LucienL

Okay, now onto stage 3 of the build: masts, rigging and sails. First was the bowsprit. I built this primarily using AOTS rather than the kit instructions. This is an ongoing thing as the kit seems to deviate quite significantly from AOTS for the rigging likely for simplicity and ease of construction here. The rigging is doing my head in a little bit at the moment. The chain gammoning was an absolute pain. The hole in the bow to fit this was a bit to small and it was extremely difficult to thread chain through it multiple times to secure the bowsprit. Next were the masts, the ship is finally going vertical! I used a slightly thicker dowel for the fore and main masts, I think 8 mm. I found the spider hoops to be quite difficult. These were made by bending a 2 mm brass strip into two rings to go around the mast and the trysail mast. I then drilled holes in this brass strip to take the rings for the belaying pins. The rings for the belaying pins were cut from brass tubing and then I drilled holes in them to take nails and secure them onto the mast. I also used a trick from @brunnels with heat shrink tape to make all the mast hoops, which worked out great thank you! Deadeyes still kind of a pain, but I got there. I used chain to secure them rather than rope. Mizzen mast was mostly the same as the kit. I’m working on the standing rigging now. It’s a long process but just need to take it one rope at a time and I’ll get there. Maybe I will actually end up finishing this thing. Although, the final major hurdle that is sails is on my mind.

Okay, thank you both, that does help clear things up

Hi everyone. I am in the process of rigging my Beagle and am struggling a bit understanding how the mast tackle is supposed to work. I am not sure how the lines running through the blocks indicated by the red arrows is meant to finish. Should this tie off to a belaying pin on deck or just wrap around the base of the block? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for the kind comment Johnny. Yes, I remember having much trouble to get the deck right. I think after re-doing things enough times I sort of lucked into something that looks okay. I've also seen the method with black thread, which definitely sounds interesting and could work quite well.

After finishing the anchors, there were only a few small things before the deck details and the second stage of the build was finished. I secured the whaleboat and the gig onto the davits and coiled up the excess rope. I’ve upgraded my thread to the rigging cord from Syren now, it does look much nicer. I also noticed that there is a lot of detail around the bow included in AOTS that I had not included. This includes the all-important shitting hole or more tastefully; the “seat of ease”. After that, I took some more photos of the completed stage 2. The close ups really show how dusty parts of the ship have become. Looks alright from a distance, but I might need to have another go at tackling the dust. Parts of the ship have been sitting for three years now. Next up is masts and rigging.

Okay, so next steps were to fit all the boats to the ship. I made the chocks for the whaleboats out of the Sapele supplied in the kit. I had to fit them to the boats and add an extra layer of wood to make it level with the skid beam over the main deck. I also placed the davits and added the support beam found in AOTS After placing the boats, I realised that they are a little large. They are to scale, but I suspect that the deck in the occre model isn’t quite the right proportions for 1:60, which makes them seem a little big and makes the quarter deck a bit crowded I then went and did the anchors. I chose to keep the bower anchors with the iron stocks from the kit. Two of the bower anchors in the kit are given a ‘wooden’ stock that is actually a cast metal piece. I chose to replace these with wooden stocks that I made from sapele. I made some iron bands out of a thin masking tape that I painted black. I made up some new blackening solution. This time, I had access to lab grade copper sulfate and sodium carbonate, so I was hoping the higher degree of purity would mean I could add a bit less copper carbonate. The ratio was 0.5 g of copper carbonate to 20 mL of household ammonia. It basically worked as well as the homemade copper carbonate, it still took around 30 minutes to blacken the chain after cleaning with vinegar. I then fit the anchors onto the boat. I added some additional lashing as suggested by AOTS. I also fed the rope holding the chain through a hole in the bulwarks to tie off to some belaying pins. I can see that is what has been done in the model built for AOTS so I decided that it was worth it. I’m not sure how authentic this is or how anchor lashing would normally be tied off.

Thank you for the comment. I’ve realised now that I didn’t actually include very many details of how I did the hammocks in this log. I used a thin piece of fabric similar in texture to the sails used in the kit. I’m not sure where I found the fabric. I would cut a 1 cm by 1 cm square and roll it as tightly as I could. I would then use a bit of CA glue to seal it and then fold the roll of fabric in half (with the edge of the fabric facing inwards) with some CA glue again to hold it in place. Then I cut the roll with fabric scissors. The dimensions ended up at 0.3 cm width (the width of the space in the rail) and 0.38 cm long. There was some quality control where I would throw out the ones that didn’t look quite right. Then I would place them in the rails and check with a ruler to ensure that there were the same number of hammocks on each side of the ship, some squeezing or adjustment was necessary with tweezers. After the rails were full, I brushed some varnish over the hammocks to help keep them clean. I hope this helps, I tried a few different things including using wire to help with the rolling and holding them in shape but eventually found that it wasn’t really necessary.

Wow, this is an awesome build! I think the shiny copper and the red go really well together. Also, the kit on the cutter looks really nice.

