Thukydides

That's awesome to hear Ben. Your rope is fantastic and this is proof I am not the only one who thinks so.

Those blocks look fantastic.

Log #91: The Topgallant Stay & Topsail Braces Thank you again for all your kind comments and encouragement. I suspect that there are only a few more log entries to go as the list of things remaining to do is getting smaller and smaller. I once again underestimated how much rope I would need and ran out of the 0.35mm rope I need to do the jib so I decided to proceed with the topsail braces and topgallant stay. The topgallant stay was a little bit of trouble as I had already attached the block it will run through to the model and both ends of it need to be served. To get round this problem I first served the eye to slip over the top of the mast and then ran the rope through the block and stuck the other end in my serving machine. Since the rope is rather long there was enough slack that I was just able to get the serving done. Steel calls for 3in rope for the stay which is just slightly bigger than the 2.5in used for the topgallant backstays. However at scale this rounds to the same size of rope (0.35mm). This presented a problem, do I go with a slightly larger rope to illustrate the size difference or go with the more accurate rope size. In the end I decided to stick with 0.35mm rope. To attach the stay to the stem I used the kit arrangement as Goodwin is not clear how this is done. The lanyards were 0.2mm rope. The topsail braces steel give as 2in. This equates to 0.25mm at scale and I used BE’s arrangement just running them straight down to the bowsprit instead of the kit arrangement of the pendant with a block on it. And here you can see the tip of the bowsprit with the three lines running through the triple block. The block seemed a bit large and if I had any I would have preferred to use a 4mm one given the rope sizes running through it, but all I had was 5mm so it will have to do. At this point I tied off the squaresail bowlines to the pin rack on the windlass and also ran the topsail braces to this pin rack. I plan to add rope coils to all of these once I am done tying ropes off in this area. And finally here is a picture of her with all the new lines. She looks much more imposing with the braces and stay on her.

The nails appear to be just in front of or just behind the frames. The most logical answer to me seems that you add some cross beams secured to the side of the frames right below where the nail patterns would be. This makes intuitive sense as the platform has to be secured to something and that something really should be secured to the frames. Great work as allways.

Fantastic planking job

Fantastic Glenn. She is quite the model.

I believe that is a later print of the above painting. If you look at the inscription it says it was published in 1814 for the naval chronicle. That being said if I had to guess he likely based it off of someone else sketch.

It is a fantastic painting and one of the few potential visual representations of the Sphinx ships. Do you plan to paint the lower counter black then? I did a bunch of digging but was never able to establish if Serres was actually present or if he worked off someone else's sketch or if he just made up the scene based on accounts of the action. During the seven years war many of his paintings were based on sketches from an eyewitness so given he was fairly old at this point I suspect it was one of the latter two options. At the very least he would have seen enough English ships to know what in general they looked like.

Thanks Ronald England has not been easy on the eyes this euro. I am sort of torn between cheering for them and wanting them to loose so I don't have to watch them anymore 🤣.

Log #90: The Bowsprit Shrouds Thank you again to everyone who has liked and commented. The end is in sight now. Now that I have all of the ropes tied off at the base of the mast it was safe to finally finish off the spreadsail braces. You may remember that the pendants for these were done a long time ago when I first raised the yard and I delayed finishing them to preserve my access to the base of the mast. For this I used 0.35mm rope spliced to a hook on one end and tied off a timber head after being run through a 3mm block at the other. I also decided this was the time to rig the foresail halyard. I gave this a fair bit of consideration as how to do this is not entirely clear from the Goodwin book, but in the end I decided to copy the arrangement used by BE. I used 0.25mm line run through a 3mm block hooked on to the stem and then through a 3mm block on a pendant which is seized to the mainstay. The line was then run down to a cleat on at the base of the mast. With that done, it was time to start work on the bowsprit. According to Steel the bowsprit shrouds are 5.5in diameter with 10in double blocks. Goodwin doesn’t show this part in detail and the kit uses single 3mm blocks which are a bit on the small size for the 0.6mm rope I used. So I decided to go with 4mm double blocks. At this time I also prepared the triple block for the end of the bowsprit. The serving of the eyes of the shrouds was a bit tricky as this had to be done on model, so what I did was serve a section as can be seen above. Then I spliced the ends together on the model and then sized over the splice manually. For the tackles of the shrouds I used 0.35mm rope and tied it off to the base of the eyebolt attaching the blocks to the hull. And here is what everything looks like at the moment. Things are a bit of a mess as I am waiting till most of the other lines are in place before I tie off the bowlines.

Good job on the gratings. That is some precise work you have done by hand there.

Welcome to MSW

Looking really good. Very impressive.

Great planking job. The garboard is looking really good.

Happy Canada Day / Memorial Day.

That is very kind of you to say. My goal with this build has been to figure out what I am capable of producing and though I have in some ways exceeded my expectations, there has also been a wide gulf between when I first try something and my later work (as evidenced by the above picture). My goal for the next build will be to hopefully bring up the quality of my weaker work so there is less variance across the build. I do hope other first time builders will be encouraged that even with limited experience you can push the boundaries of what can be produced with a kit. Granted having such a high quality kit as a starting point certainly helps.

I really like those

It is looking good. As with all skills you get better with practice. I find if you take your time and are not afraid to redo things that are not quite up to standard, you may surprise yourself with what you can achieve.

Congrats, great job.

I think the bow shouldn’t be too hard to change provided you are planning on painting it. You could just build up additional material. The biggest challenge I imagine will be the redesign of the stern and quarter galleries. If you get those three things right then I suspect it will look very close to the Christinia. For the gun ports I think they should be fairly easy to modify (just use the longitudinal pieces for the gun port framing, but place your own vertical pieces). Obviously this will necessitate you planking this area instead of using the laser cut pieces, but should be very doable. Overall sounds like a very interesting project. I approve of your decision to try and push your boundaries a little and make this your own. I will be following along to see how this progresses.

Log #89: Mainmast Finished Time for a minor update. I finally got round to finishing the topsail bowlines and so was able to put in the topgallant sheets. I am not planning on adding bowlines to the topgallant yard. For the topgallant sheet I used .35mm rope and for the topsail bowlines 0.25mm rope with the eyes served with fly tying thread. The topgallant sheets are belayed to the foremost shroud cleats. With that done, the mainmast is finished apart from the topgallant stay which will have to wait until I get to the end of the bowsprit. Then more rope coils. I feel at this point I have the hang of them and my latest jig seems to give me the right shape. Just two small spots of super glue to tack things in place, a blast from the hair dryer and then a coating of very thinned matt varnish to hold it all together. If you want a more detailed explanation of my process you can find it here and here. You can see below the progress I have made on these. The one on the rightmost cleat was my first attempt, the next was somewhere in the middle and the leftmost is the latest one using the above jig. And that is all I have for today. Not a huge amount of progress, but it has been a busy week so I only got a little time to work on the model. I now have to give some thought as to what order I will tackle the ropes associated with the bowsprit. Thank you to everyone who has stoped by to take a look.

Fantastic, I really like these.

I think they look great. Lots of nice details and folds to highlight and give depth to the models.

Great job, you should be proud of her.

Edit the title of the first post I believe