CaptainSteve

As another one who survived a stroke (mild for me) I wish you a full recovery, Christian. 

Sorry to read of your unglück, Christian. Best wishes for a full recovery.

I was wondering why we had not heard from you in some time.  I hope that your recovery will be quick and complete.  Take care of yourself, Heinrich.

Prayers for your speedy recovery, enjoying the research and your build blog. Look forward to you back in the dock soon!

You could stabilize the hull with temporary wood beams. They would give you the rigid structure to allow for further hull work and can be removed later when you are ready to work on the decks.
 
For the decks themselves, I would use a piece of stiff paper, card stock, or similar material that you can trim to fit and see what looks right to get everything correct. Then simply use that for a template to trim the plastic decks as needed. The lower deck has the advantage in that nearly all of it will never be seen and so any errors, especially along the hull, will never be known to anyone but you. 

Thanks Marc,
I think there are a pile of discussions to be made - even with those starting SAINT PHILIPPE as a 1/24 scratch project. Sometimes I do think I want too much to of this old Heller kit. Am I overstreching its abilities?
 
 
I amv still thinking about solutions. There are a plenty of thinks I could start to do. But I have to install the planked decks first - before starting the shells' planking  . This due to stability reasons . Also it is nonsense to start the fiddely work of the transoms inside work before the hull is planked. But my bigges graft in the number of these bottlenecks
are the decks -
 

in particular the LD. And I do not want to trimm them in anyway untill I am shure it's
 

the dreck that is wrong and not me.

Thanks for the likes and comments.   Time for a proof of life update.
 
Life has gotten quite a bit quieter lately, which is good.  So I focused on these little boats.  The barge (the middle sized one) jig went well and so deciding to be bold and do both at the same time, I started on the cutter jig.  Hmm... not so good.  It's smaller and everything is proportionally more fragile.  So.... spent a lot of time remake parts that I broke in the fitting.  I solved the breakage problem by reducing down the laser marking in thickness and expanding the "bits" that hold the pieces together.  Ended up coating many of them with 2 coats of white glue and water.  Seems to work and tests say I'll be able to snap those naughty bits on the lines without damage.
 
The jigs are built, the keels installed with few other necessary bits and pieces and I'm ready to start actually building the boats.  So, I'm off to fix the ribs and start planking.  Here's a photo of the jigs and the larger boat (finished).  The Longboat (finished) is 6 inches long (152.4mm), the barge is 5 inches (127mm), and the cutter is 4 inches (101.6mm) long.
 

Rant away! Horribly familiar...
 
Can you honestly recall such a schizophrenic first build log? You've had to sit through it too
 
I'll point out the flaws, finish the damn thing and proceed to make a proper bona fide build log of a very highly regarded kit, Daniel Dusek's pentekontor in 72nd. I have the .pdf plans already from his site - if it turns out half as good as Robin Lous' and others, well, that'll be progress!
 
Anyway, this thing... the attachment has been my "actual plan/instructions" recently. Far more of a guide...
 
Have a good day, Mark and .... as nobody else is reading this, can't say I can blame them

Ah.. good for you.  go for it.  I ran in to AL's issues with my Constellation build.  Ended up just using (after reworking it) the hull to build the 1854 version.  That kit I wouldn't recommend to my worst enemy.  I'll stop ranting now. 

Mark, I'm going to go through each section of their "full color instructions" and point out the sloppy, as you rightly express, errors. Each page has a howler or two to enjoy. The PDF for the Bounty jollyboat San Bounty de NepoBountyjollyboat is freely available on their website (or was, they're having a facelift currently) so let's take a little guided tour together, starting with grinding down with a carpenters' bastard file a whole 1cm of hull. Fun times when there's noplan and instructions for the wrong model kit, to be sure.
Basically, let's try to warn off maybe-customers from even considering buying this thing. Yes it is cheap. But beginners surely must start small.
 
I'd like to wrap this up over the weekend -move on from a horrible first experience with boats.
 
Sorry, Joao, but another time
 
As for new horizons, there's some really outstanding pentekontor builds here; that Dusek kit looks like solid potential. Cheers.
 
 

Well, would it be to your advantage to finish and point out the errors or just move on to a better kit?   AL is known for their "sloppy" kits.

Well..
 
I think it's an idea to try to resurrect this --if only to point out the horrendous flaws, the misrepresentation of the whole kit and the insane inadequacy of the instructions/noplans.
 
