Dr PR

Mark, It is pretty common for printers to not print at 1:1 scale, even if "Fit tp page" is disabled. Most people assume the printout is the "correct" size until they get burned as you did. If the actual size of a print is necessary you have to determine the actual error and correct for it as you did. However, there is another problem. How do you know the ruler you are using is accurate? I have a collection of rulers from different manufacturers and they do not all agree! Some differ by as much as 0.1 inch in 12 inches (0.83%). The cheaper ones tend to be junk. But metal "shop" rulers may also be inaccurate - there is a lot of junk being marketed by worthless slimeballs who care more about how much money they can stuff in their pockets than the quality of the products they sell. If you have calipers that can measure to 0.001 inch (0.0254 mm) you can check your rulers to determine which are most accurate. But how accurate are your calipers? There is always some error in measurement devices. It is just a question of how accurate is good enough? For modeling purposes an error of +/- 0.001 inch is good enough.

I seem to recall a caution someone posted in another thread about trying to solder to cast metal parts. Some are made of low melting temperature alloys. You can buy this stuff for making castings at home. If you try to solder to them they melt. The fellow had a broken anchor from a kit and tried to solder the pieces together. The entire anchor melted. Lead and tin/lead (pewter) parts will melt at low temperature. Cast brass or bronze can be soldered to. A resistance soldering unit is best for this because it concentrates the heat quickly in the solder joint without heating the entire cast part (which could take quite a while for a large piece).

The upper part of the superstructure must have been painted with invisible camouflage paint!

I can't speak for caulking on vessels from the 19th century and earlier. But mid 20th century US navy deck planks were beveled on the edges down half the thickness of the planks. This left a gap at the top about 3/8 inch wide. The bottom edges of the planks were butted together and cotton and oakum were driven into the gaps. A tar-like black marine glue was poured into the gaps over the oakum to seal the gap.

Vaddoc, I have generated 3D drawings of several hulls from the numbers in the Table of Offsets. As you said, it is a lot of work! I found several errors in the offsets for each of the hulls. They were usually off by 1 foot, 1 inch or 1/8 inch - the units used in the tables. First an engineer created the offsets, probably using a slide rule or maybe a mechanical "adding machine" for some of the older hulls - the first chance for error. Then the engineer had to write all of those numbers down - the second chance. Then the draftsman had to read the engineer's hand writing (a third chance for errors) and copy all those numbers onto the drawing - the fourth chance for error. And, of course, I had to copy them all into the computer. Five chances for error. It is a wonder that any of it came out right! And then, after finding and correcting these simple numeric typo mistakes, I found that the station/frames generated from the data didn't fair smoothly after all. Like you I spent a lot of time tweaking the lines to get a smooth hull. But even so, I am sure the hull dimensions are more accurate than if I had just traced lines from the hull lines drawings. Your hull is looking good!

Many models without sails do not have the running rigging associated with the sails. This is most of the rigging on a sailing vessel. Without the sail running rigging the model may look under rigged. There will be a lot of unused belaying points (cleats, belaying pins, etc.). If you want to include the sail running rigging without the sails you can. There are procedures for hooking together the halliards, sheets and tacks on fore-and-aft sails, and tying up the square sail sheets, clewlines and other lines. This was done before actually hauling up the sheets so all the lines would be in place. So you can rig most of the running rigging without actually adding the sails. Adding sails is a controversial topic. Many models have cloth sails that are ridiculously out of scale (thickness and weave of cloth, stitching, etc.) and just look silly to some modelers. If you use thin materials with no visible weave and avoid oversize stitching and such, sails can enhance the model. Another problem with sails is that they obscure a lot of the details on deck. To resolve this problem many modelers furl the lower sails, either partially or completely. This is not unrealistic because sailing vessels often did this to reduce sail to slow down. Or you can rig the sails as the vessel would be in port with all of them furled.

