Ab Hoving

Hello Eberhart, I only recently found out that you are chairman of the Arbeitskreis Historische Schiffsbau in Germany. As you know I sometimes contribute to its magazine Das Logbuch, invited to do so by the editor Robert Volk. You seem to lead an extremely active life. 🙂 Houtboard: I am not an expert on the fabrication of it, but I suppose even wood-dust is used. It causes the material to become more or less 'flexible'. You can make concave shapes by pressing it with round surfaces, like a spoon or an iron ball. It can also be filled and sanded, but I only use it for covering up the skeleton of a planned ship model. You are right that the result is not exactly crispy and clean, but I don't care, as I cover it with self-adhesive plastic strips, which improves the result. In cases where sharp contours are needed, like the wales of a ship (the most important part as it goes for catching the right sheer) I use 2 mm thick polystyrene. Nobody ever told me that you have to stick to paper once you started building in paper.... Compared to what I see accomplished here on this forum, I am not exactly what I call a good model builder, because in fact I have no interest in finished models to put them on the mantel shelf. Sometimes I give or throw them away, sometimes I sell one, I even considered burning some, as they take a lot of space and only gather dust. I only build because I want to learn something. For me model building is a technique I use, a way of scientific research, building itself is never my purpose. The end result is always something different from a ship-model, like knowledge, which is the reason why I am often reviewed by historians and replica builders. I have worked in wood all my life, but getting older, I am running out of time, so I switched to an easier material, being able to work faster. Having explored in model scale the way 17th century ships were constructed, I now turned to the outside looks of the vessels, trying to make them look as real as possible, so a Photoshop painting can be made in a convincing way. This leads to the conviction that too small details are totally nonsense (for me) to apply to a model, as a model can be compared to a real ship seen at considerable distance. From a hundred meters I cannot see what sort of head the nails of a ship have, so why should I bother to model them? I don't make real ships, they are only models, probably the most useless objects in the world... All this beside of the fact that I am notoriously lazy...:-)

Hello Jan, (funny how two Dutchmen have to communicate in a foreign language through an American forumsite :-)) In Dutch it is called 'houtboard' and I buy it in Amsterdam at an art-suppliers called Van Beek on the Weteringschans 201. It comes in various thicknesses. I know that local art suppliers don't sell it because it's an 'old-fashioned product', replaced by many more sophisticated materials, which are of course all useless for our purpose. Another problem is that it is so cheap that sellers are not very interested in holding stocks of it. Maybe you are planning a trip to our capital anyway to visit the Rijkmuseum, located at 400 meters from Van Beek....

And here is a picture of us (rigger Floris Hin and me) finishing the re-rig of the model in 2012. The model was relocated twice, once in 2007 and once in 2012. Dismasting took 2 1/2 days, rigging 4. I made a u-shaped construction to take off the masts with all its rope work and sails together, with the shrouds temporarily attached to the legs of the U and the mast tightly connected to the middle piece. Those were the days...

Thanks for sharing Kenny. I'm sure many people will be very glad to see all this. I hope you also enjoyed the 'special collections' with all the ship models well hidden in the basement of the museum?

It seems to me that you made a wrong choice. If it is a pirate ship you want to model, forget these big monsters. Pirates were not so well organised that they could manage big ships. You better find a smaller ship, about a hundred feet. That means of course that 24 pound cannons are a bit over the top. Fortunately you can simply scale your cannon down and you will never see the difference. If it is the 17th century you are looking for, you might consider the Heemskerck, Abel Tasman’s ship when he discovered New Zealand and Tasmania in 1642. His 100 feet long ship might have been suitable for a pirate. If you are interested you can send me a PM and I will send you the draughts.

Hi Marcus, You must have a lot of time at your disposal. If I look at your plans, you could easily fill two lives with them. 🙂 There must be plans for the William Rex, but I don't have them. About ten years ago I let a group of students do calculations on the ship because I did not trust the shape. Too little volume below the waterline. From this project (it turned out I was right) there must be a report in the museum. I will ask and come back to you about this matter. As for the rigging of 18th century Eastindiamen you might be interested in a rigging plan for 160 foot retourship I reconstructed from a VOC document from the middle of the 18th century. It was published in a book about the archaeological finds of VOC ships, the Hollandia Compendium, published by the Rijksmuseum in 1992. The plans might reasonably fit the Valkenisse rigging. The oldest VOC retourship of which plans have been published was Prins Willem (1651) by my predecessor Herman Ketting. There is a book from 1979 and there are plans, but I don't know how to get them. Perhaps other members can help you out, for instance Amateur? Apart from the plans for Valkenisse (1717) I don't know of any published plans, but I do have plans made after the 1697 Resolution, after which I started a model some time ago, but never finished it. I have no recent pictures of the state it is in at the moment but I can tell you, it takes a lot of study to get even this far. Anyway, if you are interested in the plans you can have them, send me a PM. Here is a preview: I hope you know what you are looking at. As I said, your plans will take a double life-time to execute.....

