Mike Y

Välkommen! 😊

Välkommen! 😊

In February is showed the model of a tartan, which I picked for its simple fluent lines to test Seahorses method of paper building without using filler.
My son made the design for a book sleeve with an older model of a small fluit under attack bij a North-African corsair. I thought you might like to see it:
 

Just a note that I finished the man-of-war. These are the results:

Not very spectacular from the side view.
 


The quarter views are OK though.
 

And the sails look like sails. I'm a happy man.
 
Ab

Ab,
 
Thank you for your positive comments on the new Kolderstok model 🙂 Much appreciated!

Have you tried using SilkSpan paper? I've not tried limp sails, but furled ones worked out well, as the material can be re-wetted many times without tearing to be shaped as needed.

Limp sails, half-hoisted for drying are so much more difficult to represent, than the dramatic billowing ones, but I think you are getting there ! This begins to look rather convincing.
 
While pottering along with my current project, I have been looking at various images, including van de Velde paintings and mid-19th century photographs, to get a better feeling for how limp sails drape over stays and the kind of folds and creases they have. My challenge then will be that I am/will be working at 1:160 scale. At any scale the problem is that the materials that are available to us are at least one order of magnitude too thick compared to the prototype and the the stiffness of the fibres does not scale down. This means that the material, whether textile or paper, does not crease and fold as intricatly as it should. Even on those billowing sails one would normally see fine creases raying out from the corners - they are never as taught as the modern plastic yacht sails. This will require almost something like sculpting in 3D, using e.g. tweezer, while the material is drying.
 
I will also experiment with painting, acrylic washes, as figurine painters use to depict fabrics or indeed any painter, with the difference that the substrate is not flat, but in three dimensions.
 
@Schmidt has been continuing with his paper experiments and he tries to achieve the transparent effect one observes when viewing a sail against the light. His recent results look quite promising: https://forum.arbeitskreis-historischer-schiffbau.de/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1874&start=75. He also works in 1:160 scale for theses models, btw.

It has been a while since we had the short conversation about the material to choose for natural looking sails. I jumped into several experiments after wefalcks suggestion of using paper for sails and I managed to get all the paper I needed. However, I never succeeded in creating the result I was looking for. So I went on searching for the right kind of textile. Thanks to one of my former collegues at the museum I managed to get some stuff called 'voile cotton' that answered my needs.
Since the hull of the man-of-war I referred to earlier in the thread was finished, I decided to try my hand on an experiment with almost windless conditions like on this Van de Velde painting in the Rijksmuseum:

Because I don't want to hurt my back too much I prepare my masts, including blocks, sails and lines on the table.

In this picture sails and blocks are in position, lines still have to be added.
 
Here the sails are sprayed with starch and dried with a hair-dryer, while modeling them in the shape I want. Purpose is of course to get natural shapes, expressing the weight of the sails together with the little wind that furls them. Hard to explain I'm afraid. All the lines are temporarily belayed at the mast-foot, they will be attached at the right locations later. 

And this is how it will all look after completion. The main mast still has to be done. The shrouds and stays of the foremast can be fixed now, after which braces, bowlines and tacks follow. Sorry for my lousy photography techniques.
 
By the way, my pleasure vessel experiment, the subject of this (a bit confused) thread, has led to a kit, produced by Kolderstok (http://kolderstok.nl/speel-jaght.html). Kits are not my cup-of-tea, but this one is unusual in the sense that the traditional egg-box system with its terrible straight-planks-method has been replaced by a sort of shell-first technique. Because Rene Hendrickx, my super-Belgian partner-in-crime, created the shapes of all the planking for the boat, the kit is built by using a pdf-mold, used to temporarily support the laser-cut planking. Thus  an empty shell is created after lifting from the mold, which can be finished like a real hull. A new development in kits in my (limited) vision for a very reasonable price. Sorry if I overlooked kits which followed the same method, as I said, kits are not really a point of interest for me. 
Here a page from Kolderstock's three language manual, showing what I mean.