Yea, the "so-bad-we-had-to-(badly) airbrush-out-the-whole-hull" instructions are a cut and paste presumably from AL's Bounty so-called jolly boat is fit for the bin as soon as you open the box. There are references to ply Sheets 1 through 4 (the actual sheets are A to D), there are references to parts that simply do not exist (bowsprit support etc.) --and most wonderfully of all --numbered prefab parts that are meant to plank the hull. There are none such, just the kits bundle of 1.5x5mm tilia. The mast is nearly >150% the length of the hull. Madness, I think.
 
It's a mess, and a waste of money, cheap though it be. Certainly my beginner skills are average with wood, but this dog of a thing should never be tackled by a newbie to the hobby. The sails are nicely done, the wood is good quality, but the "full color documentation" is pure fiction. Vets could make a learned guess out of that box, but with lesser skills, you're wasting £40 or equivalent. May as well tear up banknotes.
 
So. I'm going to do my best and make a sensible job from this grotesque product. It'll be my first and last AL too (though my dhow is working out good --but as mentioned previously noplans noplans again).
 
More later -- with pics, oh my!, and thanks again for everyone's kind support so far.
 
 
 

Studding hull

Hi.
I glue all bulwarks and draw the spike. And i make the trial studding on the down part of the model. 

Very nice work Eric; as others have said I actually like the planking the way you have done it - more authentic looking.
 
cheers
 
Pat

Eric, I actually like your planking.  It has a (groping for words here)... "real look" to them.  

Depends on how you define it. We actually haven't had rain in a few days, but the big rivers are carrying so much water that that doesn't matter much. The Mississippi will crest in St. Louis on Sunday (here's what it looked like a few days ago, from the National Weather Service). The Missouri is holding steady or slightly falling, but there's so much floodwater that it's going to take a long time to draw down even if the whole region turns dry, which isn't in the regional forecast. Once water gets past levees and floods the bottoms, it gets trapped there by those same levees because it can't get back out again easily. Another downside to the levee system; a natural floodplain would drain itself.
 
 
 

Just catching up with what you've been up to, Eric.  She's looking really nice!
 
John

That's awfully nice of you, Chris. My own work looks pretty rough to me, in comparison with the precision of many other modelers here, but I've learned to be comfortable with what my skill set allows for any given project. Otherwise it would cease to be fun. I do agree that a great deal of the appeal of modelling (to me) is learning about and understanding the subject, not just the actual building or viewing.

This is simply stunning work you are doing here Eric! As a community here, we are very fortunate to have people like yourself who possess not only the skill to produce such works, but also the knowledge behind the vessels they create. Congratulations!
 
Cheers
 
Chris
 

I finished off the starboard side of the aft superstructure this week, using the same methods as the port side. Once it was done, I added the other transverse chains on both sides. I placed a few barrels and a figure for photographic interest.

Once this was done, I decided I really didn't like the contrast between the manually planked sides and the scribed-planked aft (see photos in last post). Mulling it over, I realized that I'd left myself the ability to plank over the aft wall because the door there protruded enough to accommodate thin planks. So I went ahead and did that; the whole structure now looks a lot more uniform:
 

Doing this created a mismatch at the corners, though, which I fixed with the time-tested method of installing a pipe along each corner. I'm calling them gutters draining the boiler deck; they actually come out over the guards (rather than into the hull), so this is at least plausible. I like the replanked aft for two reasons: (1) it's more consistent with the sides, and (2) it's most consistent with the model's style overall. The decks and other areas are slightly rough rather than perfectly crisp, which won't win any modelling awards but gives the model a distinct "feel" and conveys the rough-and-tumble nature of upper-river boats in a way I like. So now the presentation is more cohesive. Lesson learned on trying to take a shortcut.

For reference, here's the port side again, which hasn't changed except for the installation of the transverse chain. The photo has a strange color balance between the two walls, but that's just a trick of the light.
 
Not quite sure what I'm going to do next, there are various ways to move forward from here. Thanks for reading.

Today is Memorial Day in the US, when we remember fallen veterans. I was fortunate that both my grandfathers survived WWII. One made it through North Africa and Sicily before taking a severe leg wound in central Italy. The other spent the war in a sub in the Pacific, despite being well over 6' tall.
 
It wasn't just the men in my family directly affected; my father's family had lived in the Philippines since the early 20th century and some still do (both my grandfather and father were born there), having come over for business following the Spanish-American war. My grandfather was in college in the US when the war broke out, and joined the Navy. Meanwhile, his whole family were trapped in the Philippines as the Japanese approached. I've read a series of letters from my great-grandmother to her son as the noose gradually tightened; the last few mention things like the first sightings of Japanese bombers overhead, then the mail abruptly stopped. The whole family went into Japanese internment camps; we were lucky that everyone came back out again at the other end, despite severe suffering; many families were less fortunate, both Filipino and American (especially the former). My grandfather spent the whole war having no idea if his family was dead or alive, while serving close to the Philippines but never able to do anything directly about it until the liberation. If you've read the book Unbroken (and you should), you've read a parallel story to my family's. They don't appear by name in the book, but were part of the community it describes and almost certainly knew many of the main characters.
 
