Jaager

Afonso, First off - what is your location on Terra? Second - You have set up a situation with mutually exclusive requirements. Kit + 16th C.,17th C., + Iberia + accurate There are a few vessels from that time with documentation. Vasa is sort of at the top - Northern Europe . Most of the recent finds from your area of interest have been done by nautical archaeologists. It is my impression that they do not hold us in high regard. Little that they find seems to reach us in a form that we can use. Should you change one requirement = kit to scratch, there are several possibilities. This requires that your standards for accurate be realistic. I have series of books about an Iberian find at Red Bay, Canada, these plus the recent articles in SIS documenting a model, could be the basis for a build. The following will require loose, very loose limits for accuracy: I have plans for a Manila Galleon - also SIS I think. This part of SIS is now NRG content? AOTS has a volume with speculative plans for the first squadron of C.Columbus. ( also from Britain Mary Rose and Susan Constant ) Wm Baker did plans for Mayflower - with some aspects and choices being seriously questioned. In the 1970's there was available from Verlag Delius, Klasing & Co. a series of books with plans for your time of interest. They may appear for sale from time to time. Osprey has a Spanish Galleon issue. NIP volume - probably Conway - The Galleon by Peter Kirsch. There are several books about Kogg finds. The maritime museums in Iberia may have plans or plans of reconstructions. Until your skill level reaches a level where you do not need to ask, I seriously advise sailing well away from kits or plans for multi deck warships - especially those from the 17th C.

What may have been going on = The number of trees that are suited for warship construction is finite, especially on an island that is not all that large to begin with. In the zeal the build a large navy, all of the large old growth Oak was cut. They had to sacrifice their standards to match what they could obtain. Unless the project is a cross section, in a model, it is a detail difficult to see. A close, but easier technique; have the clamp stop at the bottom of the beam and fit a short piece of the same wood between the beams that is the depth of the dovetail. Done well, the glue joint may appear to be wood grain.

Rick, This may have been Fate handing you a small mercy, and a choice to take a kinder path. I have a recollection of reading that far more SOS kits may reside at the back of closet selves than ever see completion. Building the original helped trigger a revolution. The ship is a first rate liner. It had more sculptures than a lot of museums. A sail flagship is a formidable challenge no matter how many models in the experience bank of the model shipwright. The salesmen weave a fantastic illusion of what you can have on your fireplace mantle, and try to trigger an impulse buy. It is not dropping a beginning swimmer into the deep end, it is dropping him into a storm tossed ocean with rip currents and whorl pools. Consider a project with a higher probability of completion to begin. Lots of advise here on what may be a good choice. Then, when you are ready, given where you are, maybe scratch build a model of Otway Burns' Snap Dragon. Then, if truly mad, the 74gun USS North Carolina.

You could start your new log with: "for the steps preceding this point, see this log" and place a link to it.

This is switching to a new lens with a broader view: MicroMark is a US agent for a line of DC powered tools from Kaleas Minitool , a German company. In the US marketed as the Micro-Make brand. One of the tools is a MicroLux® Heavy-Duty Right Angle Disk Sander / Drill. The power of the sander is greater than one would expect. There is a 3-jaw chuck for it, for drill bits, I have not tried that function. The tool is a box instead of a rod in shape. Certainly not inexpensive, it requires saving a lot of box tops. It is about the best power tool that I have found for sanding inside a POF hull. If you are drilling inside a hull and the bit size is #60 or smaller, there are a lot of inexpensive DC motors - small to very small and some have 3-jaw chucks - mini chucks. AliExpress - a Chinese agent for a bunch of their mfg - has a lot of choices for motors. I have not needed anything from there since the trade war began - no idea about its effect. Marlin P. Jones is a US supplier of small DC motors and a very useful = selectable output DC bench power supply for under $20 - the range is six levels from 3V to 12V. This is an easy way to control the speed. The motors are small enough that if you can get your hand in, it will work. The small gage of the power wires - they do not get in the way.

