Bob Legge

Druxey, wouldn't that be amazing
Carl we will never know.
 
Wefalck I have often wondered about this.
 
Roger thanks for sharing this. it reminds me of an early childhood memory of visiting a place called Ruislip Lido, which was a small lake near London, and I remember two things a large ocean liner model floating there near the entrance and the ride on model railway with steam locomotives.
 
"Kenneth More recalled the production of the film in his autobiography, published 20 years later in 1978. There was no tank big enough at Pinewood Studios to film the survivors struggling to climb into lifeboats, so it was done in the open-air swimming bath at Ruislip Lido, at 2:00am on an icy November morning. When the extras refused to jump in, More realised he would have to set an example. He called out: "Come on!"
The passage above is from Wikipedia the link is to the article about the film " A Night to Remember" The film was released in 1958 so it was likely a year or two earlier when I saw the model.
 
A milestone today, I finished replacing the broken cable stays on the funnels.
 

 

 
Also hook back up the antenna wire from the forward mast to the forward funnel.
 
Michael

Well stayed, Michael! What remains to be done now?

Thank you very much for your comments and your liking, place the last photos, the model of Naiad is over, thank you so much for following me during construction and I thank Ed Tosti so much that with his magnificent drawings allowed me to build this beautiful frigate. Greetings to everyone and thanks again.
 

Hi some more photos.

Hi some photos of the base of the model under construction.

Another very useful idea, Ed - thank you!  My Kathryn model will need many shackles, and I'm sure this approach will come in handy for some of them.

Started work on a new project, the extreme clipper Witch of the Wave, built in 1851. She was designed and built by George Reynes of Portsmouth, NH.  She was originally owned by Glidden & Williams of Boston. Oddly enough, Gerorge Reynes son George Jr also built a packet freighter by the same name in 1856 in the same yard his father built this one in, so there is the possibility to get confused.
 
Witch of the Wave was quite long lived for an extreme clipper, sailing for at least 34 years. She set only one record, her 1855 passage from Calcutta, India to Boston, MA in 102 days.  She was quite beautiful even by standards of the day. A great deal of attention had been paid to the details of her workmanship and the quality of her fittings.  Her cabins were fitted out with rare woods of curious workmanship and expensive furnishings.  She had a library of over 100 books. Her figurehead was that of a beautiful woman holding aloft a scarf as she glides across the waves, with gilded branches and leaves stretching out behind her that grow to wrap around the hawse holes. She also had occuli, painted eyes on each side of her bowspirit commonly found on ships involved in the tea trade.
 
This log isn't intended to be anything but a log of how I do stuff.  Others do stuff differently and use different tools and concepts to do them. I'm not saying they aren't right, or that my ideas are better than theirs.  I'm only trying to show how I go about it.  I've worked in SolidWorks professionally since about 2006 and have done some WWII era warship models for Dragon Models and some CAD models of airframes for a company that restores WWII era fighter aircraft. So I'm posting this with the idea that you guys might be interested in how I do things.  The quid pro quo is that I am hoping you guys can share your knowledge about ships where I am lacking, and I have been able to ask a few things in the forum already, for which I'm grateful.  That said, I am hoping this doesn't come across as me being stuck up about how I do things or that I feel superior to others in my skills and knowledge-base.  I do things my way and steal ideas from everyone else when I don't know how to do something. You might notice that EdT's work on Young America is something I consider highly influential.  
 
This is where I started, research-wise. This was the first hard data I found on WotW. It comes from The Search for Speed Under Sail; 1700-1855 by Howard I. Chappelle. The book is 10" tall x 8" wide so unfolded this layout was 10" x 16", a pretty decent size to work with for a scan. Fortunately I happen to have a large format flatbed scanner which can do 11" x 17" at 12,000 DPI.

The resulting image was 18528 x 12408 pixels. I cropped a part of it here for you to imagine how large the full size image (zoom for effect). Needless to say it would be a little unwieldy in this format so I had some work to do on it. Here you see the occuli and her figurehead.

