Ab Hoving

Beautiful Drazen, you both are master model builders! Ab

Hello Eberhart, Thank you for enlightening this peculiar thread of which the content seems to wonder into various directions with a nice view on Amsterdam in the 17th century.:-) This is surely a pleasure vessel. We know it under the name of 'kopjacht', a name I cannot explain. It is more often depicted on paintings of special occasions on the water, like this one, dealing with the visit of the Czar Peter the Great to Amsterdam in 1697-98. Another attractive type for model building...

Glad you take it this way Marcus. I didn't realize you planned a double planking. In that case I would do my best to sand the first planking up to a degree that nothing is left of the irregularities you caused by rather random planking. I would even go as far as using filler to get a smooth and even surface to lay the outer planking on. You might consider a layer of white paint so you can draw the lines of the planking directly on the hull. I don't know how you want to attach that planking. Just glue? It may be a bit late for an advice, but I think the use of balsa wood for spacers between frames is rather useless. I don't consider balsa wood as wood. You cannot use nails or dowels in that stuff. Any kind of wood would have been better, as it would have given you the opportunity to choose the locations of nails or dowels. Now you can only use your plywood frames. Plywood is useless in modelbuilding too. Another fairytale from the kit business. Where you stand now, you might just as well have built a solid hull, carving it into the right shape. Or you will have to give real building a try: Start with keel and posts and build your frames and planking like in the real thing. Have you read Harold Underhill's Plank-on-frame Models? I can recommend it. Ab

Jan is 100% right. Traditional shipbuilding is not an invention. It is an endles developing process that goes back to the bronze age (3000-800 b.C.), consisting of small steps forwards (and sometimes backwards). It took ages before it got to what is described for the first time in Dutch literature in 1671. There were no alternatives though. Because the method of designing ships hulls on paper was not invented yet (here you really have an invention) there was no possibility to do it frame-first. Traditional rules-of-thumb were all our ancestors had. Now is that impressive or not?

Hello Marcus, I want to make a few remarks about your planking. Sorry I didn't keep up with this thread but seeing your planking only now you deserve some clues because of your impressive drive to build this difficult model. The first thing you should let go is thinking that a ship can be planked with straight strips from fore to aft. It is a wide-spread misunderstanding caused by kit makers that straight strips can plank a round model. In reality there is not a single straight plank in a ship's outside planking. Take wider strips and shape them according to the shape of the ship: they look like crooked sabres. Never force the wood, treat it gently and it will do what you want without splitting or breaking. Twisting wood in different directions for instance is a proces that can only be done by applying heat, and only after you have made sure that the piece of plank you are applying really fits its destination. You show my Zeehaen model from the pictures in the book, but if you really study those pictures, you should see that every strake of planking consists of at least three separate pieces of wood and mostly more. Bending wood with heat (for instance a flame of a candle) is a technique you can master if you apply pressure to the hot wood and feeling that it gives way at a certain moment. That's how you get the shape. If you can mount the plank without using force, that's when you are on the right track. Secondly the mounting of the wales is, like you said yourself, crucial. If they are in the right location and have the right curve, very little can go wrong. Now look at your side view and ask yourself: is the curve of my whale flawless? I don't think you can say yes. You gave it a lot of attention, but you missed it slightly. A solution could be another technique: dress the unplanked hull with a wide strip of paper and draw the lines of the wales on it until you finally feel you have the shape right. Don't decide at once. Try to find a satisfying shape and put the model away for a few days. Then look at it again and repeat the proces. If you are satisfied with the run, take off the paper and cut the wales. You will see how curved the shape is. It also helps measuring if you draw a waterline on the unplanked hull for reference. It diminishes the problem of orientation and gives you a landmark to work from. This is really challenging stuff. I can honestly tell you that I'm wrestling with the shape of the hips of fluits up to today, even though I built quite a few. Recently I was trying my hand on a 'wadconvooier', a small armed admiralty vessel, used to protect merchants on the 'Zuiderzee'. It is not a ship type, but rather a function, for which several types were used. One of them really looks like a fluit, but shows another type of rig. I thought I could use old plans for another fluit I made by rescaling the draught. I was wrong. The result was another candidate for the dustbin where it is now, because the hips were placed too low: Finding the right curves is the most challenging part of the proces. And there is only one way to learn: the hard way.

Congratulations with your work Glenn. It must be years ago that we met in College Station. Keep good memories of that event. Ab

Of course. And there are so many more fantastic draughts by Jules!

An inspiring build!

In my opinion you don’t have to remove the ratlines to tighten the shrouds. I always leave my lanyards more or less loose until the ratlines are done. Then you can easily tighten them, taking care that the shrouds are stretched in an even way.

You are welcome. Why do you think I traded Amsterdam for Alkmaar?

Thank you. Let me emphasize that every modelbuilder has his own motivation for building and every motivation and hence every technique and every material is appropriate.

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.