druxey

I think that’s a fair point, materials make some of the detail in the geometry be lost. I’ll look at the best of both worlds for future logs.
 
Added some more detail to the hold, as well as some sheaves and bitts. Also added are some of the lantern rooms. From now on, I’ll be going deck to deck doing the final detail passes. The hold needs a major one, as does the orlop; then it’s to the screens of the upper gundeck and quarterdeck. Last will be the furnishing, and then off to rigging. Then, Substance Painter materials!
 
I may need to revise my base hull mesh and add more polys beneath the waterline, as faceting is visible on the hold interior. Same for the lower gunwale. While I’m not aiming for low poly, I also don’t want to go too high. More detail is warranted, however. In my below image, I deleted the “non-visible” faces; I think I will add those back where they’ve been removed (support knees also) as I want to showcase the different layers of the ship. Thus, they will be visible. I’ll also construct the frames, in this case. Again, not going 100% accurate, but that will likely be the case for my next model.
 
I will add the images of the sheaves and bitts in my next post.
 

Hello all!

This is my first ship building project in 3D (of many, I hope!), as well as my first post on this forum. I've always been very interested in the third rate ship of the line, and with the abundance of plans for the Intrepid class I decided to model the HMS Anson, in her pre-razee 64 gun configuration. While I am not modeling the frames behind the hull planking and making it as they were built in real life (though I have some seen some projects like that here, amazing! Perhaps for another project I will attempt that.), I am going for accuracy in every other area, but just not modeling things that will not be visible. I could add the framing later, however.

I am currently on my second go at this model. I find I learn new things and better methods along the way, and I have greatly improved the process and accuracy of my build. As of now, all the framing is in place, though I need the lower supports on the main gundeck. Now going through the "detail" interior pass. The exterior needs a pass as well, with the sheaves in the hull added, netting, further detail on the beakhead, figurehead, and stern gallery.

The plans I am utilizing are from Wikimedia Commons, with better looks at interiors from HMS Leopard (1790) cutaways. The configuration I am going for includes the higher walls on the quarterdeck and the chequer pattern as seen on Agamemnon, using the latest ochre from Victory.

I'll be posting more updates along the way! I've attached some progress pictures below, including the materials I created in Substance Painter on my first attempt, which I can thankfully reuse, though they need improvement. Haven't really focused on the material/render too much, so I'll be improving those and making them more photoreal later on down the road.






 

Sharing the previously mentioned sheaves and bitts, with belaying pins added. I also went ahead and added the lower knees on the gun decks, and the ropes/furnishings for the gunports and guns themselves as well as their tools (sponge, worm, ramrod) will be added later.

Hopefully you can continue to derive pleasure from seeing others' work on MSW, even if you can't fully participate now. My best wishes as you navigate new challenges in your life, Bryan.

Thanks for the encouragement! Definitely going to see this through - the finish is in sight.
 
Half of the remaining exhaust pipes formed and in place:

Stick to it, Greg, it's coming along beautifully!
 
John

Now the coolant can make it into the radiators! The front half of exhaust pipes are made and attached as well. The remaining eight exhaust pipes have a slightly different shape; while the front eight point down, the rear eight have a bend and point aft. They will be a little harder to form.

In retrospect, I should have attached the exhaust pipes earlier as now there is a reduced amount of work space and it seems my depth perception has been reduced as well! 
 
By the way, I fell back on soldering a short piece of brass tubing to a piece of soft brass wire to form the basis for each exhaust pipe. The wire was bent and cut to shape and black shrink tube was put over the wire to finish.
 

Superb. That's all one can say.

Potential buyers please note that this model is based on the 1724 rebuilt ship, not the original 1682 yacht of King Charles.

The rear side is ready for painting
Painted, some painted parts could be better. But that is for later..
With the general shape seems to be ok. The fore castle is on hold for a while.
First I will continue with the gun deck.
(And i forgot to drill the holes for the swivel cannons. I see now....

 
Current status

Not a lot of steps completed but that doesn't mean a lot wasn't done... Finished 33-34B
 
33 Painting the Hull
     This was much more involved than painting the Dory... I primed everything in white and now I kind of wish I would have gotten some red primer hahaha... the outside of the hull was, as you'd expect, easy to paint. With the giant flat surfaces and the primer almost the same color as the paint, it was very smooth sailing (heh). The inside,  however, was a much different story... Seems that everyone agrees that multiple thinner coats of paint is the best approach to painting and that is what I did for the inside. I think 6 coats later, it is done. It came out pretty good I think! Funnily enough, the Admiral pointed out that it is the same color as a Dr Pepper can (that I had been drinking at the time).
     I ended up painting the rub rails as well as the top section of the stern transom. I don't know why, just seemed like a good idea and I like the way that it turned out! I guess that's all that matters.
     Painted the dagger board and rudder as well and threw a coat of matte varnish on everything. I have to touch up the dagger board a little bit as the fit in it's case was too close and it rubbed some of the varnish and paint off 😅
 
34A. Floor Boards
     This was made trivial with all the pre-work I did before! a simple matter of placing glue on the cleats and putting them in place. I did have to sand off some paint to ensure a good fastening. One small thing I'm not 100% happy with is where the two sections of floor boars meet, they are not lined up on the outside edge. It's pretty hidden by the midship thwart but I'll always know it's there.
 
