marktiedens

Hola:
 
Before going into the sailing process I decided to finish the anchor fittings.  Here some pictures:
 
For the first step it was necessary to do the blocks due that the ones included in the kit seems not the appropriate.  To accomplish this I used a little piece of redwood, brass wire obscured with Black Patina (the one used to the lead in staining glass) and the metal strap for the pulley was made with a paper strip painted black.

 
The second step was to fix the anchor ropes. Here you can see the little pieces of wire in the opposite side of the anchor that were used to fix them inside the anchor ports

 
And finally, installing the anchors in its place. This was done according to the BB instruction manual, except I added little wood caps in the extremes of the anchor davits.  I made this because the ropes tended to slip off the pulleys due to the low weight of the kit anchors (in the original this did not happen due the great weight of the anchors)

 
Thanks for your comments and likes.
 
Saludos, Karl
 
 

Hi Mates,
 
Continuing with the bow anchor cathead details, now turning to their needed kevels.
 
It turns out that I had built and installed a second pair that was at one time attached to the quarter-deck, turns out that this was incorrect (see first two pics).
 
 An early Vasa museum plans set (1980) showed two sets per side at that location, as did Landsröm. A second plan set dated 1981 had one set removed. I communicated with Fred Hocker, who indicated that the ’81 set had been corrected.
 
So the two kevels were just lying around, how convenient; shortened them for use at the bow railing, and just added a framing bit for attaching.
 
After gluing, then drilled small holes and inserted black fishing filament to simulate the needed nails.
 
The brilliant fishing line idea is not mine but belongs to one of our MSW members; apologetically I don’t remember whom (I did post a notation on his build log at the time of seeing his very clever idea)
 
Inserted the lines from the rear and left the front ends just a tad proud to simulate nail heads-sort of J
 
G-S cement is perfect for this task. If there were a bit of glue that travelled through the hole to the front end, after a few moments it can be removed with your thumb nail or tweezers, pulls completely off as would rubber cement. LOVE this glue! It has proved to be so versatile. Ferit thank you Again!! You found this.
 
Hint: I attempted to just “hack of" the front tips of the black filament to adjust them, but the blade snagged them and some resulted in angled cuts. Solution was to actually use the razor blade as a slicer moving the blade as I cut. Worked very nicely allowing for a nice clean flat cut. PS: Exacto type blade not up to the task.
 
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Thanks for your “likes”, dropping in for a look, as well as the very welcome supportive suggestions and comments J
 
Regards, as always
 
Michael

Here are some photos of the wales.  Most of the job was straightforward, particularly since the sweep of the hull planks was correct, so the wales just needed to follow the planking.  Another good reason to have scratched the bulwarks.  
 

 
The compound curves at the front meant spiling planks for the wales, just as for the hull planks.  I used scarf joints for the wales though, and then scribed joints at regular intervals along the rest of each wale.
 

 
The rear of the wales as they hit the quarter gallery framing.
 

 
Next up was the quarter galleries, which were...difficult.

Hello MSW Great stuff this build log . What I would like to see is an aftermarket upgrade - or let us say a "downgrade" - for the Victory to build her in an older configuration before 1800 with the balconies on the stern and so on as seen on some pictures. just an idea regards ludger

Thanks for the info.I have been studying the few pictures there are of a side view of the galleries as a whole. Maybe it`s the camera angle,but if you look closely at  the first picture of your last post the front one does look a little larger. I am going to ask about those towers on the Vasa forum just to be sure.Thanks again!
 
/Mark

Thanks Karl - I like how it came out.  Here are some pictures of the clinker-style planking above the main deck line.  Fairly easy to do once you have the top wale in place.  The wale was easy to install because my scratched bulwarks followed the deck line, so the hull planking did as well, and to install the wale I just followed the hull planking.  Everything following everything else :-).  I did have to replace the wale because I made it too wide and the spacing for the wales below it wasn't quite right.
 

 
The only real issue was being very careful about opening the round gun ports because the veneer had a bad tendency to split.  
 

 
I added scratched pieces of very narrow (1mm) veneer painted white at the top.  Note the rearmost gun port - it is a half-port and I think I'm going to mess with it some and make it fully round, but lower.  The kit supplies an odd looking carriage for that gun - looks like an artillery carriage.  Since I want to replace it with something correct, I can make sure at the same time that the gun is in line with the port at its new location.
 

 

Michael - thanks for your thoughts.I think that anything I do will be a compromise. I had hoped to get Billing`s better figures  to mix & match with Corel`s but they are not available separate from the kit. At this point I will probably be more concerned with construction details than accuracy of the figures.Thinking about it maybe all 3 Vasa kit manufacturers could get together & make one nice kit as a joint project!
Not likely.
 