Over the weekend I have been to London and as our hotel was around the corner, my wife suggested that we visit once more the Wallace-Collection. Sir Richard Wallace and his father have put together also a nice collection of Dutch paintings, including a good number of seascapes. For a colleague over in the forum of the 'Arbeitskreis' I took pictures of several hoeker-like vessels (https://forum.arbeitskreis-historischer-schiffbau.de/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1874) and also what I think may be an early form of a 'boeier'. In any case, judging by the carved and gilded decorations, it is obviously a pleasure-craft:
 

J. van der Heyden (1637-1712): View of the Westerkerk, Amsterdam.
 
Perhaps Ab can correctly identify this vessel ?

You are welcome.
Why do you think I traded Amsterdam for Alkmaar?
 

Hello Eberhart,
 
I only recently found out that you are chairman of the Arbeitskreis Historische Schiffsbau in Germany. As you know I sometimes contribute to its magazine Das Logbuch, invited to do so by the editor Robert Volk. You seem to lead an extremely active life. 🙂
 
Houtboard: I am not an expert on the fabrication of it, but I suppose even wood-dust is used. It causes the material to become more or less 'flexible'. You can make concave shapes by pressing it with round surfaces, like a spoon or an iron ball. It can also be filled and sanded, but I only use it for covering up the skeleton of a planned ship model. You are right that the result is not exactly crispy and clean, but I don't care, as I cover it with self-adhesive plastic strips, which improves the result. In cases where sharp contours are needed, like the wales of a ship (the most important part as it goes for catching the right sheer) I use 2 mm thick polystyrene.
Nobody ever told me that you have to stick to paper once you started building in paper....
 
Compared to what I see accomplished here on this forum, I am not exactly what I call a good model builder, because in fact I have no interest in finished models to put them on the mantel shelf. Sometimes I give or throw them away, sometimes I sell one, I even considered burning some, as they take a lot of space and only gather dust. I only build because I want to learn something. For me model building is a technique I use, a way of scientific research, building itself is never my purpose. The end result is always something different from a ship-model, like knowledge, which is the reason why I am often reviewed by historians and replica builders.
 I have worked in wood all my life, but getting older, I am running out of time, so I switched to an easier material, being able to work faster. Having explored in model scale the way 17th century ships were constructed, I now turned to the outside looks of the vessels, trying to make them look as real as possible, so a Photoshop painting can be made in a convincing way. This leads to the conviction that too small details are totally nonsense (for me) to apply to a model, as a model can be compared to a real ship seen at considerable distance. From a hundred meters I cannot see what sort of head the nails of a ship have, so why should I bother to model them? I don't make real ships, they are only models, probably the most useless objects in the world...
 
All this beside of the fact that I am notoriously lazy...:-)
 

Välkommen! 😊

If I understand you well you can win a prize in a competition by doing something totally wrong. Nice qualification for the jury...
 
No offense to the organizers of competitions, but maybe one should not join a competition at all. It seems to me that the items the jury reviews have little to do with knowledge of ships and a lot with 'thumb-nail-polishing' and 'rivet-counting'. In Holland we have a word for it which absolutely will be banned from this forum when I write it down, but it has to do with an unnatural sexual relationship with ants 🙂.
Personally I prefer a rather sloppy, but true model with the right atmosphere over a perfectly build wrong one. It must be my personal handicap that I refuse to compare one ship model with another on the basis on how totally random details have been applied. How nails and wooden pins are used may be in a drawing looking great, but I have made enough plans to know that more than half of what we draw is pure guess work, of which we hope it may be somewhere in the direction of a perfect depiction. Plans are not sacred. In my 60 years career as a model builder I never used a plan without changing all kinds of things in them.
 
Just have fun building and let juries judge their own models....

