rybakov

Hello,
the first lower finishing is now more or les ready. 


And that is it. But some small corrections I have to make, when I look so at the pictures. 


 

Hello,
the weather gets cooler, so the carpenters where busy today and cut out the lower finishings. 

then fitted these pieces to the ship

and at last cut out the approximate shape

The shipwright was pleased with the result. 

Post Seventy-nine
Foc’sle  (Part 2)

2073
The Foc’sle beams are fixed into place.

2074
Temporary props are used to support the breast beam whilst the carlings set.

2070

2067
The foremost beam of the Foc’sle deck is an mdf version, originally designed to incorporate the Bowsprit step.
To match the other beams, the top was faced with 0.6mm pear.
 
With the beams now fixed I move onto the Hanging and lodging knees.
This is a prep intensive exercise with char removal, painting, and fettlin’ to fit.
 
Those opting to fully deck the model need have little concern for such detail, as it will all be covered, but I would probably have done them anyway, given that Chris has taken the trouble to provide them.
 
B.E.
17/09/2023

 
 

Post Seventy-eight
 
Foc’sle
More cleaning up of heavy char and a dry fit of the Foc’sle beams.

2056

2063

2064

2065
The beams and carlings slot easily into place, less trouble than the Qtr deck.
Hopefully the Foc’sle breast beam will stiffen up once it is glued into place and the carlings added.
 
Another round of painting now ensues, followed by the addition of hanging and lodging knees.
 
Chris has kindly provided the lodging knees with the Indy kit, which saves me the tiresome task of making them as I did with the Sphinx build.
 
Thanks Chris.👍
 
 
B.E.
16/09/2023
 

I redid the columns of the base by reducing their size and added two side support bars. Now I feel it has more harmony and above all more stability
 

Hi Ian—thanks for the encouraging comments. I ended up adjusting the waterline three times to increase the draft. I found artwork that showed ships with a wet main wale and also knew that back then, in the days before slide rules, nobody could really figure a ship's displacement until it was launched and loaded. So, as long as it wasn't Vasa, no big deal.


 
The wet gammoning was a by-blow, but again—it didn't seem to bother J.C. Lemineur in his Saint Philippe plans. So I left it alone. At least I gave it a coat of white stuff. 
 

 
And yeah—I changed the "angle of attack" because it leveled out the gun decks and just looked better to my eye. I like the aggressive look of a down-at-the-bows Baroque warship. I'll let others decide if it was a successful decision.
 

(So several months back, I had this huge big plastic model ship kit. Wondering how I was going to paint it. This is what I wrote back in May—)
 

 
If you’re anything like me, you’ll agree that Heller’s Soleil Royal is a striking beauty in the box art, all blue and gold. As if the shipbuilders for le Marine Royale were UCLA alumni (go Bruins!) 
 

 
In the last decade or so, there has been something of a pushback on the Heller color scheme (and not just from USC Trojans). Maybe the Soleil Royal wasn’t blue after all. A few things prompted this.
 
First, there was the late-1990s revision on how the Swedish ship Vasa was interpreted. The 1628 warship, pulled up mostly intact from Stockholm harbor, still had traces of paint, but it took decades to thoroughly examine it. From prior thinking—that the Vasa was blue and gold like the Heller Soleil Royal box art—scholars changed their minds and have now determined that the ship’s upper reaches were mostly red. Plus, the ship’s wooden sculptures weren’t simply gilded—they fully painted in many colors (polychrome). Thoughtful modelers wondered if the Soleil Royal wasn’t likely to have been red too, and if the sculptures were likewise brightly painted instead of uniformly covered with gold leaf.
 

 
The gold leaf itself was another issue. It was pointed out that there was far too much gold on Heller’s version of the ship. It couldn’t all have been gilding. Even Louis XIV couldn’t afford that. Someone went into the French naval archives and figured out that the gold leaf budget for some premiere rang warships was barely enough to gild a figurehead. Applying gold leaf to the working surfaces of the ship—rails, ports, or anywhere in contact with abrasive ropes, tools, hands, etc.—was impractical in any case. Might as well take handfuls of Louis d’or and toss them into the ocean, since the gold would end up there anyway. So gold leaf—nope—most of it had to have been yellow paint.
 