/Mark

Thanks Matti!  I'm pleased with how the hull came out - the single planking design felt a bit like a tightrope without a net - any mistakes would be very visible.
 
Here are a couple of pictures of the hull after it was sanded, filled, and stained.  I had to use a darker mahogany stain to cover the different shades of wood I used - the strip stock and the wide stock for spiled planks.
 
I ended up scribing a butt pattern on the strip wood.  It matches with the actual butts between the spiled and strip planks.  Just use an X-acto knife once or twice to make a cut, then use the back of it to enlarge the cut slightly.  Do it before staining, and the stain fills the scribed mark with a slightly darker cast.  The effect is pretty good.  I realize the real ship used scarf joints for all the hull planks and didn't really have a pattern to them, but I wanted a pattern and I didn't want to make hundreds of scarf joints.
 

 
Here you can see the area where the spiled planks meet the strip planks.  The two shades are pretty well merged; another coat or two of stain on the front and it should be fine.  Much of the area just below the lower row of gun ports will be covered with the four wales, so the planks in that area didn't need to be shifted like the ones below the lowest wale.
 

 

Today I received the blocks in 3, 4, 5 en 7mm
I orderded these by clasicmodel.com
 

 

 

 
first impression looks very good so I can now continue

the last days some small points done, today I painted the doors
 

Beautiful work.  I too had issues with the back lower turret in the Billings kit.  Lots of reshaping required.  It's interesting to see how two manufacturers (Billings and Corel) interpret the same ship differently - I wonder what the design process was like.  What I'd love to see is 3D scans of the original ship used to create something really accurate, but I'm sure cost would be prohibitive.
 
mark

I have decided to continue on with the Corel version of the Vasa which I started about a year and a half ago.I got as far as the first planking done & set it aside while I continued working on the Sergal kit. I have fixed a couple of things so far. I re-sized the upper row of gunports as I cut them too big to start with . Also I the slant to the companionway roofs - the kit had them flat. I also re-did the lower stern to be more square.One more thing I noticed after glueing on the false deck was there were no openings for the knighthead behind the main mast or the ladder behind the fore mast so I had to make them.
 

 

 

 

 
/Mark

I have decided to continue on with the Corel version of the Vasa which I started about a year and a half ago.I got as far as the first planking done & set it aside while I continued working on the Sergal kit. I have fixed a couple of things so far. I re-sized the upper row of gunports as I cut them too big to start with . Also I the slant to the companionway roofs - the kit had them flat. I also re-did the lower stern to be more square.One more thing I noticed after glueing on the false deck was there were no openings for the knighthead behind the main mast or the ladder behind the fore mast so I had to make them.
 

 

 

 

 
/Mark

Thanks for your observation on the galleries. I am aware of the issue with the turret top on the lower gallery & am going to try and fix it  .  I was thinking about building the upper galleries first & try to make some adjustments on the lowers. The biggest problem I see is if the lower turret is moved out too far there will be too large of a gap between the turret & the side of the ship . I will have to think about that one for a while. Pictures are always welcome to illustrate an issue. By the way Sergal`s fix for this was to actually mold a notch in the casting where it comes up against the upper gallery .
 
regards,Mark

With the quarter gallery supports in, it was time to go back to the hull and sand and fill it.  This was a tedious, long process of using gradually finer grades of sandpaper until everything was flush and smooth.  It generated epic amounts of wood dust, and since my "workshop" is the guest bedroom, I needed to vacuum a lot so that the guests in question could sleep without coughing all night.  I tried to be careful during planking not to have any depressions - gaps are easy to fill with small amounts of color-coordinated filler, but depressions need more filler and are more visible.  Luckily I didn't need much filler at all, except with the spiled planks at the front.  Those were all hand curved and didn't match each other perfectly.
 

 
Here you can see the area where the spiled planks begin.  
 

 
Here you can see filler that's been applied but not yet sanded down.  It's a nice water-based filler whose color matched the wood fairly closely.
 
 

 

 
Next up was staining the hull and scribing plank butts...
 

Mark,
 
I was thinking about your Corel resurrection, along with all of the errors that are built into this otherwise nice kit.
 
And then I thought of this big error. The lower galleries are not properly scaled so that the lower, most rearward, bobbinet turret tops slightly overlap the lower portion of the upper galleries. See my pic as well as the 1/10th for comparisons.
 
Based on the size of the stern soldiers as well as the stern windows it would, it seems to me, impossible to scale this area correctly.
 
