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You may also want to consult relevant textbooks on the subject that are available digitally on the Internet: DELAUNEY, J.F., GUITTARD, A.C.A.J. (1889): Historique de l'artillerie de la marine 1692-1889.- 328 p., Paris (D. Dumoulin). LAFAY, J. (1850): Aide-memoire d'artillerie navale.- 721 p., 50 pl., Paris (J. Corréard). VERDIER, M. (1837): Nouveau manuel complet de la marine. Seconde Partie. Manoeuvres du Navire et de l’Artillerie.- 288 p., Paris (Librairie Enciclopédique de Roret).

There is a German film of the 1960s that emulates Jerome K. Jeromes novel and is much more like your own experience, Keith. The guys nearly went down the Fall of the river Rhine in Schaffhausen ... (actually one can't, as there is a very low bridge in the way, but being pushed under the bridge by the strong current isn't very healthy either).

Looking forward to the results of the roofing experiments and the weathering ... Talking about heating: we just came back from a business trip to Italy and found that the apartment had only just above 16°C - the heating in the condominium doesn't come on until mid-October, regardless of conditions 🤨 The funny thing is that southern Europeans seem to be much more tolerant to cold apartments because they are rarely home and outside day-time temperatures are quite tolerable. In Italy heating is not permitted until 1 November, regardless, whether you live in Sicily or around the Alps. My apartment in Bergamo in 1991 didn't have any heating, except for the kitchen 🥶. Likewise, when I was looking for an apartment in Nottingham in January 1987, one was advertised as having 'central heating' - it turned out it had 'central' gas heater in the living room ... The apartment in Germany, where I first grew up in the 1950s/early 1960s had stove heating and remember my mother firing up the stove first thing in the morning and I also remember pushing ice around the window pane in the childrens' room.

Some people use wet-n-dry sanding paper of an appropriate grade and paint it a dark grey to resemble tar-paper.

Home-made?

I have done a bit of colour adjustment in Photoshop to get rid of the yellow tint and the murkiness: I think the flag looks red-yellow-red ...

I would modify this summary a bit: if you can put the part under a (quality) drill-press and hold it safely, this may be a good option for even the smallest drills. Otherwise, use a pin-vise or similar.

I gather, if you live in central to northern Europe, you are less likely to annoy your neighbours, as in general, houses are more solidly build - unlike say in Spain, where walls are really paper thin and most houses are build with concrete pillars and beams, which are ideal for transmitting body-sound. Over the past fifteen years I have been living in a Parisian building made from concrete slabs and so far no one has complained. On the other hand, you are not going to work with your machine tools continuously for 12 hours a day. Just stick to the rules of the building/community and do maintain the quiet hours at mid day and evening and perhaps the weekends.

To me it appears like a Spanish commercial schooner from somewhere around the 1830s to the 1840s, Although the according to Norie & Hobbs (1848) the merchant flag at that time should have had several red and yellow stripes (see https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/J._W_Norie_and_J._S._Hobbs_-_Three_hundred_and_six_illustrations_of_the_maritime_flags_of_all_nations_(1848).pdf). I didn't check, whether any of the Spanish colonies of that time used the red-yellow-re ensign.

Perhaps you want to post some pictures of your luthier excursion in the 'Non-ship/categorised builds' section? Not that I intend to build any musical instruments (which I wouldn't be able to tune and play anyway), but the tools and materials of that trade are also of interest to us shipmodellers.

A roller-fairlead would make indeed a lot of sense, when the purpose is to extend the space for working certain ropes by numerous men. The cable on the first picture looks a bit too thick though for being comfortably being pulled by hand. It looks more like a mooring cable or something like that.

The wooden crate looks good!

... I was just about to ask for something to judge scale 😁 You follow an interesting procedure for the rigging, sort of completing one mast and then proceding to the next. I am curious to see, how you will manage to bring the stays for the mainmast to the foremast and the deck in front of it without breaking other things 😲 You also need to attach the sails to the yards still.

Looking good! I like this attention to details. Casting these nets requires quite a dexterity, a bit like working with a lasso I could imagine. Below is a shot of a guy using such a net on the Niger river that I took nearly 20 years ago:

Yep, wooden clothes pegs of various sizes and ladies' hair clips are very useful to us too ... I also shape their front for various applications.

No, the OLYMPIAS together with the armoured cruiser AVEROF and some other ships are on display in a sort of museum harbour a few kilometers to the south, outside Piraeus.

A couple of weeks ago I had, during a business visit to Athens, the opportunity to visit the Hellenic Maritime Museum in Piraeus. They have a 1/50 scale model of the ARES on display: I think your small model compares quite favourably with this model, which is three times the size!

