wefalck

In any case, in real practice it would not be possible to wrought the ring closed with the rope through (with or without thimble) - the heat would burn your rope. The same applies, when bending the hooks from wire and (silver-)soldering the ring closed. One has to follow full-size practice and splice the becket after leading it through the ring. In small scales, one may need to fake the splice and hide the joint under the seizing.

In principle, fillers are a good idea, particularly, when bulkheads are thin and spaced wide apart. The need for them also depends on how thick the planking will be - thin planks tend to kink much more than thicker ones, of course. In your particular case, however, I have the feeling that fillers might not really be needed, as your bulkheads are quite thick and closely spaced. The wood used for the fillers should be about the same hardness as the bulkheads, if it is too soft, you might sand hollows into them between the bulkheads, if it is too hard, it is a lot of work to shape them. Looking at your model, I have the feeling that you might want to define the rabbet line better. It looks, as if you won't have much space for the planking above the bulkheads in the midship section. But then I don't know, how you will construct the keel.

на здоровье!

Hi Michael, didn't hear from you for a while, hope things are ok!?

Another project that I missed until today ... although I would be mentally/historically on the other side of the fence

Keep it coming !

How could I possibly have missed this new project since May! A (a non-selfpropelled) derrick lighter after some 1880s plans has been on my projects list for decades ... looking forward to see your solutions for the derrick and the machinery.

Jon, I did not do any systematic research on this, so some of my observations are rather conjectural: The layout of European and North-American vessesl around the middle to late 19th century was quite different. In virtually all cases the crew-quarters in Europe were forward (with all the inconveniences described quite graphically by Dana in his book). The kitchen, fuel storage and storage of other combustible materials, such as lamp-oil and paint, where in a 'caboose' (with the original meaning of word), that is a mobile deckhouse that was tied down with iron rods. Accomodation for the captain/skipper/owner and perhaps the mate was in the rear. Sometimes it also housed the skippers family, at least the wife and below-school-age children. To provide more head-room from around the 1850s on the rear deck was raised as a poop. To the contrary, in America a larger deckhouse was constructed that accomodated the whole crew and in a forward compartment the kitchen. This could have been an autochtonous development in America to provide a more healthy living space, but could have been also a tradition that was brought across the pond by Scandinavian shipbuilders/mariners. As an exception to the above discussed European layout, Scandinavian lumber-traders seem to have had larger deckhouses. The reason was that they needed to have bow-ports in order to be able to stow long pieces of timber and the crew accomodation forward would have been in the way. By the same logic, moving the skipper's quarters onto the deck gave more room for long timber. I would doubt that 'hot berthing' was used on these traders, it was more common on certain naval ships. If you calculate say a 7' headroom in the deckhouse, this would allow you to have three bunks above each other plus a storage space for the seamen's chest under the lowest bunk. Thus in a 15' long deckhouse you could sleep 12 crew. You would need around 4' to 5' between the sides of deckhouse and the bulwark to work the sails etc. BTW, I was wondering about the rather tall 'skylight' on your deckhouse that made it look a bit like a 'caboose' (in North-american railway sense). If there was a skylight at all, I would have thought it be rather low in order to clear the main-boom, which you want to have as low as possible in order to bring the meta-centre of the sailplan down. When estimating crew numbers, I would think that four men per mast would be sufficient, but it depends on the size of the square sails that need to be handled. In Europe smack-type ships were sailed with three hands, including the skipper and a boy, while schooners may have had six hands and small brigs perhaps eight - which is why many brigs were converted to brigantines, which saved a quarter of the staff-cost and the cost of maintaing the square-rig gear of the main-mast without loosing much of the sailing capacity.

I am not an expert on kits, but it seems that the laser-cut kit by Master Korable are setting standards as far as the precision and ease of building is concerned, judging by the various building logs here and on other fora. They apparently also require a minimum set of tools only. I cannot speak from experience, as I grew into this hobby since my childhood, but it may be advisable, when diving into the deepe end, to takle a boat-kit first, rather than a ship-kit as ones mentioned in your post. Ships are quite complex 'beings' and it is easy, even with a good kit, to get lost, when you don't have a good feeling for how a ship is actually constructed. And once you get lost, you may become frustrated and give up, which would be a pity. Also, one should not underestimate the challenge of rigging and you may actually spend more time on it than on building the hull (particularly with laser-cut kits) - there are very few short-cuts for rigging-job well-done.

