Mike_H

Well this is excellent news! That and bigger, better and faster laser cutters I interrupted a holiday in the hope of hearing of progress - and boy what progress! Can't wait to order one.

And so here she is, and probably finished! So, first of all some pics of the full rigging. The instruction book is pretty clear - though you have to combine the information for with, and without, sails. I used the sails exactly as supplied and rigged them all hauled tight. I am aware that sails are often not installed because first of all they are very hard to do accurately at scale, and also because they hide much of the work of the builder. As a modeller I accept both of those points, but feel they really are issues for the cognoscenti, the average slightly interested friend or family member will assume that a sailing ship should have sails. So, first for that reason, I rigged 'em. A secondary consideration is that the running rigging is literally superfluous if no sails are present, and in that regard having the sails has been a joy. The sails also speak to the whole purpose of these craft: they were very fast and very weatherly, carrying a truly prodigious area of canvas for such small craft And some details Shortly after I had rigged the square sail I realised that the tacks and sheets and the foot of the sail would not hang as they should so reflected on how to stiffen the sail athwartships. A stall at a Christmas market was selling florists wire for building wreaths, I bought a roll but it was shiny black. A few minutes of googling found the perfect refinement - white coated wire for sugar flowers. I was able to thread a wire - athwartships - through the hem along the foot of the sail. It works a treat in providing shape and stiffening. Sheets and tacks now run outboard as they should - though hardly along the graceful curves that they should. Given my time again I would think about stiffening along foot and leach of all the sails and perhaps more. But not this time. And a little reflection: She's a beautiful small vessel, showing a style quite different from the square-rigged ships we so often model from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I think a single-masted rig should be on everyone's list to build and this kit worked ideally for me. The materials are beautiful to use and plentiful in quantity (though why anyone would dye their own 0.25 mm thread is beyond me - fortunately I had a large supply). The large A3 instruction manual is beautifully conceived and magnificently clear. It suffers a little in clarity through the revisions to the model, but the revisions are all welcome. The sails were provided for free, and apart from being slightly miss-cut, I was happy to use them as provided, and I really do think the sails are worth having My biggest uncertainty in the whole project concerned attachment of the lower yards to the mast, and of some of the rigging, all lower than the gaff. With sails rigged it's obvious that if the gaff is to be raised or lowered at any speed then for the rings holding the spanker to be able to descend or rise, the mast must be free of rigging. And surely it must be possible to deploy the spanker in a hurry - to chase or flee abruptly to windward, for example. I couldn't find an image of the Alert model in the Science Museum - but all the cutter rigs I could find online showed no obvious attachment of the lower yards to the mast - so I've not added any. I used simple trusses for the topsail and t'gallant yards, and I suppose the lower yards could have had light trusses swiftly removed before deploying the spanker, but I cannot see how parrels could have been used on those two. But in fact, one of the alleged defects of rigging sails - they hide details - is a virtue in that they hide the attachment of the yards. They also hide details I chose not to add - hanks and coils of rope attached to all the belaying points. The pins just struck me as too small to take hanks of rope, and the decks too crowded already with sails, for coils to look right. Some things in modelling just don't scale well - mainly things to do with rigging thread, in my experience! This was meant to be a sort of infill project before HMS Surprise hoves into view, where I could try a few things out (sails, bare planking) - and hone some skills (too many to mention). It was all that, but much more: rich in features, novel in rig, but above all, beautiful.

Have been back building - but not posting. So here is the first of a couple of updates. The standing rigging was reasonably straightforward . I built a jig to line the dead-eyes up while tensioning the shrouds, which meant I could tie throat seizings. Naturally managed to rig at least two of them with the eyes the wrong way round, but spotted it pretty quickly After about 100 clove-hitches my mojo returned and I rattled down the shrouds in a a couple of sittings. Am I weird for enjoying that? I space the ratlines at 5 mm, so 32 cm or 12.5" IRL. I've previously persuaded myself that that follows historical precedents. But I think 7 mm might look better. Once the stays are in you get some perspective of just how much sail these relatively small ships carried. And sails are the subject of the next post.

I very much prefer the one with rails, but well-understand why it's a pain to print. If you printed it with brackets, then a rail would be easy-enough to scratch, or could you print the rail and brackets as one piece and leave us to glue that to the stove proper? Anyway, I vote for rails.