CAD = computer aided design * (the verb may be a different one) Assumptions: You are starting with an existing plan and lofting hull components from it. The actual design has been done. You wish to replicate parts of that design at you target scale. Lofting In Painter I having been doing a lot of this (frame patterns for over 70 hulls). I use a raster based program. It does not do smooth curves as such. It does line segments. The more segments, the smoother the curve. Theoretically, what I get is a series of facets. I patterns that I print out look smooth enough to begin with and even if it were facets, I can not get anything but a smooth curve on the wood from my sanders. I use Painter 19 - I already had an earlier edition from my time with 3D CG. I could not justify the expense of Painter for just this part of its functions, were I just starting out. GIMP is free, but it is a Photo Shop clone and brings a heavy load of functions with it. Photo Shop will do it, but is not cost effective as a stand alone and a money sink on the Cloud if this is to be a continuing enterprise on your part. Paint Shop Pro is about $50 +/- and provided it can handle the potentially huge number of layers and large file sizes should be enough. Painter 12 could not handle my file size in a single file - it added random green blocks when some threshold was exceeded. Several smaller files solved that = Fore alone - one series, Aft alone another series- lofting at 1:48= one file , reduction to 1:60 in another, cutting the 1:60 frames into timber patterns a separate one or two files. It makes a big difference depending the size of the ship. A 118 gun liner stresses everything - all the way. A pilot schooner is a snack. Irrespective of your choice of raster program, you will only be needing a relatively few functions. SAVE - a function you will wish that you use more often than you do - unless you enjoy plowing the same furrow over and over. COPY, PASTE, CUT, SAVE - big help is having a gaming mouse with programmable buttons for these. I burned out the left click on several expensive brands. I am getting excellent use out of a Redragon M711 Cobra Gaming Mouse @ $20 I can burn thru a lot before I equal what a Logitech cost me and it is lasting longer to begin with. For a brush - a thin line - (Painter buries finding a useful brush within an incredible number of options.) Paint bucket fill tool - having frame lines as different colors helps in seeing what to cut - With two timber faces on a pattern I cycle just 3 colors R G B - in that order. I know if it is R G, red is always the midship face, if it is G B , green is midship, if it is B R , blue is midship. The placement of the floor timber matters. It is easy to get confused at the sander, A system helps idiot proof things. Rectangular Selection tool and Polygon Selection tool cover this function for me - plus any erase needed Magic Wand - good for removing the background from a scan and making a layer transparent except for the lines of interest. SCALE is vital so is Rotate selection I do not use many more functions than these. Not much of a learning curve. To begin, to save what I aim to print, I had select a canvas size that Windows Photo Viewer all not "adjust" for my printer. I use pixels as the dimension units. Home scanners to do not provide a 1:1 copy. I had to determine an adjustment factor for every scan. For MY Brother machine it is 102.5%. The first thing I do to any scan when I import into Painter is to SCALE 102.5%. Before I do anything else - bad results if I miss doing this. Once I found a page size that Windows will leave alone, I scanned a transparent metric ruler and printed copies at ever more precise scale adjustments until I got an exact match. This is tedious but necessary. After importing a scan, adjusting the scale, removing the background, the next fun ting to do is to rotate the scan back to vertical with your base vertical Y line and X baseline. The only concession I have made to CAD is that I saved a long thin vertical line using TurboCAD that I bought from an end cap display. The finest line that Painter will do is 1 pixel wide. I wanted thinner for within the program and a PNG import from TurboCAD provided that. The patterns that I work with can't be any finer than what a point is from my ink jet printer so the precision is limited to Painter.

Mark, I did not notice until your replacement molds made it obvious, Belle was a bit of an out layer. The degree of hollow at the bow is more than Sea Witch even and Griffiths was heavily criticized for designing that. I wonder why Belle did not set a trend? Dean

Jolly, If you have any ambition to go to scratch building, get as much and more of what Haiko is offering as you can even unrealistically handle.. Work a deal and use specie even. This is especially true if what is being offered is 4x4 or 8x4 (or your domestic equivalent of those dimensions). If your living situation is limited, long term rent a small storage unit. Debark, seal all cut ends ( surplus house latex paint will do if gobbed on super thick - a piece of Bounty will do for a brush) - sticker between pieces. Find a storage unit location that is not prone to termite or carpenter ant invasion. Maybe spread Borax fabric softener on the floor - kills roaches - maybe other beasties react against it too - study up. There is also a local species of Buxus there, see if you can get a bunch, a big bunch. If you do come over to the dark side, you will probably always regret it if you miss this. Think Scrooge McDuck in his vault of gold or Smaug in his. Get with your fellow countrymen who share this interest and pool your efforts. Let me add some of my perspective on this. I come at this from POF in the 1:48 to 1:60 range of scales. It is difficult to grasp just how much wood it takes to fully frame a ship at these scales. An impressive amount winds up as saw dust. Tackling a liner will give you a real appreciation for the stress on the treasurer who had to come up with the money to pay for a real one or the sawyer who had to obliterate a forest to supply the wood needed.