The next prompt came from comments made by author J.C. Lemineur and others, pointing out an alleged scarcity of blue paint in the 1600s. It was claimed that blue pigments were expensive and hard to come by in quantity. “Blue-shade paints were therefore mostly avoided,” Lemineur wrote in his monograph on the 1693 three-decker Le Saint Philippe. Following Lemineur, modelmakers restored their Saint Philippes in red and gold.
 

 
Some Soleil Royal modelers absorbed all this, plus the information from the Vasa, and revised their thinking about how the Soleil should be painted. In some cases, they straightaway swapped all the blue for red.
 
Another red herring dragged across the modeler’s path was the set of c.1689 paintings of Soleil Royal’s bow and stern made by Jean Vary. These showed the ship all blue, stem to stern, main wale to sheer. Wow! 
 

This gave Soleil modelers even more options, some opting for the traditional Heller paint scheme, others going off in a red direction, others going all-blue. 
 
Finally, there was a fourth bit of drama. It was noted that one version of the Jean Bérain drawing of Soleil’s stern had color indications—

 
Some parts light red, some a kind of tan, deep blue on the stern plate, and the figure carvings are in several different color treatments. What was up with that?
 
So I pretty much know the Heller kit's paint instructions are, um… apocryphal. There couldn’t have been that much gold leaf on a real warship, and the whole issue of whether or not it was actually painted blue was being questioned. How should the Soleil Royal be painted? More important to me, how was I going paint my ship? Was it possible to untangle all this information and come up with a likely and justifiable color scheme? Hold my beer.
 
Please keep in mind that the following information is the product of someone who is admittedly sometimes a mad modeler and a dunderhead, poster boy for the Dunning-Kruger effect. Marc LaGuardia's (Hubac's Historian's) build log is a better informed source. If it’s important to you, always do your own research and come to your own conclusions! And paint your own ship however it makes sense to you.
 
First, it should be remembered that there were three Soleil Royals in Louis XIV’s reign. (This was discussed in the last post.) Paint never lasted very long in a marine environment—ask any former Navy swabbie. Given the need for frequent repainting, it’s not likely that the three ships had only one paint scheme between them. They undoubtedly changed, year to year, refit to refit. And tastes changed too, over the forty-year period the three ships sailed, as did the artisans and bureaucrats who decided such things. Point number one to consider—the Soleil Royal(s) likely had several paint schemes.
 
That being said, the Soleil Royals got associated with blue paint early on. Blue was a logical color for a royal ship. Besides being a mobile gun platform, a French warship was intended to proclaim the might and majesty of the Sun King and his Bourbon dynasty wherever it sailed. Blue, gold, and white were the royal colors. The Bourbon coat-of-arms had gold fleur-de-lis on a blue field.
 
In much of the art from the early 18th century, the Soleil Royal I(a) is shown with blue on the hull above the gundecks, like in these details of paintings by English artist Peter Monamy dramatizing the destruction of the ship at La Hogue in 1692. Monamy was known for his accurate depictions of naval battles and ship portraits, and he made these paintings when the battle and the ship were still recent history.
 

 
Keep in mind that right-hand image, with light blue on the quarterdeck level and dark blue (with gold fleur-de-lis) on the poop deck level above it. Hmmmm.
 
And here’s the image of the Soleil Royal II on the 5-meter scroll painting of the order of battle for Velez-Malaga in 1704, made by eyewitness and battle participant Jérôme Hélyot.
 

 
Ship’s got the blues. From the upper gun deck up, and some on the middle gun deck level of the quarter galleries.
 
So at least two versions of the ship were painted blue above the gun decks after all. The Heller box art wasn’t that far off. But what about those claims of blue pigments being rare in the 1600s? 
 
Turns out, maybe not so much! 
 
Some blue pigments were rare, or unavailable in large quantities, or unsuitable for ship paint, or simply not invented yet. Ultramarine blue (lapis lazuli), a powdered gemstone from faraway Afghanistan, was worth more per weight than gold and was used only for things like painting the royal crest on first-rate warships. Smalt was blue pigment made from ground potassium-cobalt glass. It wasn’t available in quantities large enough to paint a ship. Plant-based indigo (woad) made poor paint that faded fast in sunlight; it was a better clothing dye. The synthetic pigment Prussian blue (Paris blue) wasn’t invented until 1706. Cerulean and cobalt blues weren’t synthesized until the 19th century.
 