Although my specific line all survived that war (and all those that have followed), knowing their story helps me remember all those who didn't, both veterans and civilians, and how what they suffered contributed, in the end, to the world being a better place than it was then.

More progress! Here are the two forward transverse chains on the starboard side. These cross to the port side (as that's visible from the outside) but don't descend back down to the deck on that side (as they'll be hidden from view in the superstructure. Again, the starboard side is remaining open to view so I can show off details like this.

Next, I began filling in the aft superstructure. First, I built two more cargo doors (one for each side, built the same as the aft one described earlier in this log) and installed them with some extra vertical braces. Then I started filling in walls. I've gotten as far as finishing the port side so far. This work is pretty basic stuff so I don't know that much detailed description is needed.

You can see one transverse brace just behind the wheel. There will be another one further aft at the same spacing as the forward two, but I won't add that until the walls are built. The one by the wheel won't be seen on the port side as it comes down within the paddlewheel well. But the aft-most one will be visible on both sides.

 
In this photo, it's more obvious than I expected that I used pre-scribed panels for the walls in some places and individual planks in others. Stuff like that really jumps out on screen. I hope the difference won't be so obvious once there's other detail in the way, like all the support posts between the two decks, various cargo, shadow from the boiler deck, and so on. Following up on the last comment, the forward of the two aft chains would be just behind the wall of the wheel well (and thus hidden in the final model), while the after one will come out just forward of the cargo door.
 
Other responses:
 
I really like understanding the context of a model or a subject, it's just so much more interesting when you understand how, why, and where a vessel was designed and used. Thanks for being interested.
 
 
Yeah, I've been through that area, visited the Atchafalaya control structure, and so on. As a geologist with a particular interest in river and landscapes, that area is like catnip. Interesting to hear your personal perspective.
On 5/26 I wrote that the river at St. Louis was forecast to crest at 43'. After another week of storms in the basin (including one that spawned a huge tornado near Kansas City), it's now forecast to crest at 46' this coming Thursday (1993 record is 49.58'). And it's just entering June, in 1993 the river didn't peak until August.
 
The Missouri continues to surge. Multiple levees have now broken and there are countless roads and bridges closed. If you don't know the area, it's hard to explain how difficult it is to get around. The river is so high that it's backing many miles up every tributary, closing all sorts of routes that normally wouldn't be affected. And levee breaks are closing fairly major roads across the state. Here are a couple more photos I took the other day of the Missouri River near its current peak.
 
Here's the river at Glasgow, Missouri. It's hard to tell from the photo, but the far bank is a levee that's at least ten feet above the bottomland beyond, and the river is about a foot from the top. The road and rail line crossing the river here are closed because they cross the floodplain for a mile after this and are underwater further back where it's not protected by the levee seen here. These bridges are a major corridor across this part of the state and you have to go a really long way around to find another way across.
 

Here's the Missouri River at Boonville, MO. The bridge in the background is a historic railroad bridge that's partly open to pedestrians; the water is really close to the actual bridge structure. In the foreground you can see the river overtopping the bank and coming up the hill into the lower parts of town. The corridor stretching straight back is another busy railroad line that I'd estimate is 5-8 feet underwater based on my knowledge of the area and what's left of the signals poking out. There isn't much to flood here other than the rail line, the rest of town is on higher ground. The building in the background is a casino and I could care less if that floods. However, just across the river from here, a major levee just broke and is now flooding a section of bottomland that's at least ten miles long, inundating another major road through the region.

Pretty wild times here in the American Midwest. I haven't even mentioned the Arkansas River, which has surged past its record level.
 
Thanks for reading, as always.
 

Everybody agrees that there is no historically accurate data on what these vessels looked like, specifically. At best, we might have some idea of the type they were, but that's about it. Nevertheless, they just keep on putting out books and model kits of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. The demand just never lets up.
 

In fact, actually quite expensive but ...
Good development of notebooks showing the history of sailing and techniques used in boatbuilding.
Good quality of wooden material.
Excellent quality of metal decoration casts.
In Poland, one issue of the notebook with parts in subscription = two packets of cigarettes.
So a collection of 140 = 280 packs of cigarettes or 140 bottles of pure vodka.
In this conversion it is quite cheap.😁😉