At previous occasions on this and other forums I explained that real trustworthy information about the shape and construction of Dutch 17th century ships is scarce. (http://www.papermodelers.com/forum/ships-watercraft/35441-17th-century-dutch-fluit-14.html, ,
The Amsterdam diplomat, lawyer, collector and lord-mayor of Amsterdam Nicolaes Witsen (1641-1717) was the first to write a book on the subject of Dutch shipbuilding, Aeloude en Hedendaegse Scheepsbouw en Bestier (Old and Modern Shipbuilding and Managing) 1671. To illustrate his story he described the building of an average ship of his days, an armed trader called a 'pinas'. Three masts, 134 feet long, 24 guns, sailed by a hundred man. It took me 6 years to process his data about the ship into working drawings and to build the model.
The knowledge I gained during the work opened the way for me to another career: head of the restoration department for navy models in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. In 2006, after having published about Witsen and his pinas I started to work the material around into 3D. I got help from a Belgian gentleman, called Rene Hendrickx, who proved to be an expert on the free downloadable shipbuilding program Delftship. Over three years we worked together to turn every single part of the ship Witsen mentioned into 3D shapes. In the end thousands of files formed together the unquestionable image of a 17th century average ship.
The Cultural Heritage Agency, part of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science commissioned Tijdlab, a young firm that makes historical 3D representations, to use our results for a program that made the pinas accessible for the public on an internet site: https://witsenscheepsbouw.nl.
 
To say that it has grown into a heavy program is an understatement. It takes time to download the various parts. Therefore the (Microsoft)user gets the opportunity to download the entire program, both the Dutch and the English version, at once on to his own harddisk. That saves a lot of time if you want to access it more than once (which I warmly recommend). Mac users are for the time being convicted to use the online version, preferably through Chrome, which is just a little bit lower in quality, but still very worthwhile visiting.
After opening the site you get three choices:
Interactively you can watch 14 stages of construction of the ship. This is especially useful to watch the shell-first building method that was applied in those days in Holland, in which the outside planks are placed before any frame part.

2. Here you can 'walk' through the ship, using the w, a, s and d keys of your keyboard. In the next update you can ask the name of any part of the ship you see.

3. Those names can be looked up in the Encyclopedia, where the location of the part in the ship is shown, as well as all the data Witsen provided about that part in his book. Of course it can be viewed from close-by, moving and turning the part any way you want.

On a forum for ship modelers it would be an omission not to make available the construction plans of the ship, the only 17th century avarage ship we know. There are also links to the online version of Witsen's book, together with another 17th century author about the subject, Cornelis van Yk with his book De Nederlandse Scheeps-bouw-konst open-gestelt (Dutch Shipbuilding Unveiled) from 1697.
 
Because this is the beta version (we hope to update very soon with more info presented within the program) we invite anyone who has remarks or questions to react and share his thoughts so we can serve the user even better.
 
Please have a look there!
Ab

Välkommen! 😊

Just a quick update.  It might not look like a lot of work was done since my last post but you would be surprised how involved the deck beams can be.
 
With the cabins on the fore lower platform completed,  you can start adding deck beams above them.  No reason to wait until everything is built below deck to do so.  In fact, waiting to do it all at one time wont be very enjoyable.  Doing it this way breaks up the task a bit.
 
This kit will be very simplified compared to the books.  Because we will be planking the gun deck in the "classic" contemporary model style,  there is absolutely no need to make and add the hanging and lodging knees.   In fact, this would up the difficulty factor by about ten.   So we will just be adding the deck beams with all of the carlings and ledges.  You can however follow the Seawatch books and scratch build the knees should you really want the total experience.
 
 
The photo below has a lot going on that was completed.
 

First, The first four deck beams were glued into position...
 
Then the carlings were added between them as shown on the plans.  The carling are cut to length using 3/16 x 5/32 strips.   
 
Lastly you may notice that the after most beams have a column under them at the center.   These are just 1/8" x 1/8" strips cut to length.  The corners are chamfered as shown on the plans.
 