Stay away from cyanoacrylates for coppering, as it tends to stain the copper. A solvent-based contact cement is the best option.

For an European eye these American deckhouses have a strange appearance, like a log-cabin that has floated onto the aft-deck during a storm 😏

Veggies are for softies and women ... and they were expensive. The fishing trips would have lasted only a day or two, depending on success and weather conditions.

Probably not ... they ate boiled potatoes on those boats - a chip-pan would have been far too dangerous (it is the major domestic fire hazards in British houses to have a pan with boiling oil on a gas cooker 😱). I think it was an anecdote recounted by Wolfgang Rudolph in one of his books on the boats from the Pommeranian coast: A guy was taking a passage on a fishing boat (probably late 19th century) and the fisherman offered him a meal during the trip. As the guy did not come from the coast, he tried to be modest and ate mainly from the potatoes - whereupon the fisherman reprimanded him: "Mate eat fish, potatoes are expensive!". The kitchen utensils on these boats typically consisted of a frying pan (for the fish and perhaps some bacon), a pot for boiling potatoes, and a kettle to boil water for coffee.

I think on many double-hulled boats they use(d) either wooden or iron connecting rods between tillers. The connecting rod would need to transmit largely only pulling forces, it could be quite thin in order to have a strength comparable to that of the tiller ropes.

Exemplary attention to and rendering of the details - as always ! I think she has the pontential to become one of the most detailed models of such yachts ever built ...

This is another recurrent discussion ... as Allan said, if you require high accuracy and long useability, then you might to go to either an industrial supplier or a watchmaker supply house. However, there you will have to pay a bit more. I am not sure about that, but I would suspect that hobby suppliers can only maintain their prices by buying lower quality or 'seconds', i.e. drills from reputed manufacturers that did not meet their internal quality requirements or that of their customers. Grinding sub-millitmetre drills is quite a challenge and may result in quite a lot of 'seconds'. In general, they are ground from calibrated 'drill-rod', so that the shank is the nominal diameter. It is here where diameter should be measured. In fact, such drills may cut slightly oversize holes, because the cutting edges may not be exactly centred. The most exact drills with respect to running true are those with thickened shaft. They are made with 1 mm, 1.5 mm, 3 mm and 3.2 mm (= 1/8") shaft. If you are drilling by hand, you are quite certain to end up with an oversize hole. Nominal diametre holes in the sub-millimetre rand can really only be achieved with a pillar-drill or similar and collets (chucks normally have to too much run-out). So at the bottom line, I would not worry too much about the drills not being exactly the nominal size. Pick a drill that matches the material for which you are drillng the hole for.

Also, this is discussion that has resurfaced several times over the past few years. I gather, in these discussions we quite exhaustively covered the different options and materials. So, it will be worthwhile to plough through theses threads.

I believe the scuttled ships in Scapa Flow are not only protected was a war memorial, but expressedly as a valuable resource for low-background radiation steel.

Yep, this was a many decade-long experiment to map ocean currents. The Deutsche Seewarte published sailing handbooks for the various oceans with the view to speed up voyages (not only of sailing ships) and to avoid recurrent adverse weather effects. Such experiments are still carried out, albeit with the aid of modern technology, such as radio-tracked buoys or buoys equipped with GPS, that at intervalls report their positions.

There are 0.2 mm sheets of styrene I wonder, whether it would be possible to take a sheet of clear Perspex / Plexiglas and directly 3D-print the pattern of mutins on it, rather than on the usual base. I personally have no experience with this kind of material, but some people draw out over a heat-source waste styrene from kits into thin 'wires'. This might be easier to work with, than wire. It probably needs some practice to obtain wires of uniform thickness.