Yet many ship paintings from the Baroque period show blue-painted ships. 
 

 
There’s even a book that discusses it—The Colour Blue in Historical Ships, by Joachim Mullerschon. There are several more blue-painted French ships on Hélyot’s scroll, including— ironically— the supposed-to-be-red Saint Philippe from Monsieur Lemineur’s monograph mentioned above. It had blue above the middle gundeck just like the Soleil Royal. At least, it did in 1704. Huh!
 

 
So where were French shipwrights getting blue paint? 
 
Azurite (azure, azul) is a deep blue copper mineral mined near Lyons, France. It was the most important blue pigment used in the middle ages. By the 17th century, it had been synthesized and manufactured in quantity by mixing copper nitrate with calcium carbonate (chalk). The inexpensive synthetic pigment was called blue verditer (Bremen blue, blue bice) and common enough to be used as wall paint during the 1600s. 
 
Verditer comes from verd de terre (earth green) because natural azurite often came mixed with another greenish copper ore, malachite (copper carbonate hydroxide). Depending on how much malachite was in the mix, azurite could be green or a greenish blue. But synthetic blue verditer could be close to cerulean or cyan in hue. See the swatches below. Blue verditer was often mixed with lead white to make a light blue shade (Versailles blue), or with lampblack, to deepen it.
 

 
Blue verditer isn’t used any more because it needs other paint binders, like casein, rather than common linseed oil and turpentine. Linseed is too acidic and causes the pigment to degrade to dull olive green or black in time. Ship paint rarely lasted long enough for that to happen.
 
Yes—there was plenty of blue paint to paint ships with in the 1600s. 
 
But were any of them painted all blue, like in the Jean Vary paintings?
 

 
What about the Vasa being red with polychrome figures? Was it possible that some version of the Soleil Royal had been painted that way? Well… maybe. We don’t know how the Soleil Royal was painted when it was first built by Laurent Hubac in 1668–70. From the look of his ships, Hubac built with a large helping of Dutch influence, and the Dutch painted their ships with a lot of color. Color was an important component of early Baroque art in Northern Europe. The art style is called Mannerism. It was a holdover from the styles of the Late Renaissance, and by the mid-1600s it was still popular everywhere, it seems, except around Versailles and the French court.
 

 
As head of the French navy, Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert tried to separate the decoration of the royal ships from the actual shipbuilding, with different officials presiding over each function. The same artists and designers working at Versailles were given the job of designing the decorations for the ships, but management was limited to an exchange of letters and drawings. We don’t know how that played out in the shipbuilding port of Brest, which was isolated out on the western tip of remote and rebellious Brittany. It could have been that all those independent, conservative shipbuilders took direction well and dutifully painted the new warships in the approved Versailles style. But maybe Colbert's instruction letters went into la poubelle with the fish wrappings. I think it’s at least possible that Dutch-trained Hubac still had a say in how his ships were painted, and that would have included using a lot of Mannerist-styled color. 
 
On his log on this forum, Hubac’s Historian (Marc La Guardia) has an absolutely beautiful partially-scratchbuilt Soleil Royal that I would place as painted in the Mannerist tradition. It’s the most amazing Soleil Royal model I’ve ever seen! If there were no Soleil Royals painted in the Mannerist tradition, Marc shows us that there should have been!
 
Laurent Hubac died in 1682 and by the late 1680s, the Royal bureaucracy at Versailles was in full control of the shipyards. Jean Bérain was filling in for the aging Charles Le Brun as chief decorator of the king’s warships. From surviving documents we find out that Bérain exercised more control over the process than his predecessors. His detailed drawings of ornamentation and sculpture were apparently followed, and we can suppose his chosen colors were too.
 
What about that one version of the Bérain stern drawing with the color indications? The one with the odd-colored statuary? How do we interpret that? Well—it not only shows all the signs of French Classicism in action, it also directly invokes the architecture of Versailles. Remember that Jean Bérain was the chief decorator of the palace. 
 

 
But I’m more interested in working up a color scheme for the 1693 Soleil Royal II. The end of the 17th century was an age of bright yellow sterns.
 

Ludolf Bakhuizen, Battle of Barfleur
 

 
L to R—Konung Karl, Le Foudroyant (actually painted in 1834, but I like it), Le Royal Louis.
 