The first problem is that the plan and profile images were split on two pages.  Fortunately the image didn't go down into the gutter of the spine so I had nice clean edges to work with. In Photoshop I cut out pieces of the image and pasted them into a new document.  I then lined them up using the grid and rotate layer command. Here is the profile image done. The processes I'm describing were done for all images, I'm just showing a couple quick reference images in order to save time and space.  This is  apretty lengthy process by itself and should probably have it's own discussion.

The next part was a little more involved. There was minor warping all over the image.  Fortunately there were tons of grid lines that I knew should be straight.  I had to use the warp transform tool on the parts to get them into some semblance of straight and true lines. Needless to say this wasn't easy and took me about an hour for each view. The fore/aft view wasn't as hard because I didn't have to stitch two halves together, but it still got straightened up. Here is the plan view done.

Next I used the sketch picture tool under sketch tools in SolidWorks to insert the resulting images into a new part.  I added relevant geometry and used the dimensions I knew to scale the image up to the proper size.  I found out that the frame stations were on 32" centers which did not diminish near the ends. I then added in more geometry for the individual frame stations.

Next I created a new sketch on the midship plane and added the hull lines and some waterline geometry.

And after that the plan view with buttock lines.
The resulting work in 3D.
Next I added in some rudimentary sketches for the bowspirit and jib boom.  This gave me a rough overall length of 273' to 274'.  

The next thing I wanted to focus on was the fact that I didn't have a midship cross section to work with, only small sections of individual parts like the keelsons and garboard.  A midship cross section is important, as it will help you lay out geometry and understand the interactions of the pieces more easily.  So I created this one to get a general idea of how she laid out. Here you can see her rather unique keelson setup.  Her sister keelsons were fayed to the floor and transitioned into her 4.5" floor ceilings.

Next was adding planes for each frame station. I accidentally named the first plane m when it should have been l but I fixed that later on.

The garboard is 7" thick at midships but thins out to 4" at the stem and stern. The frame angle varies from about 86º at the stem to 18.5º at midships, then back to 87º at the stern.  After doing some number crunching I came up with a rabbet line, shown here in blue. In this view we are looking down the centerline of the ship from just above the baseline so you can see how it warps.
And then I added a bearding line for the keel, again highlighted in blue. Here we are on the horizontal baseline of the keel, looking at it from just right of centerline. If the above rabbet line is the warp, this curve would be the weft.

SolidWorks finds it easier to loft a surface if you maintain some uniformity to it's geometry. I intend to do this in one surface if I can, so I am making each frame loft section full height. It might make more sense once I'm done.  Trust me, I'm a professional.
Here I've finished adding in the port side lines.  As before, all lines go from the baseline up to the 36' line. These line remain unsmoothed as yet.  I will start smoothing them once all the lines are drawn.

Looking from an isometric viewpoint, you can see where the bottom edge of the lines are constrained to the rabbet line (red arrows).  That will give us a good start for smoothing later. The blue arrow indicates a good example of how the lines are not smooth yet.  Even a well controlled spline won't always do exactly what you told it to and takes some coaxing.
Aft of midships, I run into the rather small problem of having to draw lines on the starboard side of the ship.  The solution is rather easy, a simple mirror command, which necessitates we also add a centerline.

Work on the lines nears completion.
Added in a rough estimate of the transom, this is probably not final. The green color is an approximation of the color of Zinc Chromate, the paint used on the insides of aircraft during WWII to curb corrosion.  The parts template I use for work has this color as standard, so just ignore it. Or don't, you're an adult, you can do what you want.
Added in planes to add in sketches for the buttock lines. I noticed that when I put the scan in for the reference image I forgot to scale it horizontally.  The blue plane lines should line up with the tick marks on the scan.  When you scan a drawing to put into CAD like this you need to scale it not only vertically but horizontally as well, and make sure the two are not linked.  Line drawings scanned from books are never scaled perfectly one to one in both axis.
Here is the first buttock line. I added in a spline with the same number of control points as there were frames.  I then selected a control point and one of the frame lines and used the pierce constraint.  The control point of the spline is now connected to the frame line as if it "pierces" through the control point.  This let's us compare the model shape against the drawn buttocks lines.  The closer I can get the buttock lines to match the lines in the scan, the more accurate the hull will be.