The size of the window panes would depend on what material/process was available at the respective time and region. If I remember correctly (didn't cross-check on Wikipedia ...) float-glass was invented at the end of the 18th century in France (the glass-maker, St. Gobain, are still one of the biggest manufacturers in the Western world). So, French ships might have had larger panes, then could be traditionally made by blowing a cylinder, cutting it up lengthwise and then flattening it out. Thinking about the problem, I wonder, whether it would be feasible to cut the frame-pieces from styrene strips and assemble these on a drawing of the respective window, as David suggested. If you go for rectangular cross-sections of the strips, you don't need to bother with mitres. However, if you were giving them a profile with a scraper, you would need to mitre them - but this would be quite a challenge in 1:192 scale, I think. In a next step you can cut the individual panes from clear styrene-sheet, fit them carefully and then drop them into the grille with some liquid styrene-cement. A 'cheaper' variant of the above would be to assemble the above grille with water-soluble glue on a drawing and then to cement a clear styrene-sheet onto the back. The drawing then can be removed by soaking the assembly in water.

Zu Mondfeld died some years ago and I think, the series is not continued.

I don't know von Mondfeld's books, but I tended to shy away from them a his coverage is to broad and he surely was not an expert on all the periods. I understand, that there are also quite a few errors in them. The safest way is always to try to dig up primary sources from the period in question. Obviously, there are regional differences in practices, but as ships and people moved around in the Northern European region (Baltic, North Sea), so that practices diffused around it. So, one can look around Swedish, Danish, British and the scantily available German sources (Images, drawings, models, etc.)

The geometry of the movement of the tiller is a bit complicated, as the rudder-shaft is inclined and it does not form a right angle with the rudder-shaft. The outer end of the tiller, of course, will move in an arc around the rudder-head as seen in plan-view. At the same time. looking from the front, the outer end of the tiller will move in arc downwards from the highest point, when it is in the middle. At the moment I don't have the possibility to make a sketch, but I would think that there will a block attached to each side of the bulwark approximately, where the tiller would touch it, when put 'hard over', that is a bit backward from the front edge of the after cabin. Two single blocks would be attached to the front end of the tiller. So the runner of the tackle would be fixed to the block at the bulwark, led to the block on the tiller, run back to the bulwark block, and then from there forward. The arrangements would be mirror image on port and starbord. There could also be a lead-block a bit forward of the rear-cabin edge so that the runner can clear the cabin roof without chafing. Please note that this is purely conjectural and one may need to have look at (contemporary) models, for instance, for examples. Below there are some images from models that were constructed around 1900 by professionals for the Altonaer Museum (Hamburg) on the basis of plans and paintings etc. from the 1820s to 1850s. This is obviously about 100 years later than your example, but the principles have not changed much. I don't have pictures of 18th century examples. Above a schooner model that more or less illustrates the example that I have tried to explain above. The image above shows an arrangement similar to what you have, where the tiller is quite low above the raised after deck ('roof') and does not protrude a lot beyond its edge. No tackle was provided, so I am not quite sure, how the tiller was worked, when the rudder was hard over. As a matter of fact, the area of these rudders is quite small and they were mainly used to initiate a turn, which was mainly affected by taking away sails either before or after the mast to make the ship turn into the wind or away from it. It also served to keep the ship on a steady course, correcting small deviations due to jeering.

Not sure that the downloadable files and those on the CD-ROM have the same resolution. I copied the original book way back in 1978 I think, eventually go the real one and the CD-ROM. I wish someone would have measured up the surviving German boats just after WW2 in so much detail, as Nielsen did for the Danish ones. The book includes also a number of German boats, apart from the Zeesboot also a dug-out(!) used in the Kiel Fjord to transport fish to the market, rowed by the fishermen's wives. While there are quite a few drawings made during the early GDR days (by Wolfgang Rudolph) and in the 1990s/2000s in the same area by Helmut Olszak, there is virtually nothing for the area of Western German Baltic and North Sea coast. Will be following the progress on this project, as Nielsen's book has always been a source of inspiration for me.