The sketch of the Soleil Royal II on Jérôme Hélyot’s 1704 scroll of the Battle of Velez-Malaga shows a ship that looks like it fits right in with that paint scheme.
 

 
What would this look like on the model?
 

 
This is one of my Photoshop/Illustrator sketches—I made several. Okay, fine—but what about separating the decks? Specifically, separating the upper gun deck from the quarterdeck? The way I drew it, they have two different ornamental schemes going on. (I’ll discuss the decorations in a future post.) How about going dark blue / light blue, like the Konung Karl in the All-Blue-and-Gold-Ships box above?
 

 
Cool. But now, what about the poop? Maybe the poop should get its own decoration scheme. Dark / light / dark?
 

 
And yeah—the poop now gets some fleur-de-lis on a dark blue field, similar to other period French warships depicted in art. (See that Monamy painting at the beginning of this post.) Each deck now has its own color and ornamentation. I stared at this variant for about two weeks before deciding I liked it best. Finally decided, you know, I could live with this. 
 
Okay, so—paint! How should I approach painting this plastic model?
 
If we were absolutely true to our perception of scale, all small ship models like Soleil Royal would be built with smooth styrene. Not a hint of texture. There’s hardly any texture to finished and painted wood anyway, and certainly none that would be detectable in 1/100 scale. I dislike many small-scale models made of real wood for this very reason—real wood grain doesn’t show up on that small a scale!
 
This is not what most modelers and viewers expect. They like to see indications of what the thing being modeled was supposed to be made of. Wood should—in most viewer’s minds—look like wood. Metal should look like metal. Stone should look like stone. Never mind that at 1/100 scale, everything should look like smooth plastic.
 
Besides, modeling and painting textures is really cool. The Heller die-makers certainly thought so. They did a hella (Heller) job of giving the sides and decks of the Soleil Royal a great-looking raised wood-grain texture.
 
This sets up an interesting dialog. The real ship was a fairly new, well-kept, premier rang warship that was also a national symbol, cared for by hundreds of low-ranking swabbies with an officer-enforced mandate to keep all hands busy. (“If it moves, salute it; if it doesn’t move, paint it.”) In other words, ships like the Soleil Royal should look almost new.
 
On the other hand, modelers love to age, weather, wear, begrime, and texture surfaces. The Heller model invites this. I don’t want to sand away all that nice wood grain. Likewise, I don’t want to paint over it and pretend it’s not there. I can’t resist the temptation to work with it. At some point, the casual model-builder (me) has to shrug and go with the flow. I’m left trying to find a middle ground between this—
 

 
And this—
 

 
(The Victory and Neptuno are, IMHO, just really, really big model ships.)
 
But I’m not much of a fan of weathering. To my mind, a model ship should look like it has had at most a few weeks at sea, not months and years of neglect.
 
So I’m going to try and make the Heller wood grain subtle, but still present. I’m not going to emphasize joints and plank edges with subsequent washes of detail-enhancing dark color. Decks will look used but well-scrubbed. The hull can look like it has weathered one hard blow off Ushant, but no more. No nails, bolts, trennals or other passages for the Big Wet to penetrate will be visible. 
 
And not much attention will be given to places where I don’t want to attract your eye. Forget about seeing much beyond featureless light grey below the waterline, I don’t want your attention there. And I’ll be using the old illustrator’s trick of using flat black on any details that I want to disappear. Hopefully, the end result won't look too different from my Photoshop sketch.
 
(Nope, it didn't.)
 

 
Next week I'll go through the process of painting the lower hull and the decks. Stay epipelagic 'till then.
 
 
 

small steps:

Thank you druxey and etubino!
 
But firstly, I'm stupid and secondly, I need glasses ...

Thanks to the many tips from modelling friends, I know that I had misinterpreted McKay's drawing. Of course it is correct 🙂

So here comes another demolition.



In the meantime, I no longer print the blocks sorted by type but by yard. There are still some blocks missing, but 2 of these sets contain everything for the main yard.
 




Slowly it is routine and goes quickly by hand, glueing one rope into the groove of the block ...



... then the second one into the other, so that the short ends are diagonally opposite each other.

Then the whole thing into the holding device, a drop of superglue in the middle and press them together vertically ...



... and horizontally with a pair of strong tweezers.