The pedigree of the Canadian/US American fishing dory is quite obscure. However, there were many flat-bottomed boats with more or less straight sides all around the European coasts. They are simple to build, with a minimum amount of skills and tools. The type probably came with French settlers to N-America, as around the British Isles keel-built boats dominate. It was then, presumably, that the Franco-Canadians sort of standardised the design and construction. The French and Portuguese Grand Banks fishermen adopted the type for its obvious advantages in this type of fisheries. It is quite well-adapted to long-line fishing, where its initial low stability does not matter so much, but the stability increases, when the boat is loaded with fish. The flaring sides also make for a good loading capacity. This design is less useful for net-fishing as practiced around most of the European coast, due to its said low initial stability. The standardised design and absence of structural traverse timbers makes ths dory most suitable for stacking, hence space saving transportation. The big three-masted topsail schooners sailed from French and Portuguese harbours with huge stacks of dories to the Grand Banks. They also carried spare boats as 'flat-packs' IKEA-style, that could easily be assembled at the fishing grounds. Fecamp at the coast of the Canal and Paimpol in Brittany were the big French Grand Banks fishing ports and had their own dory industry I believe.

That gives a very American look to the coach ...

Should be easy for any one with a lathe and who is located on your side of the pond to turn up a sleeve ...

0.6 mm in your set, but PROXXON and watchmaking supply houses sell them down to 0.5 mm in 0.1 mm increments. It's the same shaft diametre as the common burrs.

Got a similar one for Christmas from my beloved and well-meaning, but not so well-informed in these matters wife a few years ago. If yours really goes down to the indicated rpms, it is much more useful than mine, which has rpms in the thousands. It was really meant for engraving glass, rather than drilling. For this reason it is also designed to only take bits with 2.35 mm shaft. The smallest drill diametre with this shaft seems to be 0.5 mm.

John, I have posted your query including the first photograph in our German forum: https://forum.arbeitskreis-historischer-schiffbau.de/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=2660. There we have a number of knowledgeable people on these fourmasted barques. There is one guy who worked on the restauration of the PEKING after her return to Hamburg from the New York Southstreet Seaport Museum and another guys works on a large-scale model of the PETSCHILI. I have looked for potentially useful photographs of the PASSAT and the PEKING in order to see, whether they have the same fairleads on the central bridge, but couldn't find any close-up picture (yet). Let's see, whether there is a response on the German forum ...

I tend to shy away from tools sold in model shops, but rather go for the quality tools sold to watchmakers. They may be the same tools, but of higher quality, albeit at a somewhat higher price. However, one has to pay attention, because even watchmaker's supply houses, particularly the on-line ones, today often sell Chinese scrap. I tend to buy secondhand semi-antique tools ... Below is a selection of my antique and modern tool-/workholding and drilling tools: 1 - Archimedes drill for watchmakers. 2 - Slender modern pin-vice with hollow fluted brass body. 3 - Slender antique pin-vice with hollow fluted brass body. 4 - Shop-made pin-vice with walnut body and head made from an insert drill-chuck; these drill-chucks are unfit for their intended purpose as they usually do not run true. 5 - Eclipse toolmaker's pin-vice with knurled steel body; these come in different sizes. 6 - French-style pin-vice; these are closed with the sliding ring and have usually brass inserts in the two jaws that can be adapted to special needs; 7 - Dito, here the jaws are replaced in hard-wood for delicate parts. 8 - Antique laboratory pin-vice with fluted wooden handle. 9 - Modern pin-vice with fluted wooden handle; these come in different sizes and capacities. 10 - Antique toolmaker's pin-vice for very delicate work in confined spaces and for holding tiny files and broaches. The Archimedes drill of No.1 closes from 1 mm down to near zero and holds even my 0.1 mm drills. They make also a variety with spring-return that can be worked with one hand (though I wouldn't do that with such tiny drills). Before the days when I had all those tools, I slipped a section of cored solder wire over the drill. The run-out may too big for an electric drill, but it works very well for hand-drilling.

Not that I particularly like this 'after-though' solution, but I have seen often in museums brass wire-struts midships on both sides that are meant to keep the model from falling over. My personal approach would be to epoxy two nuts (say M3 or M4 for Europeans) above the keel, drill an appropriate hole through the keel (which may need to be doubled-up at this point). The pedestals need to be hollow to run threaded rods through them that screws into the nuts. There needs to be a space drilled out in the baseboard to accomodate a nut and a washer. The latter serve to tighten down the model onto the pedestals. This arrangement can also be used to temporarily hold the model onto a building stand/jig for further work after the planking is finished. This solution has the advantage over wood-screws that the model can be screwed down/unscrewed any number of times without losing grab.