Jaager

A Sloop-of-War (or corvette for an easier to type word) was a three masted vessel with one gun deck. Peacock II - the one that began as part of the U.S. Ex. Ex. was launched in 1828. It was wrecked on the Columbia river bar. Peacock I 1813 was also a corvette - 3 masts. It did not have a forecastle or a quarter deck, so no waist. It may have had a spar deck - I do not know when these were added to corvettes - but they were mostly sun shades over the main deck that could be walked on to handle the sails - too light for ordinance. The Dolphin that visited in 1826 was a schooner and not a frigate. It was the second of that name. The name Dolphin was reused in 1836 for a brigantine that was a sister to the Porpoise - brigantine - rerigged as a brig - that was one of the two vessels that completed the U.S.Ex.Ex. Peacock I and Dolphin II have plans done by HIC and are available from the S.I. The six vessels that began the U.S.Ex.Ex. also have plans at the S.I. although the Flying Fish is a substitute using Webb's John McKeon as a substitute. Which needs scale adjustments to match the size of the NY pilot schooner Independence (re christened Flying Fish by the Navy). The sailing model in the newspaper photo from 1924 is at best a chimera from the builder's imagination. The hull looks inspired by pre revolutionary merchant vessels and the rig late 19thC. The gun locations look to be inspired by post WWI German decorator models as does the hull itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartouche For this site, it is a tag that is part of the title, if the author has chosen to include one or more.

Wrong date - wrong forum - look in 1851-1900 - scroll down a bit and when you get to the latest log - click on the LGBD cartouche and everyone that has that cartouche will pop up.

The following is mostly accurate - it is easier to write in absolutes, yet almost nothing really is: Collecting ship model kits is mostly a total expense. An investment ain't in it. You may as well collect full Kleenex boxes. As an entry for wooden models of sailing ships, plastic kits are a negative preparation. Unrealistic expectations about what instructions will provide must be overcome. I have a sense that some have been so frustrated and indignant over the nature of especially older kit instructions that they have abandoned wooden ship modeling. An "I'll show them." response. They did not accept that learning esoteric and difficult new "language" and skills is necessary, It is the challenge of the thing that is a great appeal. It is not something that can be totally mastered. It is finite, but that number is much bigger than a lifetime. Plastic is mostly a really terrible to use to replicate a wooden vessel. If you care about wooden ships, use wood to model them. You sorta have to do it to understand the difference in feel. Plastic is much better than wood to replicate a steel vessel.

Blue Jacket has a selection of small craft at a larger scale. Model Expo has the Shipwright trio as well as several in Midwest line. Wye River Models has a series of Bay water craft - even if they are from Maryland. It reads like IACA is one of those situations where the spirit of the law should be honored, but an absolute adherence gets into a world of the absurd. What you do in your home and keep to yourself is of no concern to anyone but yourself. Just because the authors of the law were witless dullards .... In any case, if you make your grand daughter your co-author, your should be OK.

@Bob Cleek interesting essay, thanks, Using a hardwood instead of a grass to make chop sticks is foolish. While it is essentially trash as far as a forest product is concerned, the whole Cottonwood family is plenty useful while it is still on the hoof. If the whole equation for the effect of using Cottonwood instead of a grass for something this frivolous was run, the result would without doubt find that Cottonwood is by far the more expensive option. It is just that the planet on the whole is subsidizing the difference. Actually, a chop stick is not complex in shape and is easy to clean for reuse if the starting material is quality.

Allan, I posit something that is probably very unpopular, but likely the case: The several wooden Old Timers and all of the modern replicas are absolutely dependent on the interest of tourists and the general public. It is Show Time or Death for them. The look of the decking - the width and color of the caulking and obvious trunnels probably has more to do with what the public expects to see and what the most economical commercial products present than actual practice 200-400 years ago. From the various photos posted here, most look too wide and too constrasty. @Bob Cleek Since there are a lot of species of Bamboo - that is likely the case. But we have no control over what is on grocery store endcaps. I also suspect that the skewer manufacturers get a different species with every lot. For it to be predictable - they would probably have to tree-farm their own supply. It is a grass, so it would be easier than Oak or even Pine.

CA is nasty and toxic. Its speed is handy, but not necessary. Life would probably be simpler of you eschew it altogether. Between PVA and two part epoxy most all our needs are covered. Heat activated PVA can replace the instant bond in the few instances where that is absolutely necessary. StewMac has a premixed Fish glue that might be fun to explore. There are fads of silicon based dry lubricants for belt sanders and bandsaw blades that should be banned from your shop - bullseye in a clear finish.