Hey there. I'm working on the boats from the Beagle and am trying to consider some stretch goals for the amount of boat kit to include. I think at a minimum I will make a set of oars, masts/spars, boat hooks, grapnels and rudders for each of the 7 boats. Still debating whether to include a barrel and a compass. Are there other items that anyone would consider essential for a boat? Further, would all these items necessarily be stored in the boats or possibly below deck in some other storage space?

Hey brunnels. Thanks for the comment. I doubted my abilities a lot going into it. I think I am quite lucky with the way it turned out. Adding these whaleboats ends up concealing quite a lot of detail so it's definitely a choice to consider.

After completing the hulls, I could start working away at all the internal details. First, I laid the deck planks. These all were a bit narrower than the previous boat. I’m still not really sure that there is enough space between the planks and the thwart raiser. Then I worked away at the gratings, quarter decks and various benches After the thwarts went in, they really started to come to life I’m just going to post a bunch of pictures now. There were many small things on these boats. I think the thwart knees were a particular pain and they could be a bit better, but I’m otherwise very happy with the boats now. So this was my biggest point of improvement going into this build and I am extremely relieved it is done and very happy with how it turned out. These boats absolutely turned into a project of themselves, but I feel they take an important place in the model. I’ve learnt a lot through this process and am extremely grateful for all the logs and posts I’ve seen on this forum of other people’s small boats, that was a huge help. Anyway, onwards now. I can finally start thinking about the ship again and how I am going to fit all these little guys in.

After deciding to do all the boats in parallel, suddenly each step became quite a big task (shocking). After printing and cutting the body lines, I assembled these 6 skeletons for the jig. From left to right it’s the 23 ft cutter, the dinghy, the replacement gig, the 25 ft whaleboat and then the two 28 ft whaleboats. I filled these frames with paulownia this time. This wood is now quite readily available in Australian hardware stores (Bunnings) at sizes that are suitable for modelling. It’s not really as good as balsa for this particular purpose as it is less spongy, harder to sand and more prone to cracking when pushing pins through. It works quite well for other parts though as it is a bit sturdier than balsa, doesn’t ‘fuzz’ up in the same way and looks alright after filling and staining. Then here we are with the frames again This time I checked early to make sure the cutter was the correct size Slowly coming together Planking finished on the cutter Now while both the cutter and the yawl are carvel hull, the remainder of the boats are all clinker planked. By this point I had planked three carvel hulls with reasonable success and was ready to give the clinker planking a go. I used slightly wider planks and marked the overlap with a pencil using a 1 mm stick as a guide after tapering the plank. Then I could lay each plank from the garboard up, ensuring that each plank roughly met the pencil line This actually ended up going reasonably well first try, here is the dinghy I went ahead and planked all the other boats in a similar way From AOTS, the boats hanging over the sides of the ship are painted black and those stored on deck are white. I’m not sure if there is a reason for this correlation, but it is nice aesthetically. They all made it off the jigs safely, and this time the jigs survived too.

Hi Allen, that's not a bad idea, I'll have to keep that in mind for next time. That boat is beautifully detailed even at that scale.

Okay, so it’s been a while, but I haven’t exactly been idle. Over the past year and a bit I’ve been continuing to work on the Beagle’s boats. In my last post, which was January of last year, I had finished up the yawl. The next steps were to make the chocks for it on the ship. I next started on building the cutter that would have nested inside the yawl. This would have followed a similar construction plan, so it made sense to do it next. Similar to the yawl, I printed out the plans and used these to cut the pieces of jig I glued these into a frame and filled the gaps with balsa Then I sanded it back to the frames. I also thought it might be a good idea to add some glad wrap this time as I had such a problem getting the hull off the jig last time Then came lots of bending and staining frames to create a platform to lay the planks on Then planking Unfortunately, it was only at this point I decided to size the boat up next the yawl I had already made. I’m not sure how it happened, but the plans I printed out were too small, which resulted in the ship having significantly reduced dimensions compared to the yawl. I spent plenty of time trying to determine whether I could live with this. Ultimately, I figured that the scale problem would likely only become worse as I proceeded and make it more difficult to fit all the deck planks and thwarts into the boat at the dimensions I wanted. I decided to bite the bullet and start over. This caused a big break in progress, so when I eventually came back to the ship, I decided to try to make all 6 remaining boats in parallel to move the project along a bit faster.

Hi Allen the plans outline 2 different types of whaleboats (25 ft and 28 ft), both of which have only 5 tholes. The whaleboats made up 3-4 of the Beagle's boats. There are two other single banked boats in the plans, the yawl (the Beagle's largest boat) and a gig that was built/purchased as a replacement for one of the lost 25 ft whaleboats at some point around the ship's second voyage. The plans for both these boats have 6 tholes (or rowlocks in the case of the gig). I've included the plans for these two boats. The two other boats, the dinghy and the cutter are both double banked.