Bill, The AOTS Endeavor book, page 25, has two photos of the model showing the capstan and surrounding area. The drawing on page 54 shows this in profile. In the model and drawing the capstan head is significantly higher than the skylight and companionway. From your photo it looks like the companionway may be a bit too high, or the capstan too low. The profile drawing on page 41 and the capstan drawing on page 70 both show a thick support piece under the capstan. That would raise it a bit. I don't see it your model. I think it was pretty common for capstans to have a thick base that rested directly on the deck beams, with the deck planking fitted around it. While the skylight and companionway are obstacles preventing the men from simply circling the capstan, they could still operate it. Two gangs of men would work the capstan, one on each side. A man could start pushing a pole as it cleared an obstacle and take it about 1/4 way around. Meanwhile, as soon as another pole cleared the obstacle, another man would start pushing it, and so on. When the first fellow reached the second obstacle he would just step back to the end of the line and push another pole. The bars are quite long. It looks like three men on either side would be pushing at any time. The photo on page 29, lower right, shows the framework for the skylight and companionway on the Freemantle replica. The companionway framework looks temporary, perhaps just for safety to prevent workers from falling down the hatch. Seems to me the most awkward part of the capstan's position would be routing lines to it. Everything would have to come through runner blocks outboard of the capstan.

Especially if he is on a schooner. Lever doesn't say much about schooner rigging. Been there, done that!

I discovered a problem with my belaying plan for the lines from the main gaff topsail. I had routed these to the port and starboard bulwark pin rails. But this had the tack and sheet pulling to opposite sides where they might interfere with the swing of the gaff. And the halliard had no tackle, but just ran straight to a belaying pin. The topsail spar was fairly long and heavy; the sail and other rigging added to this. It would be difficult to lift it with just the one block at the top of the mast and no mechanical advantage. I added a ringbolt on the deck just aft of the port bulwark pin rail where the single block of a luff tackle will be hooked. The fall from the tackle will belay on the aft most belaying pin on that pin rail. In the drawing the sail, sheet and tack are light blue. The topsail halliard is green, as are the main boom topping lift and the main gaff peak and throat halliards. Here is the revised belaying plan. The topsail halliard luff tackle belays to ring bolt 5 port and the tackle fall to aft pin rail pin 6. The main boom topping lift tackles belay to ring bolt 6 port and starboard, and the fall belays to pin 5 port and starboard. The topping lift runs up inboard of the topsail halliard. The main gaff topsail sheet, tack and brail (if any) belay to cleats on the main boom. This way the lines swing with the boom, gaff and sail. I wouldn't bet that this is the last change I will have to make to the belaying plan!

One thing that is very important to me is to be able to adjust the height of the arm rests to the same level as the desk top. My forearm can rest on the arm rest and my wrist on the desk top. The arm rest height must be adjustable relative to the seat height. Many/most office chairs have fixed arm rests.

I am making sails for my model and I used SIG silkspan. I am using their thinnest material SIGST001 00: SIG 00 silkspan is about 0.001 inch (0,00254 cm) thick, give or take a bit. There are several different materials sometimes called "silkspan" and some tissue papers that are similar weight. The actual silk products seem to fall into two categories - woven fibers and unaligned fibers. Real silkspan seems to be the later type with random fibers. "Japan Paper" is a similar product. Here is a link to my sail build:

Tilting the yards out of the horizontal as you propose would be bizarre! It would mark the model as unrealistic and amateurish. I understand your desire to reduce the space the model takes up. There is no reason why you couldn't rotate the yards around the masts in the horizontal plane. This was done at sea to orient the sails properly to the wind. This is what the braces were used for.

Ratlines can be the last thing to go on the model. They are on the outside and all the other rigging should not interfere with putting on the ratlines. The opposite is not true. You will need to install the shrouds early on to set the masts in place. But there may be a lot of additional rigging to belay around the base of the mast. Ratlines can get in the way..

Bug, Nice looking model! Figuring out how to run the rigging so the lines don't foul or chafe is tricky. Regardless of what the plans say, it has to work on your model!