I have not seen a Corel Vasa build that has gotten it “figured out”, food for thought on your current build J
 
PS: I did not mean to add one of my pics on your build log, but only using this single pic as an example of this issue J
 
Your work is so excellent; it will be fun to follow along…
 
PS: as has been posted your first planking is - well so perfect..
 
Cheers,
 
Michael

Hello Karl
 
Yes I do like this ship but the the main reason I`m continuing on with it is seeing the poor thing sitting there half started as I walk by it every day . I can tell you the differences between the Corel & Sergal kits are quite large. The biggest differences are the figures - Sergal`s are pretty good & Corel`s are somewhat poorer. Sergal`s are brass or bronze so you can tweak them a little if needed.Corel`s are plated pot metal I think - they can`t be bent or they will just snap in two. Some of them are already broken in the package just from shipping .
 
/Mark

Hey friends:
 
I had several days without showing progress in my Vasa, which does not mean I was not very busy working on the rigging.  
 
So, at last I finished the more than 1,000 knots that were needed to fixed the ratlines to the shrouds !!
 
Probably this ratlines could be a little thinner and darker but I used the material that came with the kit.
 

 
Now I will begin with another challenge: doing and sewing the sails in order to fix them to the corresponding yards.
 
Saludos, Karl
 
 
 

The upper false quarterdeck is secured in place. Before planking it, the bulwarks that run partially on this deck need to be cut back substantially because the forward end actually falls slightly below the deck surface itself.
This is where you really have to pay attention to the plan drawings. Sheet #17 shows the run of the decks and the hull detail in scale. Making careful measurements off the drawing is needed to mark the bulwarks for cutting.
The first photo shows the bulwark before and the second after cutting back.
 
Vince P.

With the hull finally planked, I wanted to do something different, so I started the quarter gallery supports.  They were fairly straightforward except for the double curves at the rear.  To get those to look right I needed to break the pieces and reassemble them with the right curve, cleaning up the joints with filler.
 

 
Each gallery has an upper and a lower part, separated by a spacer.  Eventually the gap gets filled with small balusters - the kit provides 2x2mm wood for them, but I think I'm going to do something slightly more ornate.
 

 

 
And finally the view from the stern, showing the reverse curves.
 

 
 

Hi Mates,
 
Thanks for the comments and the likes very kind of you.
 
Started working on the ropes for the anchor catheads. I wasn’t sure about how to detail the blocks. On the 1/10th the blocks were capsuled with metal bracings, not rope. This created a bit of a scratch of the head.
 
So I chose this solution;
 
1) re-drilled the block holes increasing their size.
2) drilled two more holes in each block, one for the hook and the other two for the pulley rods.
 
Looking through my boxes of “stuff” I found a copper tape strip that had adhesive backing. Hmmmm, that might work?
 
Cut the tape into a narrow strip and wrapped it around the block.
 
Glued the hook with CA, and pulled a drill bit through making sure that the hook was not blocking a rope hole.
 
Cut some flat head nails and glued them to the sides of the block.
 
 
Painted the added bits with flat black paint.
 
Lastly added the ropes attaching the blocks. Next up will be the single side anchor cathead and its block.
 
In the last two pics; I removed the knightheads that had been built such a long time ago, as well as removing the railing leading out of the upper gun deck, both of which are incorrect for Vasa. I will rebuild the knightheads to correctly reflect the Vasa’s. Tossed the railing (it was so nice (L)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I have decided to continue on with the Corel version of the Vasa which I started about a year and a half ago.I got as far as the first planking done & set it aside while I continued working on the Sergal kit. I have fixed a couple of things so far. I re-sized the upper row of gunports as I cut them too big to start with . Also I the slant to the companionway roofs - the kit had them flat. I also re-did the lower stern to be more square.One more thing I noticed after glueing on the false deck was there were no openings for the knighthead behind the main mast or the ladder behind the fore mast so I had to make them.
 

 

 

 

 
/Mark

Thanks Nigel - although I may look like this permanently before I`m done.
 
Michael - I must admit I will be borrowing ideas from other builds.
 
/Mark

FINISHED! I decided to add a stern lantern to finish it off. There are still a number of errors but I am fairly satisfied how it came out. I want to thank everyone for all the loos & likes during the build.The problem now is where to put it - it`s almost 4 ft long. An even bigger problem is deciding what to build next I will try to put a few more pics in the gallery.
 

 

 

 
 

 
/Mark

A little more progress - all yards mounted. just a few more lines left like braces,anchors,flags,& a few misc.items.note the hooks & rings on the lower end of the mizzen lateen yard - I think this is correct.That light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter...........
 

 

 

 

 
/Mark