You could consider building small vessels at a larger scale. I am thinking boats. Tell a story about their evolution - which will work better if all are the same scale. Mystic and its fellows have a multitude of mostly ignored small craft plans to choose from. I was recently bitten by a bug to explore the various classes of 18thC RN Establishments liners. The NA is my focus so the guns would just be a time consuming distraction. So I will omit them. If you tackle a multi masted subject, go for stub masts

Actually, I am potentially quite the fan - under one condition. That is if the trunnels are used to actually secure the planks - they go thru the plank and into the frame or beam. (But they do make a hash of the frame or beam integrity.) Hitch chocks on lills take care of any needed clamping. However, the cost has become too high for me now. I have moved from 1:48 to 1:60 - so the diameter is a problem. Even the finest brass pins become too large. Bamboo does not draw all that efficiently in the #76-#80 range and I do not have any pins that small anyway. (The procedure is to use pins with hitch chocks to fix the planks, then pull the pins, use a broach in the hole and then drive in the Bamboo.) Finishing out the proper pattern requires a lot of attention and a lot of time. I have been considering using copper wire instead of brass pins along with Bamboo - since for at least one time period, half wood and half metal was used. But I find that the copper offers too much resistance to being drawn by me. The contemporary French model have examples of brass trunnels. I think that there is at least one old model where iron was once used - except that now it is a hole with an iron oxide stain in a broad ring in the wood around the hole. No insult is intended to the fans of trunnels, but it seems seems absurd to me to go to all the work if drilling shallow holes and filling them with faux trunnels. It might be worth the effort if the trunnels are actually doing a job. For just looks that are essentially anti-historical - naw.

It depends on objective and the type of model that you are building. On the real ship, the deck fasteners were essentially invisible. They were counter sunk, given a dose of sticky water resistant material and sealed over with a plug of the same species as the decking, not end grain, but grain oriented to run parallel with the deck grain. If you got on your hands and knees, and looked closely, the outer circle would be visible. If it is a fad based modelers convention look, anything goes. A curiously popular look with no basis in reality is plank butts on the same beam in every other strake and fake trunnels at just the butts. It probably should include rhinestones, balloons, and glitter. On the contemporary models with hull planking trunnels, the trunnels were likely real fasteners. I like the idea of mechanical fasteners, but because of the material physical limitations, the trunnels are over scale. Plus, it is really tedious to draw thousands of strings of fine bamboo. On a real ship, the slush or paint would hide the trunnels and spikes.

Cyanoacrylate - Super Glue - it is an 11 footer for us crusty traditionalists. The stuff is toxic when in a gas phase. The stock bottle does not like its content being exposed to the atmosphere. Water is the catalyst - even water vapor. It reacts quickly. The bond is strong against perpendicular forces and weak against horizontal (sheer) forces. I found that PVA dried quickly enough to stiffen the end of a line. Shellac works quickly.

My beams will be decked. The area where the beam sits on the clamp will be hidden. No way am I going to notch the clamp or the end of the beam. I intend to forgo knees. Certainly no lodging knees - no point - however - the gap between each beam is a neato location for a chock that is as wide as the clamp and high enough to just avoid interfering with the deck planking. It should lock the beam and be yet another location of tension in the hull as it equilibrates with Temp and humidity changes.

There is a recent thread here about mast making. A search should bring it up - and probably similar older ones. A lathe is a cool tool and many here are stretching credibility in search of an excuse to buy one. The cold blooded bottom line is that if it for use on wood, a lathe is overkill and unless you make a concerted effort to use it for jobs that can just as easily be do using simple tools, it will be an expensive door stop. What a lathe is useful for is for making other tools - turning ferrous metals. I bring this up, because a lathe seems like it should be an easy way to shape spars. That impulse is a specious idea. Using a dowel as starting stock for spars is the commercial choice - because it is both inexpensive and expected - and the common choice for individuals. The problem is in how dowels are made. Essentially, a cork borer eats thru a board starting at the end grain. The grain of the board can and usually does go every which way. Once the dowel is free from the board, it is wanting to follow the grain and forms a dog leg or something. It is foolish to try to fight Mother Nature. It is best to start with a board that has straight grain to begin with. Split out a square stick along the grain. That way the spar is already the way it "wants" to be. Square - to octagon - to whatever a 16 sided polygon is named. A really good quality miniature hand plane, and or a file, a chisel if you are brave, scrappers, sandpaper. Simple hand tools. You have the joy of getting the round - or oval - straight for ways, then tapering spar that the vessel needs. As for the wood, a lot of the species named are tropical - loved to near or total extinction - If you are US based, Hard Maple, Birch will get you there.