Ab, I am not suggesting that actual frames would slide. Deane constructed about 4 design cross sections, the dimensions of their arcs were determined by various lines drawn on the initial profile - OK, their position determined their shape - so no sliding. It just seems to me that by later "adjusting" their location, interesting effects would be seen in the shape of the hull. I guess as long as the accepted rules were followed for design, a dud would not end a career. Take an off the wall chance on a design and if that is a dud, it would on to sweeping out a stable for a living. I see from the NMM plans that the RN seemed to be obsessed with using the top timbers to frame the sides of the ports. There are some labor intensive jogs drawn on some. I think the Dutch were in the decided majority in placing the ports where they wanted them irrespective of where the top timbers were. The majority seemed to have more wood higher up, so weakness was less of a problem - just add more wood to the other side of the timber. . The RN seems to have been rather spare with framing in the upper works. ---- if you plank everything above the LWL in and out on a model, it does not matter anyway. I make it a solid wall of framing up there. It locks the frames in position and turns a fragile area into a strong one.

The sliding part is my conjecture. Whole moulding tends produce hulls with a generally similar conformation. Were I a designer at the time and was interested in producing something faster or more stable, doing the experiment of moving the fore and aft design stations and observing the effect. would only involve erasing lines that were a failure. Granted - the vellum was probably expensive and doing a lot of handling of elemental lead was gradually making the draftsman dumber. I have done a very preliminary lofting of the 7P IV , the big one that followed the famous 7P, compared to English and French contemporaries there is a long section in the middle where the shape does not change. It seems that more than a few 17th C Dutch plans available to us replicate the mid ship bend a bit more than those of other countries. It reminds me of a barge with a long sculpted bow and stern as opposed to the oft duplicated illustration of a fish superimposed on the profile of a race galleon - an attempt at streamlining? Where change is constant. Home waters that are a bit shallow - a deeper wedge shaped hull would sort of not work out too well?

Following your encouragement - I will let the reins go a bit looser. I followed Anthony Deane's design instructions for a bit. I tried to use his Body section method to produce the shapes of stations at every second bend. It would have saved a lot of lofting. His was a version of whole moulding. It works OK using intervals similar to those that van Yk described - 4 points along the keel and since his was a drafting table method = using waterlines and buttock lines to fine tune the shape. Three of the whole moulded sections can be "slud" (moved) along the keel to get fatter or slimmer at the ends - fine tuning the design. But it is too blunt a tool to be effective for any shorter intervals. I thank you for providing the key to this insight. For presently used modeling methods for POF - lofting the outer and inner edges for both faces of every timber - the Body plan is mostly of no use. For pre 1860, I believe the Body plan was everything for the mold loft. It was only the stations that were drawn on the floor at full size. The patterns for the mid line of the bends that were at the position of each station was what was sent to the wood shaping crew. POB sort of uses this method, except that for kits too many stations in the middle get dropped and in any case, the surface area for the lands is not as wide as is really needed. I think we can thank Dizzy Dean for introducing slud as the past tense of the verb = to slide.

It is not the design aspect that is my interest. It is something a lot more mundane. It is the mold loft product and what it actually was. I think the present description is true for very late 19th C thru early 20th C. It was probably heavily influenced by what was necessary for iron and steel. Materials that require much more precision and engineering, than does wood.. After 30-40 years of the dominance of iron, I think a short lived fad for large wooden hulls took hold and those workers and architects who were back to building larger wooden hulls had probably been filtered thru the 'new, modern' iron techniques and applied that to wood. At the beginning - the era of van Yk - starting with 4 lofted bends and all the other timber shaping done by eye on the ways, it was probably a long evolution until every timber was shaped using a pattern from the mold loft. I doubt that even by 1860, that degree of pre engineering was at all common. I suspect that the replacement of wood with iron for the larger hulls produced a situation where those with the necessary skills and experience to eyeball the needed wood cuts aged out and they did not pass on what they did to enough workers to support a large industry. Our practice of lofting every frame timber is a copy of what was done around 1900, but not the replication of actual practice before 1860 that we pretend it is.

For almost all the parts on a plan that we will make, the size of a particular unit that we work with will fit on a 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper. It is satisfying to have the whole on a single sheet, but it is not necessary. My point is that a home copy/print computer accessory can do the job at a practical level. For the cost of a couple of $30 copies, you can almost buy a scanner/printer. The ink is so expensive that the printer can almost be a free item and they still make out like bandits. Just be alert to the "adjustment" in scale that each scanner "adds". The "return to 1:1" factor is constant for a specific machine, but different between machines. Using a pantograph now is pointless punishment.