For older wooden vessels no one will ever know what their dimensions really were. They were built from experience, not accurate drawings. This is especially true for the hulls. They were built on the ways piece by piece and often the parts were hammered into place to fit with all the other pieces. The frames were fared with battens, not rulers, and certainly no two hulls were the same dimensions exactly. So don't sweat the small stuff! There is one trick that I have learned. For things that have straight lines or regular arcs/curves the designer/builder was working in some type of measurement units (inches, millimeters, etc.). You don't make something like a cabinet, deck house or hatch by just slapping together random pieces. So if the measurement you get from your drawings comes out to 10.082 units, it is probable that it should be 10.000 units. When I was making my CAD drawings for the USS Oklahoma City CLG-5 I found that the designers worked in common fractions of an inch - 1/16, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, etc. So when photoguesstimating dimensions from photographs I just rounded off to the nearest fraction and things fit together pretty good in the drawing. A real problem here is that an older European vessel may have been designed to the inch/foot, but was it the English inch, or the French, Dutch, Danish, Swedish ... inch? They were all different! Another trick you can use when you don't know the actual real world dimensions is to use "relative units." For example, in a drawing/photo make the hull length at the waterline 100 units. Then measure things relative to the hull length. How many relative units back from the bow was the fore mast, main mast, etc.? How tall were the masts in relative units? Just make your CAD drawing in relative units and everything will be in proportion. Then, if you learn the actual dimensions of any part you can rescale the drawing to make that part the right size in real world units, and everything else will also be the right size.

I have two headband magnifiers with plastic lenses. Both have a fold-up higher power lens and a permanent low power lens. I find this quick change feature to be very useful. I have another "head wearing magnifier" that has glass lenses with several degrees of magnification, but it takes quite a bit of time to change lenses. Also, the highest magnification lenses had an extremely short working distance, requiring me to get my nose into the work - not very useful! The glass may be better than plastic, but the inability to change magnification quickly has put the unit back in the box and on the shelf. For a long time I just used cheap off the rack eyeglasses with higher magnification than I normally needed.

Not knowing which vessel, the time period, or whether it had wood or steel masts, we can only guess. But Underhill did publish several drawings of different truss types for lower yards in Masting and Rigging The Clipper Ship and Ocean Carrier. He also included a sail and rigging plan for a two mast topsail schooner (Plate No. 44) in Masting and Rigging, and another for the schooner Kate in Sailing Ship Rigs and Rigging (page 56). The frontispiece in that book is a very nice perspective view of an unnamed two-mast topsail schooner.

The railroad ferry is of some interest for me. My grandfather was born in North Carolina about 5 years before the Civil War started. The war devastated the area so the family boarded a train headed west in about 1870. After a stop in Kentucky for several months they got on another train headed west. He told my Father that they crossed the Mississippi River at Memphis, Tennessee. The cars were loaded onto a ferry (but not the engine - it was too heavy). On the Arkansas side another engine was hooked on and they continued the journey to the end of the rails where the railroad was being built. There was a small railroad town named Atkins, Arkansas, and that is where they settled. That is where my parents were born. I have always thought it was an random series of events that brought them there. And the idea of crossing the river in railroad coaches on a ferry was interesting. I have researched this a bit, and I think the first railroad bridge was built across the Mississippi River at Memphis in about 1871.

I have sails at last! A few have the tablings and linings but there still are a lot of details to add. The model is 1:48 scale, where 1 foot scales to 1/4 inch. The sail cloths were two feet (48 inches) wide, and that comes out to 1/2 inch scale. I have a metal ruler that is 1/2 inch wide and that really helped me to draw the lines for the cloths and seams. It was also very useful for cutting the sails from the larger sheets of material. I mentioned earlier that this sail material is pretty tough (when dry). I am able to erase any errors when drawing the pencil lines for the seams. However, although most of the pencil marks are removed it isn't easy to get the last bit, leaving a faint pencil line where it isn't wanted. I found a simple way to fix that - I just paint over the lines with the original buff colored paint I used to color the sail cloth.