Then tie a safety knot close to the block.



Then cut the short ends as short as possible.

Then set the averaged length for the short loop, bring the rope to length, and fix it with a drop of glue and press it together again with the tweezers.



Check length.



Adjust long loop and do the same.



Then the whole thing should already be stable enough to make a trial fit at the place of use - here it is fitting.



Then, with the specified distance of 4 mm from the block, set a knot with long enough ends for the binding and then line up normal knots close together alternately at the top and bottom all the way up to the block. It's quick and, unlike the standard wrapping, nothing slips out of place.



Add a little paint to defuse the white glue spots ...



... and two neat block strops are ready.



Still tying up the lanyard ...



... set the whole thing in place and sew in the lashing with a needle. The inner lying sheet block had already found its way to the yard :-)



After that, it was the turn of the clew garnet blocks.



And then one can recoice 🙂






Hopefully it fits this time 🙂

XXXDAn
 

@giampieroricci
@jose_b
@druxey
@jfhealey
Hello,
I am very pleased with your nice comments. That's an honor, but with a little patience and practice you can do it too.
Of course I would also like to thank you for the many LIKES.
 
Continuation: Equipment of the main topsail yard – brace blocks and lifts / Poulies de bras et balancines
According to the table in the monograph, the blocks for the braces of the main topsail yard of the La Créole had a length of 190 mm in the original, which corresponds to a length of around 4 mm at a scale of 1:48.
Like the brace blocks of the lower yards, these were attached to the yard ropes without rope swaps, but directly via thimbles (“Dog and Bitch” connection).


The simple lifts were fitted over the yard arms with eye splices.
Contrary to the arrangement of the footropes in the lower yards, in the topsail yards they are only placed further at the end of the yard arms. But more about that soon.


I also have to clarify whether and how many stirrups were attached to the footropes of the topsail. There are no stirrups on the original Paris model, as far as I can tell from the images available to me. I still tend to be of the opinion that at least one stirrup per side wouldn't be wrong.
Up soon …

Let’s see the three Soleil Royals and figure out why I decided to build the last one. Thanks to Guy Maher and his Soleil Royal log on Ships of Scale for organizing a lot of the following information. His PDF guide to the ship is a treasure trove. (It’s in French—get a good online translator.)
 
The biggest issue with building any model of the Soleil Royal is simply that we don’t know much about what the ship looked like in real life. The few pieces of surviving artwork raise as many maddening questions as answers. It’s like getting a story from an unreliable narrator. In spite of in-depth research by half a century of dedicated hobbyists, we don’t seem to be much closer to finding out how the Soleil Royal really looked as we were when the Heller kit was first produced.
 

 
Soleil Royal I was a harbor queen at Brest for 20 years. The big 106-gun three-decker was intended to be a flagship for the channel fleet. It needed a huge crew and was expensive to maintain in sailing condition, so it was laid up and never got much attention until its timbers were so rotten that it was taken apart in 1688 and rebuilt from the keel up. See Soleil Royal I(a).
 
Not much is known about the first version of this ship, built by Brest shipwright Laurent Hubac (1612–1682). Hubac built around 50 ships-of-the-line heavily influenced by state-of-the-art Dutch warships. There are no surviving plans for the Soleil Royal because it’s probable that none were used in its construction. There are letters in the French archives from First Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, head of the French navy, encouraging his shipbuilders to start using uniform dimensions and plans on paper. Unfortunately, the ship constructors in Brest were a stubborn and conservative lot who built their vessels the same way that medieval architects built French cathedrals—by knowledge and rote, without drawing plans. So the first Soleil Royal was probably built without visual documentation. Nobody bothered to draw artwork of the ship, either. We have some paragraphs broadly describing the stern sculpture, that’s all.

The print above is from an engraving in a 1690 book on French ships by Henri Sbonski de Passebon, and was thought to be the Soleil Royal by some authors. But Sbonski de Passebon was a galley captain in Toulon who had no opportunity to see (or draw) a ship harbored at Brest. The engraving was, at best, guesswork. It’s no good as a representation of the Soleil Royal because the numbers and arrangement of the gunports are different and it has no armed forecastle. Who knows what other details are wrong?
 