34B. Installing thwarts and stern sheets.
     This also went very smoothly all that was needed to do was sanding a bit of paint off and gluing them in place!
 
Next up is the Tiller assembly.... I have cut out all the pieces and read the instructions but decided to stop and write this up and then study some other build logs for this step particularly.
 

I ordered silicone for molds. While I'm waiting, I made a figurehead on a CNC machine. Then I made ship holders from bronze.

General view of the ship.

I've made all the gratings and ladders. I'll sew up the middle of the deck with slats and take on the guns.

The steering wheel control lever works.

WOW!!! Beautiful work!!
Rick

The entire propeller-rudder system is pre-installed on the cruisers hull.
The blades will be twisted and the propellers will be fully polished later, before final installation.

After this I do a preliminary polishing of the screws.

The four propellers are soldered together using a silver-based solder.
These photos show the propellers after soldering and cleaning them from carbon deposits using a citric acid solution.

You absolutely should keep your process proprietary, Chuck. The time as well as cost you've invested should produce a return for you. You didn't invest in all that to produce a dozen 'me too' knock-off merchants.

The after deck framing
 

The central thicker deck planking in place
 

The outer thinner deck planking in place. Gratings in place.The waterway will be added when the deck is finally attached
 

The two upper decks are removable which allows completion of the main deck and facilitates finishing off the upper deck furniture etc
 
Cheers
 
Dick

Now about what you said about the working space between the guns. You are right, it is extremely important that they are mounted at a sufficient distance from each other. I absolutely agree with you. And that's why there was a discussion on these same pages a few months ago about where exactly to put an additional cannon. Putting the cannon in the outermost segment is the most convenient option and in terms of the issue you have raised. A cannon placed in the outermost section of the Bottle will not interfere with the “neighbors” in any way. 
However, I cannot agree with you on the most important point. There is a very big difference in exactly where you can put a cannon in a side gallery, and where you can't. And if the outermost segment is too close to the outermost cannon on the deck, I would never put a cannon in the middle of the side gallery. 
I've written quite a bit on this topic before. And believe there is no point in repeating myself. About the fact that there are mentions with cannons, I tried to be objective and point out that side too. 
But I can't call these examples worthy of serious attention. All images can be divided into two groups. These are drawings. Simple pencil drawings. Let's be frank - these are in no way suitable for a serious document. I just imagine that a few centuries later someone will find my childhood sketchbooks where I drew cars, airplanes or ships and will claim that this is exactly how it looked in the distant 21st century. Here's the proof. We will repeat exactly.
 

 

 
Parsing what in the old drawings was actually correctly depicted, and where the artist's imagination or lack of knowledge is a separate topic altogether. I think you'll agree with that.
We often argue about nuances not only when looking at fuzzy handwriting, but also drawings made as an exhibition project for a king. And even here we can debate what Beren meant by making the floor lines not parallel to each other? And here it should be a volumetric construction or a flat bas-relief? And we end up with models where there's no exact replication. Created after personal research work, private representations of a particular author. And you can either agree with it or not. Please, make your own version. The modeling world will only get better. And let our descendants go crazy, compare different variants and think why they are different? Which one is right and which one is wrong?
The second group is models in museums. And this is a much more serious argument. But what do we actually see on these models? I have already mentioned that some of these models are ships that were not built and do not reflect accurate data. But now let's put that argument aside.
---
Let's take another close look. 
 

 
You can see the standard cannon positions right next to it. And that's where the cannon barrels are. If the windows in the side locks are also cannon windows, then why did not they put cannons here? What prevented it? Or maybe it's just a window? And there shouldn't be a cannon in it? I willingly agree that from these windows it is possible to fire muskets, arquebuses or other kinds of hand-held light weapons. But not a cannon. 
And this is an example that I myself was interested in, and am now already using strictly in counter-evidence. 
 