The second line is added and what I am seeing is that the frame lines and buttock lines from the scan are pretty good so far.

Once all the buttock lines are in you can see that me not scaling the lines horizontally is probably causing some issues, since the gap gets worse the further out from centerline you get. I'm probably going to have to adjust the horizontal scale of that front view image again and redo all the frame lines.

Just to check, I moved the planes I created outwards until they lined up with the wrongly scaled front view to see how the change would affect the buttock lines and the result says, "Yep, you're gonna have to fix em."

I added the 39' 8" width in as a couple of reference lines mirrored across the centerline.  Then I edited the picture to scale it properly.  Remember to uncheck the item in the red box to ensure it doesn't just scale the whole image.

Here's something I do a lot when I am tracing images for a loft.  I offset the spline by just larger than than the scanned line is.  In this case the line I scanned is scaling out to  around 3/4" thick so I offset at 1/2 inch in each direction (bi-directional) and check the offset geometry under construction to make the outside lines into construction or reference lines.

Here's a close up of the result, you can see how it is helpful to get right down the centerline.

Since I know the lines in the drawings I scanned are pretty good, I am going to start the smoothing process.  This starts by selecting the main spline and selecting "Show Curvature" in the properties manager.  You get a series of lines called  a Curvature Comb that you can use to check your spline.  You want a smooth comb without these kinks in it when you're done.

Next is to add dimensions to control points.  These are already constrained vertically so the only way they can move is horizontally.  Controlling them with numbers is the easiest way for me to smooth the curve. Here you can see we have a couple of bad spots but overall it's not terrible.

Sometimes the result isn't a beautiful comb where it is exactly the same thickness throughout, in this case I'm working on frame Y which is in the transition area between the concave curve at the prow and the convex curve amidships. That little dent about 2/3rds of the way up is the remnants of the prow's concavity.

Usually you prefer to see something line frame g, which is straighter as it approaches the bow and begins to curve in a more uniform manner the higher you go.

Smoothing is coming along, but is really tedious so to distract myself I have added some details to midship section. Lower planking was 4" x 14" up to the turn of the bilge. Turn of the bilge is a rather arbitrary term so I put the change where I thought it should be.  From there to her plank sheer the planking was 5.5" x 7". The width of the wales planks is only 7 inches, compared to the 14 inches of the the lower planks, this is because the curve becomes more pronounced and the 14" planks are too wide to accommodate the curve.  I might still pull out a couple of those lower planks and move the wales down and in a little more, I haven't decided yet, but the curve looks a little to much for those last two.  

Her plank sheer is 5 inches think and her main rail is 5.5" x 20". Nothing else is dimensioned so the rest of this is best guess to get the known dimensions to agree with each other.  Her bulwark planking is 3" x 6" and only on the outside of the hull.  Inside her bulwarks are open up to the rack rail.  She has 4" thick clamps above and below the main rail, these fill the gap between the main rail and the monkey rail (fancy rail). I'm not sure about the waterway, in the description by Bruzelius they are said to be 14" square but this seems a bit excessive.  They would end up cutting away a quarter of the material when they cut the molding into it. It also doesn't leave a great deal of open space between the plank sheer and the rack rail, but that seems to be an aesthetic thing to me so I'm not sure if that's more than just my opinion.

The next question I need to clear up is the masts location and rake angle. Most of my work is based on the Chappelle drawings, so I kind of default to his being right most of the time, but here I have to disagree with him.  Bruzelius describes the rake angles of the masts in inches to the foot, while Chappelle drew them in angular degrees. In other words, Bruzlius says the fore mast is 1.25 inches rake to the foot. If you draw a triangle with one side 12 inches and the other 1.25 inches, you get a rake angle of 5.95º.  Chappelle has drawn his masts at 1.25º directly.  In my drawing each mast has two lines.  The solid line represents the rake angle in inches per foot and the dashed line in degrees. I think we can agree that Chappelle made the common mistake of replacing triangular dimensions with angular dimensions.
 