A hekboot was a hybrid ship, with the lower part lend from the fluit and the upper part from a pinas. Think of it as a fluit with a transom. The combination produced a wide merchant vessel with the accommodations of a pinas, like a wide captain's cabin. The only draught there is of the type is the elementary drawing I made from data from Van Dams book "Description of the East Indian Company" (1701). I add it here, but you have to a lot of imagination to make a model out of it.

I'm happy to take part in any discussion about shipbuilding, as long as you don't expect me to have all the answers. The contrary is true. The more I look at the subject, the less I understand. 🙂

Marcus: You cannot tell the difference. It is a matter of background. Apart from the big 'retourships' the VOC also built small warships, which they called 'yachts'. In admiralty circles such ships would be called 'frigates' and they looked very much the same. The only difference is in the decoration of the stern. Usually a frigate was a man-of-war with less than 40 guns. Jaager: I have a document written by Charles Bentam, the English shipbuilder who worked for the Amsterdam admiralty in the second quarter of the 18th century. He describes his method of design and starts with the location of the frames. The location was important for where the gun ports were placed. He is surprised that the Dutch cut their gun-ports after completion of the framing of the upper works. The conclusion must be that the idea of sliding frames was no option. The philosophy about how a ship should move through the water differed from location to location and from time to time. In the 17th century the Dutch idea of how a ship should sail was that it should more or less slide over the water, instead of cutting through it. The comparison with a duck's breast was made. This way of design produced very 'dry' ships, totally different of what we see in the age of the tea clippers, which were sharp and sailed more under than on the waters.

Peculiar. Van Yk describes the location of all of the four frames (of which two of them were identical) and does not mention the possibility of sliding. He does give a trick to derive the aft one from the fore one, counting in the amount of greater depth at the stern and the narrowing of the width of the hull. Archaeologists found a lot of traces and proof for shell-first building in Dutch shipwrecks, but so far I have never seen a report dealing with a typical 'Van Yk'-method built ship. There are so many questions to be answered and there is so little knowledge on the subject... The more I learn, the less I know.

I totally agree with you on the last point. For me it even the question if Van Yk used a mold loft floor at all. In my opinion it is very well possible that the shape of the four initial frames was drawn on the wood right away, without a drawn design on paper or on a floor. Rules of thumb work that way. Taking the shape for a new frame-part was done from the splines that that were fastened to the four frames. Even after 1725, when the first Dutch war ship (Twikkeloo) was built on the Rotterdam admiralty wharf by Paulus van Zwyndregt after a pre-drawn design, the same yard only placed 10 or 12 pre-drawn initial frames on the keel and proceeded taking the shapes of the missing parts from the ship itself. The advantage was a obvious: The demands for the quality of such a frame-part was much lower that whatever was made after a drawing. So the hybrid method of working after a drawn design and the shell-first method actually continued in the practice on the yard for ages.

My views on the matter of the development of shipbuilding in Europe is extremely limited. I have only been busy with Dutch efforts. There are very good studies done, for instance by Larry Ferreiro: Ships and Science: The Birth of Naval Architecture in the Scientific Revolution, 1600-1800 MIT Press 2006. ISBN 9780262311472 OCLC 743198863 Bridging the Seas: The Rise of Naval Architecture in the Industrial Age, 1800-2000 Mr Richard Unger has written something about the subject too if my memory serves me well: Dutch Ship Design in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (1973) Dutch Shipbuilding before 1800: Ships and Guilds (1978) Ships and Shipping in the North Sea and Atlantic, 1400-1800 (1997) I think you can find answers to your questions in those books. I'm just a model builder and not even a good one :-).

