SJSoane

After a long few days, I have only the 9# guns left to drill. Just 18 to go! Just for fun, I put the 32# into their carriages and into the starboard ports. They are a little low because the deck is not yet in, but it gives a good sense of what the gundeck must have been like. And how awful it would have been to see that ship approaching you with guns run out and a hostile intent! Mark

Alan, you are right, we seem to have an irresistible desire to get it "exactly right", even though the difference is imperceptible--until druxey gets his calipers out, of course. It is like wanting to solve a math or engineering problem, where there is a great feeling that one has found the right answer, not an almost answer. But what a crazy attitude to bring to this hobby, where everything is approximate. Oh, well! It still amazes me to see how much full size boat construction is done by eye, not by precise measurements. There is a lesson here! Mark

Thanks, druxey, I am glad I didn't overlook something. You and Alan are probably on the right line of thinking that this has to do with the dates. The Bellona was built in 1760, 30 years before Steel's tables or formulas. Since everything grew as the century wore on, I would think the Bellona's sizes would be at the smaller end of possibilities, likely smaller than in the tables at the end of the century. So I will likely stick with the formulas, assuming this was an earlier tradition passed down to Steel even as the blocks were being made larger in practice, as reflected in his tables. Oh, boy, more fun with a spreadsheet... Mark

Hi druxey, I got them from: https://www.hnsa.org/manuals-documents/age-of-sail/the-elements-and-practice-of-rigging-and-seamanship/block-making-vol-i/ and these are repeated in David Antscherl's Fully Framed Model Vol. IV p. 63. They also can be found in Lees' Masting and Rigging, p. 164, but there are some discrepancies in this source relative to the other two. Lees, for example, has the sheave diameter as 4 times the width of the sheave, but the other two are five times. Also, Lees has the width of the sheave hole as a sixteenth more than the sheave, but the other two have it as 1/16" larger. Mark

This is a very interesting way of turning small, thin pieces. I have not seen this before. Very clever! Mark

Thanks, druxey and Marc, for your thoughts on boring cannon. I do remember the advice I got from Gaetan years ago about how one's skills and speed increase through repetition. This is proving to be very true. However, taking a break from drilling cannon, I started looking again at the rigging for the cannon. I dug out my old spreadsheets, and noticed for the first time a big discrepancy in Steel's tables for sizing rigging and blocks. What he says about the sizes of blocks does not correspond to the blocks listed in his master table, a reproduction of which can be seen here: https://maritime.org/doc/steel/tables/pages/032-ShipOf74Guns.htm So here is what I found. Look at the table: Look at these examples to explore: Fore-Top-Mast Braces rope circumference: 3 ½" Single Block length: 14" Fore-Top-Mast Leechlines rope circumference: 2 ½" Single Block length: 10" But when we follow his instruction on sizing blocks (see spreadsheet below), this is what we find: The Fore-Top-Mast Braces single block should be 10.3" long The Fore-Top-Mast Leechlines single block should be 7 1/2" long This isn't just a little off, it is off by over 30%. Every block in the table appears to be larger than what his proportional rules would specify. Am I misunderstanding something here? And if not, should I be following his table, or following his calculations? Best wishes, Mark

Alan, I just discovered the other day--after suffering from the same problem--that you can drag photos directly into the text box where you want them, rather than dragging them into the attachment box at the bottom. They still show up in the attachment box, but they stay in the right order in the text box. I am not sure of the effect of holy water as well.... Mark

Beautiful, crisp, craftsmanship! Mark

Here is the sequence I am going through for facing and boring the muzzles. First, the barrel is put in the centering jig: Then the jig is mounted in the 4 jaw chuck, using the drill chuck in the tailstock to grip the cylinder at the front of the barrel, to ensure it is centered before tightening up the 4-jaw chuck: Then the cut-off tool is run up against the long cylinder cast at the front of the cannon, to true it up. I do this turning the chuck by hand. I also true up the outermost edge of the swell of the barrel, also turning the chuck by hand. The pewter is really easy to trim: I cut off the excess, using a hand saw: Then, I center drill and drill the bore: Next, to keep the foremost moulding the same thickness, I run the cutter up against a .10" feeler gauge, and set the digital readout to 0". Back up the cutter, face the barrel down until I hit 0" on the digital readout. This trims up the face so the moulding is exactly .10" wide. Done. Next. Only 60 to go....

