wefalck

Thanks, gentlemen! @Keith Black I don't have a time-plan, it takes as long as it takes. Making and in particular installing the boat will be another challenge ahead, as this arrangement will be very flimsy. @starlight to your questions: - sorry for loose use of terminology, yes they are the same - sometimes my mother-tongue confuses me also, as it is 'Vordeck' in German ... - as said in an earlier post, the idea behind the planking pattern seems to have been to arrange the seams in the direction of the gun-blast to reduce the risk of damage; the muzzle is quite low above the deck. - I do have information what kind of decking material was used by the Navy in principle, but I don't know what was used on this particular class of boats; teak was expensive, but makes sense on this exposed deck; perhaps I should have changed the decking in the barbette to this improved paint scheme, but I don't want to rip it out again and repainting in the confined space will also result in a lot of collateral damage - I tacitly assume that it may have been another species of wood; once the gun has been installed, it will also be much less visible.

Coming on nicely indeed - only ten more sides to go, I suppose ...

Thanks, gentlemen, for your continued moral support! ********************************************** Quarter-deck – further work Having now satisfactory wooden decking for the quarter-deck, this was permanently cemented into place, allowing to progress with the installation of the various bits and pieces that had been fabricated years ago. These include the anchor capstan, the four patent chain-stoppers, chain-bollards (which are hollow and double as a base for the crew accommodation ventilators), various eye-bolts to which stoppers are shackled, that secure the chains during mooring, and the forward pair of mooring bollards. Populated quarter-deck Probably the only bought-in item will the studded anchor-chain. Recently, some really good 3D-printed chains have become available. My excuse is that that many shipyards did not make the chains themselves either, but bought them from specialised forgeries (apart from the fact that I didn’t want to go insane over making such microscopic studded chains). I choose the smallest size from yxmodels (Product no. YXN700-001). With 8€ plus shipping for a length of 120 mm they are the most expensive (not considering my time) item on board. They are printed in a light brown resin and were given several light dusts with acrylic paint to turn them black without clogging up or cementing the links together. The connecting link with the anchor shackle was bent from 0.2 mm tinned copper wire. The anchors are held in place with chains attached to the release gear that had already been installed. These chains were imitated by twisting together two strands of 0.1 mm blackened copper wire so that each twist is about the length of the assumed link length. The length of twisted wire then was folded over in half and twisted together in the opposite sense. With some imagination this looks quite like a slightly twisted chain. The anchor were secured in place with a couple of dots of shellack and then release chains installed – which not unexpectedly was a really fiddly task. I arranged the chains as they would be kept ready for dropping the anchor or in light weather, without further securing by rope chain-stoppers, as I do not have any pictorial evidence for how that would have been done on the real ship. The quarter-deck later will receive some light weathering and the chain-rails need to be installed, but as they are extremely fragile, this will be put off to the moment, when the model is installed on its final base-plate. Populated quarter-deck To be continued ....

That's a clever drilling jig for the deadeyes 👍 I am actually quite surprised that such kind of boat still uses deadeyes. Given the quite close connection that the French yachtsmen had with those in the USA, I would have thought, that screws might have been used already. Or hearts and lanyards. Deadeyes look rather 'rustic' on such a boat.

How did you do the colour-matching, by trial and error with the colour settings in the file?

Yep, cultures always scavanged foreign materials and traded them. It is difficult to know what an 'original' culture was and what materials and tools the culture used. The Inuit, for instance, have traded in sawn planks and metal tools from European whalers and settlers for centuries.

Makes me nervous, when I see something like this: A boatbuilder on Zanzibar shaping the stem-knee for dhow, photographed in 2012.

Would only work, if you could print exactly the colour you needed. Never works, not even even with black and white. Of course there is white decal paper on the market.

You could still 'beef up' the bulkheads where they are low with some wood shims and then sand them down where they are high. Always check for symmetry. This will be an interative procedure with quite a few iterations, but is time well-spent, because it will save you a lot of frustration later on - you will be never able to plank the boat properly, if this is not done ...

Never used an adze myself, but that's what most full-scale boatbuilders used all over the world for hundreds, if not thousands of years. I gather the Alaskan people would have used stone adzes before coming into contact with the Europeans? On the Pacific islands they used mussel shells instead.

The problem comes when you need white markings, as no (home) printer prints with white ink. For that you may have to go to a commercial printing house that caters for hobby applications.

@rudybob, allow me to make a couple of observations following on from the discussion in the other thread and what the others have observed already: - I don't actually see any tick marks on the frames, which seems to indicate that you have not yet determined the (approximate) width of each strake and their distribution over the hull. This is done by e.g. taking the distance between the keel-rabbet and the intended top of the planking along the sheer. Each distance, which varies along the boat, has to be divided into same number of equal plank widths. You then mark of these plank width on their respective frames - Using a narrow strip of transparent paper, long enough to cover the whole boat, for each plank you then can mark out the upper and lower edge of the plank on the basis of the tick marks. However, you do this as the planking progresses for each plank in order to get the real lower edge, not the one you may make marked off earlier. You connect the points using a french curve or a thin wooden batten. This gives you the outline of the plank and you can shape the wood accordingly with some margin for fitting. - Looking at your very first picture, I have the impression, that the assembly of frames has not been fully faired. You can check that by putting a thin batten onto the hull either parallel to the later planking or at a slightly oblique angle. If you fix it temporarily at one end and then press it down on each subsequent frame, you may notice that on some you get a buldge in the batten and in others there is gap to the frame. You will have work down cautiously the high frames. However I would check first, whether on the other side of the frame you may not have the opposite phenomenon, which indicates that the frame is either to far starboard or port and would need to be realigned ... Hope that helps a bit

Are you sure they used scoria? The heat capacity would be very low due to their porous nature. Something like basalt would be much better and would not crack easily either.