With the first four beams added you can now add the ledges.   These are the thinner "partial beams" that extend from the carlings to the deck clamp.  They are laser cut for you with a special "leg" on the outboard ends.   This raises each ledge to the perfect height so it will be flush with the top of the gun deck beams.  So when you are cleaning the char off these...DONT sand the bottom or even the end with this "leg" on it.  Otherwise you wont have level ledges with your beams.    Hope that makes sense.
 
Now in that same photo above you can see the first few ledges (cleaned of laser char...no need to clean the bottom at all actually) resting in position.  All you have to do is cut the end that sits against the carling and glue it on position.
 
NOTE:  Now yes indeed...all of the carlings should be notched in the deck beams.   All of the ledges should be notched into the carlings.  But you know what...I am not going to do that.  And you dont have to either.  It simplifies things so much this way and those many mortices and notches are not so easy to make.  They will also mostly be completely covered up.   So you can decide.
 
 
Now this may all seem simple enough.  But finding the exact locations for these beams, carlings and ledges is super important.  Time and care must be taken to get their location correct....otherwise you will end up with hatches in the wrong  position and mast holes too!!  It could get ugly.
 
So use the plans.   If you have a second set printed.  Go ahead and cut them up.  You can see strategically placed cut outs on the template that allowed me to mark the locations of the carlings on the beams....and the ledges on the carlings.   This template also helped me position the deck beams properly which is the very first thing you need to do.  Finding you center line on those deck beams after they installed is also a huge help.  Gluing the parts in is easy enough...but the marking, measuring and planning takes time and patience.

 
Then its just a matter of cutting all of those ledges to length and gluing them in position.   There are a lot of them.  I believe 86 in total.   Note that these would also be down the center between the carlings and hatches also.  But once again they will be entirely covered up and its just a repetitive exercise that nobody will ever see.
 

To show you how the knees and other details like the ledges wont be seen...here is a look at this area with the deck planking cut and placed on the model as a test.  This shows what will be very close to the final appearance using the "classic contemporary model appearance".   But everyone can always deviate from that should they want to.
 

 
 

Välkommen! 😊

Hello everyone.
Last year I successfully completed the construction of the Le Gros Ventre model according to Gerard Delacroix's monograph and I chose L'Amarante as the next model (also according to GD's monograph). I started the construction of the POF at the end of last year and will gradually publish photos from the construction process here.
First, I made a jig for installing the individual frames on the keel and started assembling the keel.
     

Hi all, thanks for having me.
 
My name is Klas, I am 44 years old and live with my wife in Sweden, on the Baltic coast. I have recently taken up ship modelling and I am currently building the HM Armed Cutter Sherbourne from Vanguard Models. In the past I have done some plastic modelling and wargaming miniature painting.
 
As a profession I sit in front of a computer or in meetings all day. I am trained as a metal machine operator, turning and milling, and started work as a CNC operator. After a few years I learned 3D CAD and worked in the design department designing cutting tools, mostly drill bits. And since 15 years I work in the Supply Chain with more boring work, but getting paid a lot more. I miss some aspects of the work I have done in the past and I been wanting to take up a hobby where I can create something.
 
I am very interested in history, naval and otherwise, and I owned a sailing boat for a number of years. 
 
I have a pretty good home office where I can do most work, however I can't really have much machinery here. I don't have a workshop, but my father in law has one about 20min away, he has a lot of tools, small bandsaws, turning tools even a CNC mill.
 
I have a lot left to do in my current project, but I am also looking into the next build. Here I would like something in a bigger scale I think. The Syren Cutter Cheerful looks incredible and I will probably try and get hold of that. The Maris Stella HMS Speedy seems interesting too.
 
The most inspiring model I have seen is the Winchelsea so maybe this would be a goal to aspire to in a number of years. 
 
Klas

The construction came to an end after approx. 4600 hours. All that remains is to post a few last photos and thank all the followers for watching and commenting on the progress of the model construction. Thank you.