Hi Greg, I thought about upgrading my Sherline lathe and mill to CNC a while ago, but somehow it seems like a steep learning curve and price. Have you considered this? Mark

Hi Mark, I knew you were kidding, but your comment did make me curious about how this process could scaled up beyond the needs of one ship. I know now that I would get too bored doing this regularly, even if I could figure out ways to speed it up with multiple moulds. I had jewelry friends who did lost wax, and I did look into the idea a number of years ago. But the cost of the equipment quickly killed that idea for me. Now if I made my cannon out of gold, it might be worth it, because I could sell them as jewelry for pirates!😀 Mark

Alan, Beautiful work so far. How did you turn such a thin piece in your lathe, so consistently uniform in cross section? Impressive! Mark

Thanks, Marc, Greg, Rob, Gaetan and Mark. After working all winter on these cannon, it is very gratifying to get to this milestone. Mark, I have endless admiration for those who make these commercially. I would never have guessed how long this would take. Admittedly, I had a large learning curve, and a few setbacks; and now I know more of what I am doing, it started to go faster. One would have to make multiple masters of each size, so it would be possible to pour in gangs rather than singly. Even so, the most laborious part is dusting with the talcum powder so there is just enough even coverage without blocking up details, and this would still have to be done for every pour. I would have to charge $100 a cannon just to make it worth my sanity! When I started this quest for cannon, I explored the different ways this might be done: a duplicator on the lathe, 3-D printing, and casting. From my perspective now, even if I had been able to make the duplicator work, it would never have achieved the detail and consistency of the casting, and it would have been even more tedious. 3-D printing is still an interesting option, although it turned out to be beyond my budget to have them printed commercially, or to gear up with a 3-D printer of my own. So I defaulted to casting, which in the end gave a very satisfactory outcome. Maybe that is why it has been used for centuries. Now if only I had the equipment to do lost-wax casting....😀 Best wishes, Mark

Thanks, Ed, it is fascinating to see the logic to the grouping and arrangement. It seems to be a very rational way of managing so many intersecting lines, according to function and geometry, and location. It would be interesting to look at a typical maneuver in John Harlands' Seamanship in the Age of Sail, like tacking or shortening sail, to see how the lines needed for that task are distributed around the ship. Would they have been grouped into specific location so a small crew could efficiently manage without running around the entire ship? Or did a crew always have to be large enough to man every necessary line at the same time? I am sure members of Model Ship World who are sailors and have sailed on a tall ship would know this. I still cannot fathom how a sailor in the middle of the night in a storm would reliably grab just the right line off a crowded pin rail. I wonder if they glanced aloft just to confirm, or if they always knew for sure. Ed, your model makes clearer than anything I have seen so far just how many lines were involved in managing these majestic ships--and I remember reading you left some off! Thanks again, this was very interesting to read. Mark

Thanks, everyone. Here is the largest image my iphone will take. Above this, I need to switch to the DSLR. Mark

The cannon are all cast! It is fascinating to see all of the cannon together. 74 guns provides a lot of firepower, when you see them all in one place. And I am glad at this point that I did not build a first rate ship with 100+ guns. This got very weary after a while. Next, cleaning up with files, facing and boring the muzzles. And then messing with blacking. A big step completed! Mark

Hi everyone, More casting, I have only 11 of the 32# and 9 of the 18# to go. The 9# in long and short are done. I couldn't be patient enough to wait until all were cast, to see how they look lined up in the 32# carriages: However, I got up this morning to cast the final cannon, and my MicroMark butane burner died. It won't start. The sparker still works, and trying to fill it quickly has the butane coming out at the nozzle, so I assume it is full. There are no instructions for cleaning, so I appear to be dead in the water. I will have to buy another one, or figure out how to melt the pewter another way. I have a stand-up micro butane torch for soldering, but the heat point is too fine to heat up the entire ladle of pewter. So, moving on for a moment, I made the fixture for the 18# cannon, for facing and boring the muzzle. Much cleaner this time, now you helped me with the boring tool. Worked perfectly. This time, I glued thickish paper between two halves of the blanks, so I could easily split these apart when finished turning.