Light ships are interesting vessels, but you don't see many models of them. Nice choice for modelling, and nice work! There is a lightship (Columbia WLV604) museum ship near me at Astoria, Oregon. I enjoy visiting it occasionally. It was positioned at the mouth of the Columbia River from 1951 to 1979. I wonder about duty on one of these vessels. A plus would be that you were near "home" all the time, but it seems that it would be monotonous duty. In the Navy we visited many ports - we really did see the world. On the Columbia they would have seen the fog.

This "variable waterline" was called the "boot topping" when I was in the navy. It was a black stripe between the minimum and maximum load lines. You can see it clearly in this photo of an oiler running high and dry. When it was fully loaded only the very top of the black boot topping was visible.

I have just plunged down the rabbit hole again, trying to learn how sails were put together. After reading through eighteen books describing sail making, I have concluded that whatever one author says another will disagree with it! All agree that since the middle ages sails have been constructed with parallel cloth strips (cloths) that are sewn together. How they were sewn together and how wide the overlap of the cloths was is not always agreed upon. But most authors agree that for the last several centuries in Europe and America in most cases the cloth width was 24 inches. Everyone says the edges of sails were lined with a bolt rope for added strength, and amazingly every author says the bolt ropes were attached to the port side of fore-and-aft sails and the aft side of square sails. This was the only thing they all agreed on! The outer edges of the sail cloths (head, foot, leech and luff) were folded over and seamed (hemmed) for added strength. This was called tabling. Most agree on this, but which side of the sail was the tabling folded to? Almost none of the books say which side! The few authors that dare to venture a guess seem to agree that the tabling was on the after side of square sails. Some say the tabling was on the port side of fore-and-aft sails, but one author says it was on the starboard side (mainly on modern British racing yachts). Some parts of sails were strengthened with extra cloth pieces called linings (although a few authors also call tablings linings). Most agree that linings were on the face of square sails (the opposite side from the tablings). Some say linings were on the port side of fore-and-aft sails (along with the tablings and bolt rope). The reef bands were sewn to the forward side of square sails and to the starboard side of fore-and-aft sails. But one author claims reef bands were sewn on both sides of the sail. Another says reef bands were sewn under the leech linings. But if the reef bands are on the starboard side of a sail that means the linings must also be on the starboard side, and not on the port! You have to love it when one author says white is black, and another says black is white. And which end of the egg do you crack first anyway? ***** And now there is Phil's way! On square sails the tablings are on the aft side and the linings and reef bands are on the forward side. On larger ships bunt cloths and additional reinforcing bands are on the fore side. The top lining (to prevent chafing against the mast tops) is on the aft side along the foot of the sail. For fore-and-aft sails the tablings and linings are on opposite sides like the square sails. Tablings are on the port side, Linings and reef bands are on the starboard. Now I can get on with making the sails for the model!

Such "fancy" detail is appropriate on showboats like yachts and royal barges. It is probably too gaudy for more pedestrian work boats. But for a model it depends upon what you are trying to do. It would be inappropriate for a model that is supposed to be faithful to the original vessel (unless the original had the same designs as the inlay). But for a display model that is intended to be more decorative than authentic it certainly is OK. It all depends upon what you want to achieve. It's your model, so do what you like!

Roel, We will take your word for it! We don't have to know how it works, and you are doing an excellent job of modelling it.

I have been sidetracked for a few weeks but am now back at work on the sails. I had to redesign a few of the sails. After reading about how sails are made I had to rethink the designs to make them as a sail maker would, using full 24 inch cloth widths where possible. I changed the flying jib and jib to have a whole number of cloths along the foot of the sail, as well as adding the roach (curved foot). For the fore sail and main sail the design was changed to have a whole number of cloths across the head and foot - and the roach was added. The reef bands were changed to 6 inches wide (1/4 cloth width) and two reef bands were used instead of just one (Lees, page 154-155). I plan to install the foresail and mainsail first, along with their gaffs and boom. They are lower on the masts and will be "inside" all the other rigging for the topsails. They will have to be tied to the mast hoops, so I want to get them in place before adding all the additional rigging that might get in the way.