are they were shaped, fitted and glued in.
 
The lifting rings and mast step were located and attached to the central floor plank.  I also drilled the nail holes for the floors and sheets as I did for the hull planks.  My one regret is that I did not do this for the ribs at this point when they were exposed.  It turned out to be too crowded later – a detail that will be corrected on the next boats.
 
The thwarts were cut from 1mm thick stock, with the middle one being wider in the center and having added knees.  It holds and supports the metalwork that acts as the mast partner.  This fitting is made from brass strip which is chemically blackened, then glued and pinned with wire nails to the edge of the thwart.  A decorative beading was scribed into the edges of the thwarts, then they were installed on top of the stringers with spacers between them.
 

 
Unfortunately, once the thwarts were installed it was clear that they were sitting too high in the boat.  No rowers could have sat on them and had their feet reach the floor for leverage.  Here the flexibility of the Lineco glue came to my rescue.  With the tip of a #10 blade I was able to pry up the thwarts from the stringers and then remove the stringers without any damage to the hull or ribs.
 

 
The stringers were lowered 6 scale inches and reinstalled, followed by the thwarts, which looked much better after the adjustment.  I went back to the plans and determined that the problem was there and not in my measuring or building.  Just one of those problems that had to be built to be discovered.
 

 
Fitting out the rest of the interior is self-explanatory.  Working up from the thwarts the stern seats were planked up over battens.  They sit on top of the thwart stringers and the aftmost thwart.  The foremost thwart has a pair of knees set on top.
 
Square section stringers were fitted and glued to the inner sides of the sheer strake so their tops matched, and were strengthened at the bow by a breasthook and at the stern by two transom knees.  Thole blocks were set on top of the sheer strakes and stringers and will be drilled for the thole pins to be added later.  The locations of several of these had to be adjusted from the plans, which did not have them at a consistent distance from the associated thwart.
 

 
The only difficult woodworking came at the bow where the curved and carved fairleads on either side of the stem were joined with a double-dovetailed cross-support.
 


 
With the boat all but complete the rudder was fashioned to match the plans.  Two planks were fitted and tapered, then cut to the proper profile.  The pintle straps were made from brass strip, pinned through with iron wire and chemically blackened.  The tiller is brass bar that was tapered and blackened, with an epoxy bulb at its tip.
 

 
Top and bottom gudgeons were fashioned from blackened brass strip.  The upper one simply slipped into a hole drilled into the aft face of the sternpost, while the lower one had to be bent in several directions before being pinned against the sides of the sternpost.  It only remained for the thole pins to be installed and the boat was complete.
 

 
*    *    *
So ye think ye be quite clever, do ye? Quite the boat builder?  I be the judge of that.  I also bring me great-great-great grandson Peter who says he has worked with ye before.  He be a great galoot of a puppy, but he be useful to judge yer work.  He set up this temporary mast and I grant ye that said boat be mightily even side to side.
 

 
He sits well in the stern and nothing pulls my eye to say that he could not reach and steer the tiller, should he take it into his head to do some work, the lazy lout that he be.
 

 
It shivers me innards to grudge ye my approval, but i’ faith I canna find much to dislike.  But be warned that I will no be put off with such minor success.  Ye must do as well or better, or feel me wrath fall upon ye like to the Trump of Doom.
 


 
Well, there you have it.  The second boat will be made from hardwoods now that most of the construction problems have been identified, although I am sure that new ones will appear and demand solutions.  Those may be harder to find while looking over my shoulder all the time; Dread Pirate Peter seems to have very high standards, and a very short temper.
 
Till then, be well.
 
Dan