The small size of the porthole already speaks volumes. Now look at this porthole. You can see perfectly well that it is much higher than the cannon windows next to it. There's no way this porthole could have been a gun emplacement. It's just an open little window for ventilation, that's all. The only thing that could have been fired from here was something portable.
I tried to find some documentary information and couldn't find any evidence to support the theory that a cannon could have been placed here. I looked at every book I could find. Spent a lot of time searching the internet. I couldn't find anything. I also managed to get in touch with Michael Bezverkhny. He's one of the masters who built Ambitionary. And his opinion deserves attention. Especially since he is also a man who is well acquainted with ship history and engineering. I asked him questions about Ambitious and about the possibility of placing artillery in side locks in general. And he too confirmed that it was technically impossible.
 
By the way, if you can find such information, I'd love to continue the discussion. I've become so interested in this that I'd even like to see some actual Legend Breakers style experiments. So that replicas of ship rooms could be built, in which cannons would be set up and demonstration shots would be fired. 
How can I finish what I'm saying? This model can accommodate an additional pair of cannons on its side (one on each side) so that these cannons are positioned in the side castle area. But ONLY in one place! In the outermost section. In this case, there will be no conflicts with the standard distance to neighboring cannons, nor with the impossibility of anchoring and firing. And this is the ONLY possible option on this ship.
 

I am trying, in this build log, to provide a practical dinghy-sailor's perspective, to help those future builders of the pram who do not have direct experience of such boats. As my last post included all of the belaying of the pram's (very limited) running rigging, maybe this is a good time for me to add something about belaying lines to either (horned) cleats or pins. As with anything else, there are right and wrong ways to do it, hence right and wrong ways to show a belay in a model.
 
There are other things that lines can be belayed to, such as timber heads or bitts, so the overall topic is large, but keeping things (relatively) simple, there are three "rules" for a belay to a pin or cleat. The first is absolute and should never be broken. It is that the line, on being brought to a pin, should pass cleanly to and around its top or bottom and never across the middle:

That's not some fetish. Done right, quite a light grip on the line (the short end in that diagram) will hold a considerable load (at least with high-friction hemp or manilla, maybe not with slippery, modern Dyneema or Spectra), yet a gentle easing will veer some line if you have pulled too far, while you can readily catch and then hold some slack, if your shipmate is sweating up the line.
 
Rule 2, to be followed any time that it won't force a violation of the Rule 1, is that the first pass of the line behind the top of the pin should be from left to right:

OK, that is partly just a fetish but the idea is that, on a dark night, someone releasing the line gets a bit of a tactile warning that it is close to coming free, hence to be ready to take whatever load is on the line.
 
Rule 3, to be followed when possible without violating Rules 1 & 2, is that the first turn around the pin should be a round turn, with no crosses (as shown above). If the rigger who set up the boat (or ship) did their job properly, all three rules should be followed, and should fall into place easily, in most cases. However, that cannot always be done, whatever the skill and care of the rigger. The clew outhaul on my pram, as I have it rigged, cannot be belayed according to Rule 3 if Rules 1 & 2 are obeyed. It could have been if the sailor was left-handed and the cleat on the port side of the boom. A right-handed sailor, pulling the clew towards the end of the boom, will naturally want the cleat on the starboard side. It has to be on the boom, of course, hence necessarily below the level of the clew -- and that orientation prevents all three rules being followed simultaneously. There is no such compulsion with the halliard or tack downhaul, which can be belayed following all three rules.
 
Next, after getting to the point shown above, the line should be taken diagonally across the pin:

then behind the pin and diagonally the other way:

and repeat so that there are two diagonal passes in each direction. And that's it. No need to build on layer after layer of turns around the pin -- unless you're working with Dyneema (or, in a model, the lousy, slippery cordage that Model Shipways provide!). Though, if the tail of line is long enough to trail on the deck but not long enough to coil, you could take an extra couple of turns to use up the length neatly. 
 
The end result looks something like:

Note that bringing lines down from the masthead to pins both port and starboard means that Rule 3 has to be ignored on the starboard side. Ditto for the tack downhaul, with its cleat displaced to the starboard side of the mast (and note also that that is placed at a slight angle, to make fulfilling Rules 1 & 2 more natural for the sailor's fingers).
 
If you are working with the sizes of rope usually found on a sailing ship, even those on my 22 footer, there is literally nothing more to be done (aside from coiling -- which is a whole other topic). In a small boat like our pram, however, you can't rely on gravity to hold the loose end of the line in place. Besides, you may get a lot of water on board and that can wash a line off its cleat. So it can be a good idea to create a locking turn by passing the end of the line under the last diagonal turn -- as with the gantline on the pin next to the mast on its port side in that photo. (That has both ends of the gantline on the same pin, hence the double appearance.) At full-size, there's no need to tuck the long end of a halliard, say, under the diagonal. Rather, the last pass around the top of the pin is given a twist and dropped over the pin, leaving the locking turn.
 
And that's all there is to it ... aside from working with forceps to pass miniature lines around model belaying pins, then repeating the process a hundred times for those who aspire to build full-rigged clippers 😀
 
 
Trevor