Your hull looks horrible :-)). Don't worry though, the planking will hide it all. The trick with the planking is that you will have to judge the run of the wales only from the side. They all seem to have the same regular distances. But seen from above you get a varying width between some of the wales, especially in the aft part. It even needs extra planks there. Once you have those wales in the right place, nothing can go wrong. Maybe this picture can give you a bit more information of how it works: As you see my hull looked terrible too, but the end result was satisfying.

Shell first as described by Nicolaes Witsen (1671), means that the planking of the bottom and the turn off the bilge was done first. Frame parts were installed after that. The alternative way, as described by the Delfthaven shipbuilder Cornelis van Yk (1697), uses four pre-erected frames, to which splines were attached that defined the hull shape. Frame parts were added and the planking was done after that. The remarkable resemblance is that in both methods no preliminary plans were made. Two different methods with a distance of less than 50 kilometers between them. I studied these during half a century and still don't understand how such a thing was possible.

The question is how the Brits and the Spanish did it. Were their methods comparable? I don't know. We know of two different methods in Holland and they do not seem to be connected. Conventional is a strange term in this respect...

The ships for foreign countries were usually built on private shipyards, for instance in Amsterdam, but Dutch shipbuilders also went abroad to build ships there. I don't know what you call a conventional method, but the Dutch used shell-first up to the end of the 19th century. Only the Admiralty yards were more progressive up from 1725. The Vasa was certainly built shell first.

Beterschap. Ab

The latter. I use Magic Sculpt, but there are other two-component products.

And apart from that: a ship can reach an age of over 50 years or more. During its existence it is adapted, changed, damaged, repaired, rebuild even, and still I get questions from people who urge me to declare that the drawing they use are absolutely trustworthy and correct. Come on, we build models for fun and hope to learn something from it. That's all. Some are better, some are worse. So what? Enjoy your hobby. It's the only thing of which you can decide everything upon in your life.... 🙂

Hear, hear. Well spoken!

If I understand you well you can win a prize in a competition by doing something totally wrong. Nice qualification for the jury... No offense to the organizers of competitions, but maybe one should not join a competition at all. It seems to me that the items the jury reviews have little to do with knowledge of ships and a lot with 'thumb-nail-polishing' and 'rivet-counting'. In Holland we have a word for it which absolutely will be banned from this forum when I write it down, but it has to do with an unnatural sexual relationship with ants 🙂. Personally I prefer a rather sloppy, but true model with the right atmosphere over a perfectly build wrong one. It must be my personal handicap that I refuse to compare one ship model with another on the basis on how totally random details have been applied. How nails and wooden pins are used may be in a drawing looking great, but I have made enough plans to know that more than half of what we draw is pure guess work, of which we hope it may be somewhere in the direction of a perfect depiction. Plans are not sacred. In my 60 years career as a model builder I never used a plan without changing all kinds of things in them. Just have fun building and let juries judge their own models....

Ondra, you are a gifted modeler. The maker of the plans must have had a great imagination, but wether his design is truthful or not, you are doing a magnificent job. And you have one mighty excuse: The shape of the model may be wrong, but up to now we don’t have any written or archaelogical clue how it really must have looked, so who are we to reject? No problem so far with your build. But just promise me to throw that horrible German book in the dustbin after you finished your model. It is no good as far as Dutch ships are concerned and there are four of them there, I believe. For all four we can say that any resemblance with existing Dutch shiptypes is entirely incidental. Good luck.

Hi Petr, Thank you for your kind words. If you need any help for your next project I will gladly assist, for as far as I am capabel. 🙂

Thank you Pete, and you are welcome. It is quite an honor to be an inspiration for somebody. You almost make me blush. Tools are necessary, but with some inventiveness you can come a long way. Before I had a lathe I made my guns with the aid of an electric drill in a vice. I cannot say they were really top, but for me at that moment they were satisfying. And that is the key. Why are we making models? What do we want to achieve? Finding out the answer to that question can save you a lot of money and head-aches. All my life I used to build models mainly to get answers to my questions about construction, building methods and design. Now that most of these questions have been answered I can work on how realistic a model can look. It is my conviction that making models realistic does not require details up the micron. If you look at a model, you are actually looking a the full size ship, just smaller because of the distance. That means that a lot of details are simply not necessary, as long as the overall impression of the model is correct. Who can see a nail at a distance of 100 yards? But that is just my opinion at the moment. In the past I did add parts that would never be visible unless the model was broken down. There are dozens of reasons to build ship models and they are all valid. The choice of material is absolutely of no importance, as long as you like what you make. In the end we do this for fun, don't we?

Beautifully executed!