The second question is location and here I think Chappelle might be right but I'm not sure. Bruzelius describes the ship as being 202 feet between perpendiculars, but Chappelle describes it as 204'.  The reason for the discrepancy is the length between the frames.  The original waterlines, when scaled to 204' show a spacing between frames of 32". But at 202' the gap is 31.9".  a gap of 31.9 inches seems implausible, so 204' is the more likely length between perpendiculars.
 
Bruzelius' dimensions for the mast locations are 45' from front perpendicular to the fore, 67' from fore to main, and 53' from main to mizzen, with 37 remaining between mizzen and aft perpendicular. Chappelle, however has the given dims as 45', 68', 53'6", and 37'6". These numbers are in better keeping with the ratio numbers listed in Crother's Clipper book. The below drawing shows the masts located according to Bruzelius. The image below that has them located according to Chappelle.
 
These changes, overall, will make a little more room at the front of the main deck, but are going to make the poop deck a bit more cramped.

So, overall, this is where work has progressed to after about a weeks work.  If you guys see any errors, please let me know, I'd rather fix them now than find them later on.

 

Hello,
here I found examples showing buoys with light wooden bodies.
The barrel staves are held together with iron rings.

The buoys of the La Creole may well have been made this way or that.

Ciao a tutti,
Alcune foto della ruota e freccia. 
 
Hi everyone, Some photos of the wheel and arrow







Un Salutone

Ciao a tutti, comincio a mettere alcune foto della carpenteria assiale.
Dritto di poppa con la continuazione della chiglia in un pezzo unico, ho ricavato questo particolare vicino ad un nodo per rispettare il più possibile in senso della venatura.
 
Hi everyone, I begin to put some photos of the axial carpentry. Straight aft with the continuation of the keel in a single piece, I obtained this detail near a knot to respect as much as possible in the direction of grain.
 
Thanks Dirk





Un Salutone

Ciao a tutti, 
Ho realizzato lo scaletto e sinceramente è stato abbastanza difficile essenzialmente per due motivi.
Il primo motivo: l'utilizzo della linea del ponte per realizzare la dima di pontuale per i riferimenti delle coste e la seconda dima per il cassero sovrapposta alla precedente.
Il secondo motivo: il disegno in pianta del ponte, questa misura non tiene conto del cavallino del ponte, quindi se avessi utilizzato questo disegno senza le dovute modifiche delle quote in lunghezza avrei ottenuto sulla dima di pontuale con una sagoma più corta di circa 5mm.
Alcune foto dello scaletto.
Se notate da una parte ho messo il disegno con la chiglia a pari e nell'altra foto si vede quanto il disegno è stato allungato.
 
Hi everyone, I realized the ladder and honestly it was quite difficult essentially for two reasons. The first reason: the use of the bridge line to create the pontic template for the rib references and the second template for the formwork overlapping the previous one. The second reason: the plan drawing of the bridge, this measure does not take into account the pony of the bridge, so if I had used this design without the due changes in the dimensions in length I would have obtained on the pontual template with a shorter shape of about 5mm. Some photos of the ladder. If you notice on one side I put the design with the keel on the same level and in the other photo you can see how long the design has been stretched



Dima di pontuale finita

Scaletto



Qui ho posizionato la dima del cassero



Un Salutone a presto

Well, finally, a very small update.  What with rush trips overseas to visit ailing relatives; the world going crazy at home and all sorts of extraneous happenings at the museum, I've hardly touched the Meteor of late.  I have, however, managed to get a few more frames fitted, so here she is as of this week.  
 
As I have some medical procedure scheduled for next week, it may be awhile before the next update, but never mind - she'll get there eventually!
 
John
 
 

Members   71 posts Report post   Pos Build Log. Restoration of Full Rigged Sailing Ship Model
Posting #10  26 June 2018
 
 
By way of a supplement to my posting # 9, the photo of the Port poop fife rail shows what I was starting with – lines all over the place – very un-seaman like.
For comparison of "before and after" I now place it here again along with a photo of the Starboard Poop Fife rail after belaying the lines using my line coiling device.  Still not perfect but improving with practice!