I do not see that these tools would be of much use. I advise giving them a pass. Tools and investment are two words that do not belong together. If you could get a Jim tablesaw with all of its accessories into England, you could probably sell it for what you paid for it. Consider most any other tool an expense. A GOOD quality set of ~5" tweezers (Dumont?) - straight and curved - the cheap ones do not grip and hold all that well. A needle threader. A set of 5-6" forceps ( hemostats - Kelly clamps ) good quality - straight and curved may be a help. If you are using natural fiber rigging line - bookbinders pH 7 PVA glue. Plastic is about the worst possible choice for spars ( masts, booms, yards ) Time and temp alone can have them droop from their own weight. Split out and hand shaped fine grain, straight grain, high density wood should be substituted for masts and large yards. According to the museum standards that we have, small brass rod should be shaped to be the small yards. If you stick with the polystyrene - Rather than use tension between tie points to keep a line straight, use glue or shellac to make the line itself stiff.

Alan, I would not use anything that small but McM-Carr has threaded rod that is #80 gauge. From a shipyard practical position, my money is on the smallest gap being 1", with the siding of the timber being adjusted to allow that. I think that 1/4" would be inadequate for air circulation. I speculate that when a ship framed in England sailed south and the hull equilibrated with tropical temp the frames would probably expand more than a 1/4" gap. What was going on was allowing for an air gap for further seasoning of the frame timbers. It was a race between inward migration of wood eating fungii and outward migration of the water in the wood when the tree was felled. The minimum seasoning time of 18 months in the contracts was probably the time it took for there to be deep enough dry depth to give the timber an edge in the fungus in and water vapor out race. It is a powerful reason to use a framing that is stylized. The dominant alternative is the Hahn style - which is all bends ( paired frames with each supporting the butt joins of its partner ) with every other bend being omitted. To my eye, this produces spaces that are too wide. Hahn focused on the era of the American Revolution - during which time the RN seemed to feature spaces that were ~1". More often than not an actual bend had a 1" space between partners - it was actually a three layer unit with the middle unit being a rectangular chock at every location where there was a thru bolt joining the pair. It was small enough to allow air circulation around it. What I think that Hahn actually did was to omit the singleton single filling frames. I think that the late 17thC. Navy Board framing is particularly attractive. The negative for it is the loss to waste in framing stock. The floors are longer than an actual floor would be. Each end turns up. The F1 that overlaps it is much longer and describes a significant arc. What this means is that there are two sets of very long timbers with significant curvature. Close packing on framing stock is almost impossible. The old guys had the advantage of having sufficient old growth timber - which they probably used up - and a government subsidy to pay for it. Navall timber framing style splits the difference. It looks like Navy Board from a distance and has timbers that are short enough to allow close packing on framing stock.

I see that this is too late for you, but my solution to the clamp - sill construction is: to use the red line of the deck at the side for every station be the controlling factor. a cardboard pattern jig to locate the top of the clamp at every station cut the gunports oversize fix the clamp use a jig to define the top of the sill above the clamp - at each side of the port so that the slope of the sill matches that of the clamp use another jig to place bottom of the lintel A POF to framing clamping option: hardware stores have some very small threaded bolts - matching washers, wingnuts, hex nuts, grip nuts - I think most will order shelf pack boxes (100) which should be less expensive than one by one for the bolts, a long threaded rod - 12"- and Dremel cutoff wheel may be less expensive and offer more length options McMaster-Carr has quite a variety a diameter smaller than the space width should be easy to find two pieces of stick wood with holes the diameter of the rod I see this as a way to get clamping along the inside and outside face of a frame. Now that I think about it - for my above the wale solid wall - since it will be hidden, holes can be drilled for the rods. It will ugly things up, but it will be hidden, so no matter. A rule that is a compulsion for me is: for PVA - the stronger the clamping pressure, the stronger the bond - up to the point of crushing the wood.

A search came up with Xylol as the main ingredient for the 70's version. Xylol is listed as being a mixture of o- , m-, and p- xylene its advantage was a slower evaporation rate than mineral spirits or lacquer thinner or naphtha. its downside is that it dissolves polystyrene. A barrier coat was required. There are several organic solvents available that would substitute for brushing. A quick search found that xylene itself is still for sale. None of it is something you want to breathe.

PVA. Irreverent question: If there is to be a second layer of wood, what is the need to fill any gaps between the first layer of planking? If there are significant hollows in the run a PVA bonded wood scab would be better that a Bondo-like material? If there are minor dips, would the second layer even be able to follow? An experiment to try: coat the outside of the finished first layer with PVA and let it cure / dry / polymerize. After the second layer planks are shaped, coat the inner face with PVA and let it dry. Place the outer plank and iron it with a heat source that has temp control to avoid char or cooking. Instant bond. If you are compulsive, maybe a very thin wet addition before ironing as well as the PVA at the edge where the caulking would be.