Watch the unboxing video here: https://youtu.be/9MmKWya-bO4
 

Starting chapter 7
 
The first thing I wanted to do, just to get it out of the way...was to get all the gundeck beams made.  I cleaned the char off of all 11 beams now.  Then they were cut to length using the plans as a guide.  I also used the plans to establish where each deck beam is positioned.  For now I will just set them aside and grab them as I need them.   The last thing I wanted was to have to stop what I am doing just to clean char off a beam and cut it to length.  Its a comfort knowing they are all done and ready.
 
The photo below shows all the beams just resting on the deck clamp.
 

This allowed me the opportunity to cut all the templates and see what the planking scheme would look like so I can adjust it now rather than later.   I think its a good plan as is...and I wont make any adjustments, yet.
 

 
With the beams all ready and at hand, I could start making the cabins on the lower platform at the bow.
 
Each bulkhead will be made in two layers.   Both are 1/32" thick and are laser etched with a bunch of reference lines.   Now it would be easy enough to make these from scratch but this does make the building process quicker.  Especially since very little of these will be seen.  Below are the sections for the carpenters cabin on the starboard side.   It shows both sides.  I cleaned the char from the inside edges of the door panels and then glued up each layer.
 
Before I add any details I made sure they fit on the model.  I adjusted them to fit nicely in position and adjusted the heights etc.   This is why it is good to have those deck beams handy.  You need to have the first two beams in position to get the heights correct.
 

 
Once I was sure they fit on the model OK (see the deck layout for details), I started added the hinges and stanchions.

First I added the upright timbers which are either 1/8" x 1/8" strips cut to length or 3/32" x 3/32" strips.  The plans show which.   Then I added the door handles and hinges.   Make sure to add the handles on both sides of the door.   And be careful to put them on the correct side based on which way the doors open.
 
The outside view of both bulkheads completed.
 

The interior of the carpenters cabin detailed.

 
Finally they were glued into position on the model.  I placed the side with the doors first.  Just use your planking of the lower platform to position it straight and against the stanchion on the fcastle bulkhead.  
Then I added the smaller section along the aft edge of the platform.  This will probably need the outside edge to be sanded because I laser cut them longer than needed.   So adjust the side that butts up against the frames.   But remember, there isnt any planking on the inboard side of the frames so it is expected to show a gap.   Just get it as even and consistent as you can.  
 
The carpenters cabin and boatswains cabin completed.
 
Note how the top of the bulkheads against the deck clamp are flush with the top of the deck clamp.    
 

Next up will be the sail room.  But that needs to be built a different way because of the louvered walls for ventilation. 
 
Chuck
 
 
 

Yes indeed.   I am however probably going to stick with the how the cont. model was portrayed.  Its easy enough to add a few more swivel stocks for folks who want to add them.  Builders choice.  Aesthetically, they just ruin the elegant run of the sheer to my eye.   If I were to include them however I would certainly add a rope railing with stanchions along the poop as shown on that draft detail I posted of "Fly".    I think it would make sense to my eye anyway.   But I am going to stick with just the few swivels mounted at the bow.  I have gone with the model for so many other things.....number and position of timberheads etc.  Although I have also been swayed on some other things shown on the original draft as opposed to the model.   Its a trade-off.   Once you start looking you will spot so many differences....between all of these primary source references.   I forget how many swivels you ended up with per side.   Seven or eight?  
 
The draft for Cruiser does show a heck of a lot more swivels...as shown below (bottom).   Just to show folks who will build the kit and want to go another way.
 
Cont model with two swivel stocks per side.
 

Speedwell draft with two swivel stocks per side.

 
Cruiser class draft with 10 swivel stocks per side.  Very different appearance with the open sheer rails as well.
 

For me that is very true...But some folks do like to "kitchen Sink" a model.
 
 

Putting in his lunch order. 
 
But seriously….they are same figure and just used for scale.  I actually move him around as I develop the drawings.  Insane how tight the spaces were and low the ceilings were.  
 
I placed him near the tiller on the poop deck also…no railings port and starboard.  Crazy stuff…lucky if the bulwarks are knee high…
 
Just high enough to trip overboard.