 
 

Build Log. Restoration of Full Rigged Sailing Ship Model
Posting #9  20 June 2018
 
The very vexed question for me over the past 3 months has been how to effectively coil the loose end of belayed lines in a presentable and tidy manner.  I didn’t find any forum discussions on this particular task, although there must be quite a few modellers who have somehow met the challenge.
 Attached photos I think are self explanatory.
 
The practical constraints to work within are:
·        In limited space a man’s fingers make it a very difficult job,
·        Being a working model, in my case, all lines have to be their functional length,
·        Lines also have to be workable to enable adjustments for sail handling.
 
After many attempts I have devised a practical, albeit still a bit fiddly, device and technique. I hope the photos will help to clarify my solution.
 
The parts of the device are:
-         a U shaped length of welding rod provide two prongs (tines),
-         a cut down length of a basic biro (ball-point) pen with endcap,
-         a thin cable tie,
-         small wooden wedge to push into biro and jam the cable-tie
The tool used is a small end crochet hook.
 
Method.
1.     Feed thin end of cable-tie through the biro body to exit through the cap.
2.     Feed protruding end of cable-tie back through the cap, thus forming a loop.
3.     Place loop over one of the prongs.
4.     Coil line (rope) on the prongs.
5.     Bring cable-tie loop up and over the prong.
6.     Tighten loop on the coil, and jam tight with wedge.
7.     Remove coil from both prongs.
8.     Make a few turns of line around the coil to give it a waist.
9.     Poke a crochet hook through the one end of the coil towards the standing end of the line.
10. Hook onto the standing end of the line and pull it through the coil to form a loop.
11. Place the coil loop onto the belaying pin. JOB DONE!
 
Note: if the lines are a bit springy I find moistening them with diluted PVA glue helps to make them behave better!  (A tip I learned from a ship modelling book.)
 

Although the summer weather has been pretty good lately except for a couple of 100 degree days, I did manage to get some work done.  The 24# cannons are rigged and now I can start to put the upper gundeck into place.  Here are some photos.  Some progress is better than no progress or even worse... reverse progress!

 
Starting to look like a warship.
Tom

Thanks for the comments Mike, Pat. I'm glad you're enjoying the build.
 
Here's an update...
 
The next step was to add what I believe we call fascia under the ends of the roofs. This was relatively easy to do, and they give a fancier appearance to the boat.
 

 
I also made a couple decorations that fit under the peak of the roof. I think this was originally a representation of a fish. It is called a gegyo. Note that this is not something I remember. I had to look up an email that someone in Japan sent me, explaining this feature to me. I have to add them to the aft yakata, still.
 

 

 
Anyway, this often appears on temples and castles and such, and it appears on one of the museum models of the umibune.
 

 
More later...
 

Grant, thanks for the info! Google says that it is a special die design, the ones that have a split and an adjustment screw. Like this:

 
And here is my die, no split:

 
So it is probably more related to the feeding speed (and, hence, temperature). Will try to feed slower and see how it goes.

Finally back to the model building. To prepare, I need to make a set of Jorgensen-style clamps (also locally known as Tosti clamps on MSW for Ed, who popularised them in his Naiad build  ). I bought a pair in Lee Valley, but they are way too big for the modelling purposes. But I loved the way they work, and I quickly got used to them.
 
It is also my first time using tap & die (since that clamps require a mix of left-hand and right-hand threads) - I know the basic theory, but never had a need for cutting my own threads. So it was definitely a learning curve! More experienced man will chuckle reading that, so enjoy  Bought a high quality tap&die tools from Völkel, famous Swiss manufacturer. So at least I am sure that my troubles are not because I was using a cheap chinesium tools. 
 