Actually, I am primarily using the Body plan - and the breadth from that to determine the scale correction - I am aware that often the stated breadth is complicated (!). I ignore the possible complication and scale to match anyway. For the Profile - I use this same correction then compare the bar scale (if there is one) to my 1/4" scale - it usually matches. But plan aberrations often show up along the length. The data that I take from the Profile is only the location of the rails, wales, decks at each station. The WL Plan is only used for the bow plug and the stern shape - and for before~1780 the outline at the beakhead bulkhead. Most plans stop 2-3 frames short of that. I just use a single line at each station. There is no lateral distortion that matters on the Profile. I set the station intervals at what they are supposed to be. !! The complication with the stated breadth is that it often included the thickness of the bottom planking added to the frames. This is not even the actual hull thickness at the breadth - the wale was usually there and the wales were at least twice the thickness of the bottom planking. I suspect that the listed breadth was meant for use to calculate what was pretended to be the hull volume/displacement. Since it was used as a comparison factor between ships, the real world accuracy did not matter. It just required that every ship be calculated using the same formula. The error factor cancelled out.

These drawings (NMM) are "living" organic objects. Although now frozen electronic scans, they were not fresh off the drawing board when scanned. Even spotting the original draftsman as an invariant machine, time, humidity change, temp, tears, folds affected the plans, and often not uniformly. The bar scales can produce different results depending on where along its length a measurement is taken. I use a downloaded 1:48 scale in Painter to verify or re scale a scan of plans. An adjustment is necessary to make this scale useful in Painter. The white background must be selected and CUT. The layer must be transparent except for the actual scale. I have yet to get an accurate 1:1 scan on my USB stick from a shop. The PDF are ~ 60-70% enlarged. They may be able to give me an identical printed copy, but a digital copy for me to printout is anything but 1:1. The key with the printable scale was to get a direct printout of it to precisely match my K&E triangle. I do not care what the internal electron memory is actually using as long as a printout of it is accurate. As far as physical measurements of model parts, a 12 inch metal digital caliper set to inch decimals does most of that. I use the original real world feet/inches and use a Casio to divide by 60 to get my decimals. I am fortunate in that my method does not require the Profile or WL NMM printout plans to be precise as a whole. I just need the exact data at each station as a slice. It does not matter if time as made the intervals between stations variable. What it actually turns out to be depends on the accuracy and precision of my Byrnes thickness sander product.

About the ship - Red Jacket at 1:96 was one of Wm Crothers - Sea Gull plans. Still available at Taubman (Loyalhannah Dockyard) B/W scan of original blue prints - time has made the contrast between the background and lines less than ideal. They are both outside the planking -for solid carved like the above - and inside for POF - much detail - probably too much for 1/8":1'. One aspect is that the original ship was huge. Crothers probably would have preferred a 1:48 except that this scale, not many of us could live in the same dwelling with a fully masted and rigged model that is that large. 1:16":1' is miniature scale and is probably too small for anything thicker than rice paper to be suitable as sail material. It would need to be wispy / ephemeral - the rigging line is challenge enough. It would almost take having a pet black widow spider to provide scale line starting material. (I seem to remember reading that the spider once was used to make crosshairs for optics.) The kit would probably be an excellent initial project for someone with an ambition to try scratch miniature. The pre-carved hull gets you beyond that first significant barrier. As is, this kit could probably produce a higher quality decorator model that could live in an office or library - in a case - always in a case.

If the ship is pre-1860 There is dark brown construction paper - There is stamp pad ink - black and red - a little black added to red makes brown - then any thickness paper can be dyed and thinner than scale paper can be used to adjusted for scale effect.

You really don't want to buy a low cost mini tablesaw. To ask this in eastern Kentuckian: Where are you at? (This is a geography question.) To assuage a compulsion I posit that no species sold as Mahogany is suitable for a ship model that is to be clear finished. Even the old genuine Cuban / Honduran is too coarse and has open pores, the stuff that is now passed off as Mahogany is less and is an insult to the original. If painted or for your proposed use, it will probably work. If this is only a one off project, seeking outside help may be more cost effective. A bandsaw with a Wood Slicer will produce a surface similar to a hollow ground Sears finish blade and the kerf is about 1/2. Find a neighbor with a big bandsaw and buy a blade that is the size that his machine mounts. If he has a bimetal, minimal set, you are golden. You will just need to use 80 grit as well as the 120/150 grit and 220 grit that the WS blade product will want. I propose that even now, a pristine used Byrnes saw will sell for about what you pay. When Jim retires from production, they will probably go for more than you paid for it. It is unique in quality, precision, and accuracy.

To be a bit heretical: In wooden ship models 1/96 is approaching the point where no species of wood will scale to a realistic degree. Smaller than this is in the miniature range. This is an area of art and illusion. For steel, the materials do scale more realistically. A steel ship built at a scale where wood works as a reasonable material (1:48, 1:64, 1:72) will produce a model that is untenable in size. Actual wood veneer on a steel warship at 1:700 or even 1:350 is using a material that is far outside its physical ability. It is being paired with materials that are within their physical abilities. It is more a job for paint. The inclusion of actual wood is an advertising scam. It should be obvious if viewed realistically.