I think a better starting point for considering how this ship looked would be one of Willem Van de Velde’s drawings of a similar ship built by Laurent Hubac in the same time period. Here’s another one of his premier rang 104-gun three-deckers, Reine (ex-Royal Duc), built by Hubac the same year as Soleil Royal. I’ll bet the first version of the Soleil looked similar. It has an armed forecastle, a fat stern (a Hubac trademark), a big stern plate, and full-figure sculptures sitting on the stern quarters, just like what the Soleil Royal was supposed to have.
 

 
If we use a little Photoshop and attach the Soleil Royal’s stern… the result doesn’t look too bad. Plausible. But—
 

 
But as the subject for a model, Soleil Royal I leaves too much to the imagination. The Heller hull would need massive modification and a lot of scratch-building to look anything like this. Too much work. Let’s move on.
 

 
This is the version many modelers seem to want to build, thanks to the superb artwork by Jean Bérain (1640–1711), dessinateur de la Chambre et du cabinet du Roi, the king’s chief decorator, who made the drawings as a proposal for dressing up the 1688-1690 rebuild of the ship. In addition to the drawings, we have paintings, made by Jean Vary, that show the ship entirely painted in blue. (Spoiler—it probably wasn’t. This will be discussed in a later post.) These may have been made for presentation to the king, showing le monarque what his ship-decorators intended for his favorite namesake royal vessel.

The son of Laurent Hubac, Étienne Hubac (1648–1726), was responsible for rebuilding the ship. Surviving documents say that much of the ornamentation from Soleil Royal I was recovered and reused. Some of the weighty sculpture was redone in a smaller size to reduce the ship’s top-heaviness. Bérain designed “bottle” quarter galleries for the ship—all balconies enclosed. This was the regulation style after 1673.
Regrettably, there’s a good chance Berain’s designs were never implemented. The Nine Years’ War broke out before the ornamentation on the rebuilt ship could be finished. In 1690, the ship sailed off to fight le perfide Britannique sans fancy paint or sculpture, and met its end in a fateful kiss with a fire ship at La Hogue in 1692. 
 
There are obvious differences between the Bérain drawings and the Tanneron-model-based Heller kit, notably, the design of the quarter galleries, the proportions of the stern, and the number of lights—windows—on each deck balcony. Tanneron had access to the Bérain drawings and it seems like he deliberately disregarded them. Even by the lax standards of historical representation in Tanneron’s time, there are just too many discrepancies. These issues vanish if we assume he was modeling a different ship.
 
Modifying the kit to resemble this version is a good project for those who like to scratch-build in styrene and have the time to invest. They have to widen the Heller hull and more or less replace the entire model fore, aft, and above the gundecks. Hubac’s Historian (Marc LaGuardia) has a wonderful build log on this site describing his adventures doing this. If this approach interests the reader, I strongly suggest continuing with that build log. I’m content to admire it from afar. This is too much work for me. My Soleil Royal build will be simpler.
 

 
The simple little watercolor-and-gouache sketch above is the only artwork of a Soleil Royal in action made by an eyewitness, so we know this version of the ship was really painted blue. It appears on the five-meter scroll made of the order of battle for Velez-Malaga in 1704, painted by French officer Jérôme Hélyot, who participated in the engagement. This ship is likely the inspiration for the Tanneron model. One of the prominent researchers of the early French navy, Jean-Claude Lemineur, author of The Ships of the Sun King, identified the Tanneron model as being the Soleil Royal II. Skilled French modelmaker and researcher Michel Saunier thought the same thing. These are strong arguments from authority.
 
The model’s arrangement of gunports and the design of the quarter galleries are close to what we know about the Soleil Royal II. Tanneron built other model ships in the Musée from the same 1690s time period as Soleil Royal II. It’s possible his intent was to document the time of the “Second Marine,” when the French fleet was rebuilt following the disaster at La Hogue.
 
The Soleil Royal II was built in 1692 by Étienne Hubac. In a letter to Louis XIV, he pleaded to be allowed to rename his recently-completed ship from Foudroyant to Soleil Royal in honor of his dad’s ship lost at La Hogue. In the same letter, Hubac disclosed he still had all les gabarits (moulds, maquettes, and templates for the decorations) from the previous ship. The Soleil Royal I(a) had been stripped of many of its finished sculptures before the battle. All these were apparently available for reuse on the Soleil Royal II. New carvings based on the surviving les gabarits filled in the gaps. 
 