First drilling the holes in the round bushing. It went surprisingly ok with just a mill and a Proxxon metal cutting drill bit. I thought it would slip and bend, and was ready to pre-mill the flat surface first, but it was ok even without it:

 
Second is tapping:

 
And threading:

 
Threading was harder than expected, the force required is quite high, so it was not easy to find a way to clamp the brass rod without damaging the thread that is already cut on its other end. I followed the rule of rotating it back every now and then to break the chips. 
It also took forever! 
 
To my surprise, the result was not good, especially on the left hand side - the bushing was rotating properly on some part of the rod, but getting tight or even jammed on the other part of the rod. I could not find a problem with a bare eye, no particles and the thread was looking quite even. Few extra runs of the die back and forth improved the situation, but just a bit.
 
The next test rod I cut with a lubrication. That was easier, but lead to the same quality of the thread, and much more mess (also brass chips not falling out but getting stuck because of the oil).
 
It helped to clamp the rod into a screwdriver and make a few passes with the bushing instead of a die. That way the rod and the bushing kind of adapted to each other, I guess..
Few more passes - and I ended up with a thread that is too loose. Whoops!
 
Then I tried to use the screwdriver to cut the threads instead of manual cut. That was much better! 
 
So the next test rod was cut much faster and had a good fit from the start. Maybe a bit on a loose side, but I suspect it is because I was cutting too fast, and die and rod became too hot -> hence they expanded a bit -> and the thread ended up too loose because too much material was cut. But at least it worked!
 
Few more cuts on a mill - and the test version of the clamp is done:

 
It works, but needs some tweaking of proportions to look good. Once I am satisfied with its proportions - will start cutting the real clamps out of pear, lined with a super soft basswood on the inner surface, to avoid damaging the model parts.

Mix of PVA+sawdust is very stabil and hard.
 


 
 
 

Working on getting the beam shelf smooth.
 

 

 
To be honest, the amount of wobble is pretty tiny - maybe 1/2mm - but it does make a difference. To smooth out the curve I've used all three techniques I mentioned earlier - slicing off where it was too high, filling where it's too low, and relocating the beam shelf where it's too far off the line to slice or fill. Still a bit to do before it's all smooth.
 
Next time I do something like this I'll make sure I get it right first time so I don't have to get into this whole correction thing, which wastes time and effort. A lesson learnt (I hope!).
 
Steven 
 
 

Well about time for another uupdate although not very much has happened. The weather has been very good for weeks in a row now so little progress.
 
But Starboard side I finished up to the 3rd whale. I had to do some correction on 2 gunports. Which is the second time but it was still not ok, I simply dont understand why as I checked tripple times before.
 
here the wrong situation: With the 5th port already a part of an insert for the correction.
 
And here after correction. After sanding it is hard to even see the inserts. I used insert pieces to lower the ports instead of replacing a full plank. I was afraid that removing a whole plank would damage too much.
 
Nest steps are the portside planking and the 3rd whale.
 
Rgds Hans.
 

Hi
just a small update , the knee parts and keel ar done ,one last thing that needs to be done is tapering the knee of the head.



Below is a dry fit of the bulkheads except frame nr. c


 

 
Michael
 

Hello and thank you all for your comments and likes,
 
I was not very busy the last week, but I made the hawse hols with the linings and bolsters.
 

 
 
The next things are the trail boards between the cheeks. I have a trail board, all in ocker but only the little dragon in green, in my mind. I saw it somewhere, but I did't find that picture again. If anyone has that picture, or know where I could find it, tell it. 

Thank you, Harley!
 
I probably used the word "cross-spall" loosely in that post. I used a flat piece of wood clamped across the top of the hance pieces to make sure that the top edge was flat across the hull.
 
On Hayling, I used a cross-spall or batten strip to insure that the frames were parallel across their tops. I tack glued the strip at the height of the top timbers. I set the frame when both sides were the same in vertical measurement to the top of the batten. There are other ways to do this when using a cross-spall, but I found that this way worked for me.

Mike

Thank you, Karl, I am pleased you like my work.
 
***************************

Well, I modified and improved the statue of horse (head, neck and other details). I must say, I am much more satisfied with the result now.
 

I am very grateful you help me find better ways for better and more realistic results.
 

Kind regards,
Doris