Dr PR

Look at contemporary pictures and paintings of the Prince to see if it had gun port covers all around. Gun port lids/covers would normally be the same thickness as the planking on the outside surface, and would fit inside the opening (flush with the side of the ship). Inside the opening would be trim pieces that the lid closed against. Sorry I don't recall the nautical name fpr the trim pieces. The inside of the port cover would have another layer of wood that fit inside the trim pieces. Some vessels had two part lids - one half swung down and the other swung up. Sometimes one or both parts were not hinged. The pieces latched inside the port opening and were removed when the guns were used. These port lids may or may not have an opening to allow the cannon to protrude. If you add port lids be sure they swing up high enough that they do not interfere with the cannon barrels. This goes also for the trim inside the port opening that the lid closes against.

I have mixed sanding dust with clear paint to create a thin paste for filling gaps and blemishes. Just be sure to use a paint that is compatible with your final finish.

Steve, I have combined much of what I red in Marquardt and other books into a thread on topsail schooner rigging. https://modelshipworld.com/topic/25679-topsail-schooner-sail-plans-and-rigging/?do=findComment&comment=750865

Thought I would post a note saying I am still alive and well. Work on the model has slowed as other summer activities are taking priority.

Some books say the fall (at B2-2) is tied off below the block B2-1 to the line between the block and the hook. This is a running backstay. When the ship tacks the windward side backstay is hooked to the ringbolts shown in the drawing and tightened to take the strain on the mast. The leeward side backstay is loosened and unhooked to allow the boom to swing outboard. Both the block B2-1 and the runner tackle fall have hooks. This allows the tackle to be moved quickly. Nothing is tied permanently to the ring bolts.

Shawn. Don't sweat the missing eye bolts. You can find several gauges of brass wire at a local hardware store and it is easy to make more pieces when you need them. If you want to get fancy you can solder the rings to close the gap (if you have a soldering iron and soldering experience). And if you really want to go all out you can blacken the brass with Birchwood Casey Brass Black. I posted about my method here: https://modelshipworld.com/topic/19900-brass-black/?do=findComment&comment=991402 You will find it handy to have the brass wire around to make a number of fiddly bits not supplied in the kit.

Steve, I have used Duco cement for almost everything in wooden ship builds. It is nitrocellulose in acetone - brings back memories of childhood model building. It works to hold the eyebolts in place in the deck, and I have never had one pull out on models 60+ years old. However, just about any glue/cement should work. You shouldn't put enough stress on any of the rigging to pull an eyebolt out. If you do, and the eyebolt doesn't pull out, the mast/spar will be bent. Just go easy and use the minimum tightness to keep the lines taut. You are working on a model of a beautiful ship, and doing a nice job! I see you are following Chapelle, and his books are excellent references for this schooner. Karl Heintz Marquardt's The Global Schooner, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Maryland, USA, 2003, is far and away the best reference I have found for masting, sails and rigging of schooners. It is the "Lees" for schooners. All other references describe large square-rigged vessels, and much of this does not apply to schooners!

gaffrig, Are you referring to gun port covers/lids? The plans clearly show gun ports (the openings the guns shoot through). I have seen four basic types of gun port covers. 1. A hinged "door" that swings up to open the port. 2. A split port cover, with the lower half that is hinged and swings down. The upper half may be hinged to swing up, but it seems just as common for the upper half to be latched in place when closed and just removed to open the port. In some cases both halves are removable. 3. Two part doors hinged on the sides to swing open to either side of the opening. I don't think this was common on American vessels. 4. No port covers at all. For the Lynx you should probably not use hinged gun port lids - at least not the single piece that swings up. Because the top of the ports is the bottom of the cap rail there is no place to mount lids that swing up (I made this mistake in my Albatros Baltimore clipper build). I think the two part port lids are more appropriate, possibly with the bottom part hinged down. It was common for the lids to have an opening that the cannon barrel protruded through - with a plug in the end of the barrel to keep water out. Chapelle's drawings of the Lynx (Mosquidobit) show the sides of the gun ports vertical, and not perpendicular to the sheer (Howard Chapelle, The Baltimore Clipper, Edward W. Sweetman Company, New York, 1968, pages 84-85). This is THE reference book for Baltimore cloppers! However, it doesn't say much about sails and rigging other than a few simple sail plans. Keep in mind that the British captured the Lynx and renamed it the Mosquidobit, so most of the plans and drawings are under the latter name. Karl Heintz Marquardt, The Global Schooner, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Maryland, USA, 2003, is the best reference I have found for masting, sails and rigging schooners that I have found. Most books talk about large square-rigged vessels and ignore schooner completely. Marquardt is the "Lees" for schooners and is very detailed. I just discovered your build and I will be following. I love these schooners!

Congratulations John! Beautiful model!

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.