In Polynesia/Melanesia they seem to use clamps that function similar to the ones used by our boatbuilders. The sides are then pulled apart using twisted together coir ropes of which one part is attached to the clamps and the other to a piece of wood driven into the ground some distance away.

I gather they used heat to widen the dugout. This was common process among many peoples building dugouts. Either a fire was lit inside the semi-finished dugout or heated stones were placed into the almost finished one and the side pulled out using clamps and levers. This is not to be confused with using fire to char the wood to make it easier to work on it with stone tools.

Take your sea-sickness pills - they had no dampening elements (shock absorbers)

I don't want to divert your log, but perhaps a couple of comments on imitating wood from my perspective: I don't use inks, I only use acrylic paints. The simple reason is, when you apply ink to a barely porous medium, such as a base-coat of acrylics, the next application of ink or paint will simply wash away the previous work - unless you used a permanent ink. This would be different, if you used the ink say on paper, because it soakes into the paper and gets trapped in the fibres. I prefer to acrylic paints, because one can work fast, it only takes minutes for the washes of paint to dry. Some people use artists' oils, but there you will have to wait several days between applications, even if you work quite 'lean' with a solvent, rather than lineseed oil as medium to make the paint flow. Acrylics, particularly when applied with the airbrush seem to have a slightly porous surface, which is good, because a base-coat applied with the airbrush provides a good key for following washes applied with the brush. However, once you are done with your 'wood-graining', as it was called as a recognised trade, the pattern will look like wood, but not the surface - it will look like just what it is painted. By applying a coat of gloss varnish, you achieve a similar effect as when applying a penetrating sanding-sealer or varnish to wood: the varnish makes the light being less reflected from the surface roughness, it is being dispersed into the paint layer, giving the imitation wood 'depth'. Over this first coat of gloss varnish I apply a couple of coats of satin-varnish, say if I want to have the sheen of 'oiled' wood. For 'varnished' wood I may apply a mixture of satin and gloss varnish to give it the right sheen (but this may also depend on the product you are using). For 'bare' wood, such as decks, I spray on a final coat of matt-varnish. It is also important to apply the washes of acrylics with a brush and always in the direction of the assumed wood-grain.

You are probably right re. dimensions. I just looked that the sketches with the figures of post #15 and there the distance of the tiller to the lateral coamings didn't look too big. I kind of imagined a person sitting on the lateral decking when steering - if not standing. In a pleasure boat comfort is probably an important criterion, while in a working boat the practicalities of doing whatever the boat was supposed to be doing are the key considerations. A working boat may have been steered standing up most of the time, which also give a better field of view to the helmsman.

OK, different peoples, but do they relate to the Haida dug-outs in some way?

It is effectively a matt varnish. It is called a 'medium' in artists' vernacular because it would be mixed with the paint in tubes to change its consistency or sheen. Any varnish can be used as a 'cement', as long as the solvent can evaporate, which requires at least one porous surface.

I think it doesn't work, when you don't have a FaceBook account (like me).

I believe tiller extensions were something that came into fashion on racing boats in the early 20th century, but would not normally be found on cruising boats like this one. Option 1 is probably less likely to be found on a boat of this type for a couple of reasons: one it is very difficult to put the tiller over hard, the aft bench gets in your way, even if you make the tiller longer. The second is that typically you would have a storage space under the decking in the stern, which would be more difficult to access. On a sailing boat you would be spending most of the time sitting on the edge of the coaming (as was pointed out above), so a bench in the stern is not very useful. In fact, I remember from my practical sailing days, we usually sat on the windward decking with the feet on the benches, rather than sitting on the benches, that were only used at anchor or when motoring.

One question: how could you fit the second plank 'correctly' without permanently fixing the garboard plank? It is quite likely that, once the garboard plank is in place, you will need to make further adjustments to the next strake up. Otherwise, it is always advisable to work symmetrically, to avoid distorting the frames. Also, it is easier to judge symmetry, when you alternate between starboard and port.

Thanks for asking, Glenn, in the signature line there is a link to my own Web-site 'Maritima-et-Mechanika'. There are not that many ...

The dockyards supplied the annual allowance of pigment to the ships and ships were expected to repaint twice a year according to: Vale, B. (2020): Pitch, Paint, Varnish and the Changing Colour Schemes of Royal Navy Warship, 1775-1815: A Summary of Existing Knowlege.- The Mariner’s Mirror, 106(1): 30-42. So they had to use the pigment given to them, but the coloured pigment was usually mixed with e.g. lead-white to increase the covering intensity and to make it cover a larger surface area. Within limits, captains were allowed to deviate from the colour schemes as long as they stayed within the allowances. Any extra material they had to pay for from their own pockets (or squeeze out of the food allowances for the crews).