Ab, Thank you. A feud between two powerful shipbuilders each with an epic stubborn streak - perhaps a script writers explanation. Pieces are coming together for me on the evolution of west European Atlantic coast building methods. The method describer by van YK differs from the English et al. frame first method by not all that much. For this initial frame first method, no plans are needed if the key individual can "see" them in his mind. It is a result of being born a genius. It can't be taught, the in your mind part, but if lesser followers in other countries like this method and its more predictable results, they can learn to do on paper, what the first guy did in his head. While back home, the rules of the first guy are used. Dean

Ab, Some of the old illustrations and ones that you have used, show the erection of about 3 to 5 bends along the keel that affect and maybe effect the exact shape the shell takes. Was this a part of the shell first method or the alternative one? Dean

Generous thought, bad idea. The commercial guys use kilns and fumigation and probably other methods to keep from exporting diseases and insects along with the wood. The amateur export world has gained us Starlings, Japanese Beatles, Dutch Elm disease, Fire Ants, to name a few. If your guys are still sloppy about what comes in, I would not bet on their being any more careful about what goes out. The wood that you offer is from wide spread agricultural species. If you have something indigenous that is kept in check by your eco system, letting it out in this way could lead to a real disaster. This is a realm best left to professionals.

Mark, Rather than cut into the spine to form a rabbet, scab a thin veneer that makes the keel wider. As thin as can be managed so that the planks look as though they dip into the keel. No way to tell now deep it really is. Was it a Jerry Lewis movie - Don't raise the bridge, lower the river? Dean

From the link that Bruce D provided - its is obvious that the Suits have altered the design - sacrificing quality for profit, like that is anything but the rule. The old swivel is significantly larger and I bet the collets are less precise, not that the originals were up to anything but wood as a target.

The one that I find most comfortable to use is a General Tools 92 Swivel Head Pin Vise However, it is an old version and I am fairly sure it was before China became the fabricator, so I do not know if the same tolerances obtain.. Compared to these others, it is like a kid from Dog Patch showing up at a exclusive boarding school dance, but it works for me.

Chris, This monograph will provide everything you could need or even want and is value for the cost and if you hurry, YOUR postal rate may not be painful. The ship - is not too different from the Conny in cross section, as far as tumblehome, with a tad more deadrise, but no hollow at the garboard. Like the Conny class, this ship has as much in common with a razeed 74 as it does smaller frigates. The cross section is nothing like Amarante, Aurore 1697, Belle Poule 1765, or especially Renommee 1744 -which looks like nothing so much as a narrow waist BBW in exaggerated jodhpurs.

Mark, I measured the frame scantlings as 2/3 wood and 1/3 space - 9.5" x 9.5" x 9.5" . If you add trunnels to your outside planking, following that interval would match what ANCRE has. I compared Belle Poule center cross section to Renommee to see how close they are - Belle is a bit wider and deeper and Renommee is a bit more extreme in the degree of curving. Again with your filling between molds, = a low cost option Mill boards from a clear Pine 2x4 stud (~$4?) having a thickness that your laser likes, and that the appropriate sum of lamination is just a push fit between molds. In your Corel Draw, draft an inside moulded dimension for each mold ***- The line of the fore most or aft most mold of each pair can define the inside for a particular unit, so no additional shaping there is needed. Now that I think on it, the center mold does not even need this line drawn for it. When you draw the inside line add 2-4 alignment dots - inside the pair lines - and use a drill press to drill a hole the diameter of whatever bamboo dowels you have. Given that it is inside and hidden, off the shelf bamboo skewers can be used as is, no pesky draw plate work needed . This will perfectly align the stack of layers. PVA glue up each stack of Pine layers Add an additional 1/4" layer on the outside of the stack - on the side nearest to the mid line. Bond it with double sided tape. Have the two mold shapes on patterns rubber cemented to either face of the stack of layers. Sand the bevel for each stack - off the hull, pop off the 1/4" layer (It was needed because it takes into account the mold thickness for a precise bevel). When you place the filler stack between the molds, ~ 95% of the shaping has already been done. If you wait until now to cut the bevel on the plywood mold, it should be easy to remove exactly what should be removed and with the Pine there, near impossible to overdo it. *** ( I would say thick enough, but not too thick.) The Navy demands that solid carved hulls be hollowed out, in their museum acquisitions. An adaptation for heat and humidity, I recommend taking the hint. I did some reading and discovered that Painter and Gimp and PaintShopPro are "raster" based and Corel Draw is "vector" based. I don't know what the practical difference is, but raster works for my needs.