That is what we want to hear! For a small business, cash-flow is king, and we need this small business to flourish. I seem to have missed the "dusty discussions". Shame (not!) 😆

Well, what fantastic news to return to. Waiting for HMS Surprise (as told by PO'B) is what has stopped me from building a frigate, so I will be all-in for this. My birthday is in May, so if you could have her released by then, that would be dandy, thanks!

Just had a couple of weeks back in the shipyard, and made myself some spars. All pretty straightforward using the Proxxon mill and lathe. Only challenge of note is that the heel of the bowsprit is specified as 6 mm square but the opining in the bitts is 5 mm. Just meant I had to machine the bowsprit twice. I opted to paint the yards, booms and gaffs black and stain the masts with three coats of oak wood dye - these rather poor photos don't really show that , but I like the effect. Shrouds and standing rigging next - and a couple of hundred clove hitches for the ratlines. But that will wait until we find some sun. So more later.

Here, hear! I wonder also about swinging them from davits. Though I think I could scratch build the davits easily enough, would it make sense to offer davits of varying sizes as an (expensive) extra?

This being summer - so not ship-building season for me, I've not been on MSW for a while. I came here on spec - and wow!! What a build. Many congratulations Mike

What great progress since Christmas - and magnificent painting. Rigging for small guns is always a challenge - I chose to do none on Alert. Best of luck!

Well, it has been a while... But we've been home for about three weeks, and after 10 weeks of marvellous sunny, dry warm wether in Australia we have returned to truly abysmal spring weather here: 6ºC, constant northerly wind and nearly continuous rain - interrupted by sleet and hail. So perfect modelling weather! The hull is now finished, with scarcely a problem - beyond periodic lapses of competence. This iteration of the Alert kit has some documented, and perhaps some less-documented differences from the manual. The first I noticed in recent work is that the cap squares are provided as small PE parts, but are also laser-cut into the sides of the gun carriages. The laser-cut detail is astonishingly high resolution so I wanted to use it, but that means the build order of assemble and glue carriage, paint carriage, add gun barrel, won't work since the barrel needs to be included before the gluing. I felt that painting the components and then assembling would not work well as the tolerances on the carriage are very fine and the paint would mess that up. But in any event, I was inclined to stain the carriages oak-brown, so I did. The results, I think are remarkable. Note the detail of the laser-cut cap square - including the tiny rebates that mean that it takes paint without it running all over the place. For scale, the lines on the cutting mat are on a 1 inch grid. A less-pleasant experience was the discovery that the chain (plates) sit lower than shown in the drawings - indeed they sit exactly on the water-line, which is not all that plausible IRL, and very inconvenient in that I had added a waterline batten. A simple lesson learnt: where relative positions are going to be important, measure the parts! But anyway, she looks OK! I've got the mill and the lathe set up, so mast and spars, here I come.

My word, this is beautiful work! I must commit to giving this much attention to detail (on some future model!)

Beautiful to behold. Just beautiful.

Final post for a while while I, the Admiral and one of my bikes seek a couple of months of winter sun. The hull and deck furniture are pretty-well complete - apart from guns, channels and one or two other things. No major traumas (that I can remember). Opted for the PE gratings, as the rebates in the coamings were sized for them, rather than the laser-cut pear wood. As a piece of painterly whimsy I decided the sky-light is glazed and the glazing bars are painted white. And as I have before, I fitted a copper rain cap on the galley flue That's it for now. Back in the spring.

Done some decorating - of the hull that is. Fitted the rough tree rail, and the rather beautiful scroll decorations. As an original act, I chose to paint the outboard edge of the rail in yellow ochre to match the other embellishments. To good effect, I think. I found the rough tree rail rather challenging - mainly because the cut-outs in the capping rail were smaller that the size of the various inserts. I thought I could just trim these latter with a scalpel, but it ended up a bit rough and ready. Should have used my Proxxon mill. Installing the decorative scrolls was time consuming but went well. The manual suggests spraying the paint on while the parts are still attached to the PE sheet to avoid getting dobs of paint on the reverse. Spraying paint in the the spare bedroom was never going to happen, so I did as follows Stuck the unpainted PE parts on masking tape, painted the PE pieces, sliced the tape around one piece, pulled that tape off (revealing the unpainted reverse - success!), trimmed the paint with a small scalpel I attached the PE to the hull using @James H's floor polish method. Works astonishingly well.