Thanks, Gaetan, it worked perfectly! So here is the fixture for drilling and facing the 32# cannon. This one is a little ragged inside because of my boring challenges. Now I have that figured out, the 18# and 9# fixtures ought to come out a little more elegantly. This one needed a little adjustment internally with a flexible shaft cutter. Mark

Thank you Mark, Landrotten Highlander, and Gaetan, for these ideas. And Gaetan, I look with envy at your full size lathe. I will likely never be able to get one, but I can admire from afar! I woke up in the middle of night, thinking that I should try cutting on the side of the hole towards the operator, rather than away from the operator as I tried yesterday. But that rubbed even worse. As it turned out, you were all correct. I rotated the cutting edge 90 degrees, and it works perfectly cutting on the side of the hole closest to the operator. Thanks! So it is interesting why the Sherline setup has a flat cut on the top of the boring bar for the set screw, when the bar needs to be 90 degrees to this arrangement. I then realized that they originally sold these for a boring head for the mill, which does use the flat to locate the bar correctly. They say that the bars can be used in the lathe, but as far as I can find, Sherline did not explain to rotate the bar in the lathe setup. There is an interesting lesson here. I knew something wasn't working well yesterday with chattering and burning, but I just kept on going thinking that I might be able to correct with a different feed speed or RPM adjustment. I did not take the time to rethink why this setup was not working well, or try other things like rotating the head. I know that machines speak to you, if only you are willing to listen. I did not listen well yesterday! Thanks again, everyone, Mark

Hi druxey, Good question, I could not find any instructions on the Sherline pages, except to line up the notch in the top of the boring bar itself, with the top set screw in the boring mount. But it sure does act like it is rubbing. The cutting edge as I have it set up appears to be meaning to cut at the back lower edge of the relief hole, cutting as the wood is starting to climb up around and back to the front. I also experimented with the angle of the boring bar to the axis of the lathe, because sometimes the bar started to rub at the outer edge of the hole as it got deeper. Didn't seem to make any difference to the quality of the cut. Maybe I should try flipping it upside down, although the flat would not align with the set screw. Mark

Looking great Michael. And I thought I was the only one who played with wind up rubber band planes. Never could get them to work very well. Mark

Thanks, Michael, you and druxey gave me good advice on this. I admit to being happier working with wood than plaster, though....😀 I spent the day building a fixture for the 32# guns, in order to mount the casts in the lathe for drilling and facing the muzzles. These are shaped so the hind end can go into the Sherline lathe headstock as far as possible, so the fore end does not project too far beyond the jaws of the chuck. This is to keep everything as concentric as possible at the face. Things get tight at the rear of the headstock, due to the Morse taper there. There will obviously be more clearance with the smaller guns. These still have to be drilled so the trunnions can recess into the fixture. You will see some burning on the inside of the fixtures. This is because I had to make very precise diameter holes to grab the front and rear of the cannon, and these dimensions were not an exact size of drill. So I used the Sherline boring tools in the lathe (see below). I could not get these to work very well. They cut grooves, and burned the boxwood I am using for the fixture (so the chuck jaws don't compress these too much, and throw things out of true). And I was taking such light cuts that it took a long, long time to bore out from the closest drill size I had first used for initial clearance. Does anyone have any thoughts about what I am doing wrong with the boring tool? This is the first time I have used them, so I haven't yet seen them work well. Mark

Hi vossiewulf, yes, that was my understanding. I wasn't sure just how much a difference it would make until I tried the experiment. Its value is now very obvious to me! Mark

Hi Ed, I realized after I posted this that I have asked you for what could be an entire book on this topic! Maybe you want to add some of your reflections into your latest volume? Mark

Hi Ed, what a joy to see and learn from this project. As you worked on the rigging, did you see any general organizing principles for rigging that had evolved over time, like what is typically inboard or outboard of each other, why some lines led to tops and others to the shrouds, etc.? You have done such a great job in the past of explaining the logic of framing as you studied it; I wonder if there are similar lessons after looking at the rigging? An inspiration! Mark