Mark, I misunderstood your narrative and thought your stock of plywood was other than flat. If you have fixed a warping and then cut, I must have mentally jumped to thinking that if the ply wants to bend, then any fix will be temporary. It will still try to bend again - unless you add in a counter force to prevent it. Mother Nature is kinda relentless. As for a solid hull, if you mean the Marseille hull, it is yes, while I shape the hull and until I add the keelson, and bilge riders, it will be solid. I followed Delacroix as per frame timber scantlings. My scale is 1:60 - essentially the same as your preferred scale. ( I am still overwhelmed by the size of that ship's hull.) As delineated on the plans, the space is small - all the frames are bends - the members of the pair of frames are each sided 0.24" and the space between each is 0.07". Above the LWL I made them all, solid Maple, below the LWL the 0.07" space has a temporary Pine filler, held in place by an adhesive that I can easily debond and pop the Pine out. The filler allows for the hull to be shaped and sanded and still have sharp and crisp edges on the bends. With a space this small, with future hulls, (doing Marseille over in my head) I would make the frame thickness 0.275" each, and omit every other bend. The temporary filler Pine below the LWL would then be a total thickness of 0.55" also. Doing POF and leaving frames on display, I think a bit wider space is more visually interesting. If I remember it correctly, Davis presented a 50% wood and 50% space as the the way actual hulls were framed - maybe 1900 and later hulls were, but not even close before 1860 for warships. Hahn used the 50/50 assembly too. He focused on the time of the American Revolution and I found that frigates at that particular time were all but solid timber - just ~1" air spaces. Framed that way, any visible display as unplanked would be fairly boring to see, so omitting every other bend is a logical technique. Starting around 1800 it seems to have become (on average) 67% wood and 33% space. for me, increasing the frame thickness by 50% to be able to omit every other bend looks unnatural, The frames are just too thick. For those, I frame the hull using scantlings that are the same as the original. Dean

Do you have access to the Philadelphia Maritime Museum? It does or did host the John Lenthall collection, which seems to have a large number of plans for USN ships covering the first half of the 19th C. It would be helpful to know what if any data they will provide over the Net.

Jeffrey, You would be very well advised to heed Chris' suggestions. The smaller scale solid hull version of Phantom should not overwhelm. As a pilot schooner, the basic shape is elegant. The rig is uncomplicated. At the 1:96 scale, it is operating at the border of replication and simulation of detail. The amount of detail is such that it will leave you wanting to do more - the next time out, if you contract this bug. If done well, this model will do you proud. The quality is there. HMS Beagle - one of the Cherokee class of ten gun "coffin" brigs, second only to the Cruizer class in the number of hulls built using the basic plan. In spite of this, specifics for the Beagle have been difficult to find. This ship is the one most significant to someone from the Biological sciences with an interest in ship modeling. For a long time, Beagle was the subject of a frustrating and unrewarding search. Mamoli produced a kit, purported to be HMS Beagle. To my eye, it does not look like a Cherokee plan was used as a basis. It looks more like a squashed collier and while shortened in the long axis, the depth looks to have been unreduced. The wood supplied looks awful, the details and parts poorly done and out of scale. I question if even the most skilled of us could produce a silk purse from this sow's ear. Then Karl Marquardt wrote the AOTS volume for HMS Beagle. A lot of is probably a very well informed series of best guesses, since no definitive treasure trove of "the answer to it" data as yet been found. I just looked on Amazon for the book and alas, a copy is really expensive. I bought a second copy - a reprint edition and not the quality of the original. I was intending to slice the binding to get flat pages for undistorted scans of the lines. Luckily, given my reverence for books, I did not have to do this. As far as I can discover, none of the AOTS volumes come with separate plans that can be obtained my any method. It is clinically diagnostic evidence of serious brain damage on the part of a decision maker at the publisher. - editorial over! The new OcCre kit for HMS Beagle looks to be heavily influenced by what Marquardt provided. The hull looks like a Cherokee class hull. The wood provided looks to better quality. The weave n the sail cloth could use a lot of improvement. A brig hull and a smaller one at that, is not like being buried under a mountain as it would be with a frigate, much more so with a liner, but it is still a challenge. Rigging three masts - with the bow, it is essentially four masts, just out of the chute and at a scale that allows some of finer details can become frustrating. But it is the level of deck detail - Marquardt inspired is my guess - should give pause to a beginner. You could wind up feeling like you are trying to sprint in a flood of molasses.

Dziadeczek, For successfully turning canon barrels @ 1:96 scale, please accept a deep bow in admiration, that scale pushes the physical limitations of any wood species. Did you need new glasses when an armory's worth of ordinance was finally turned?