I figured that it took the least amount of effort to turn the Heller model into a semi-respectable resemblance of the Soleil Royal II. That was going to be my goal. 
 
And no, I wasn’t going to accept all the peculiarities built into the Tanneron model and copied by the kit. It’s clear that Tanneron wasn’t completely faithful to historical sources. I saw no reason to be completely faithful to him.
 
Besides, it’s fun to do your own thang, man.
 
Now that I had decided which ship to build, I could plan changes to the hull. 
 
I chose Winfield & Roberts’ French Warships in the Age of Sail 1626–1786 to be my guide. It’s always fun to piggyback off other people’s meticulous research. In their description of the Soleil Royal II, they listed the armed gunports on each deck (104 total), and happily, the Hélyot sketch agreed with them. This meant the Heller hull needed a few ports added and a few ports moved.
 

 
 
Tanneron gave his model 102 armed gunports. This was because the ship was armed with 102 guns at the Battle of Velez-Malaga. Later research showed that the ship actually had emplacements for 104 guns (minus the fore and aft ports, and the four poop deck ports, which usually did not have guns mounted.) 
 
There are 100 gunports on the Heller kit (again, not counting the fore and aft ports). The last pair of ports on the middle gundeck is supposedly hidden inside the kit’s enclosed quarter galleries, but they're visible on the Tanneron model, which has open galleries. So the middle gundeck is missing the last port on each side. The kit’s quarter deck is short two ports on each side, and the poop needs an additional one. Also, the spacing of the last pairs of ports on the middle and lower gundecks is uneven. No chase ports needed to be cut; a note in Winfield & Roberts said that the chase ports in Soleil Royal II were never pierced.
 
I decided that the last ports in the middle gundeck didn’t need to be cut because I was going to have them hidden behind the panels of the quarter galleries. I had made the decision to modify (and shrink) the kit’s quarter galleries. There are several good reasons for this, which will be covered in a later post. For now, the major consequence of that decision was that four of the gunports of the Heller kit formerly incorporated into the quarter galleries were now going to be exposed like the others.

In real life, the framing of the ship dictated regular spacing of the gunports. The Heller hull had to be modified to reflect that.
 
I made a list of things to do for each hull half—
Lower deck—move last gunport forward 3/32” Middle deck—move last gunport aft 1/4” (and optional—add last port) Upper deck—finish last port frame (formerly part of the kit’s quarter galleries) Quarter deck—fill in rectangular window, add last two ports (for a total of six QD ports on each side) Poop—add one more port When complete, the modified hull sides would have 108 ports, armed and unarmed—just like the Hélyot sketch.
 
I Photoshopped the changes to be made: 
 

 
And went to work with X-acto blades and my variable-speed Dremel with a grinder attachment. 
 

 
Sheets of Evergreen plastic in a variety of thicknesses provided the patches, and Tamiya white putty filled in the cracks and oopsies. The job was finished off with a variety of needle files and sanding sticks. New wood grain was carved in with the X-acto blade and the whole thing roughed up with a wire brush.
 
One of the good qualities of the Heller kit is that the quarter deck and forecastle are separate pieces. Easier to work on that way. A lot of the decorative strakes had to go so they wouldn’t interfere with the new décor. There is a lot of floral carving detail on both pieces. None of it is from the Tanneron model and it looks like it was halfway inspired by the Bérain drawings, but it is also really insignificant and looks like the Heller die-maker was having a rotten day after fighting with his wife. I opted to remove it all and substitute something of my own. I was also going to replace the plain round gunport frames with new decorated ones, so away they went too. Sanding sticks, Ho!
 
I drilled out the additional round gunports. The spacing of the last three on the quarterdeck was tightened up a bit for fit. With everything else to attract attention on the finished ship, I don’t think it will be noticed. The missing rectangular gunport frames on the aft upper deck were made from 2mm sheet styrene and 2mm 1/2-round Evergreen strips. I ordered new round gunport frames—little brass jewelry whatchamacallits from the craft website Etsy. In the photo, I tried on a few for size. They won’t be attached until a later step.
 

 
Last step for the gunports for now—I added some thickness to the hull visible through the gunports. Ships of the line back then were true castles of oak, with thick walls of framing and planks, not thin shells. I probably should have used 1/8” styrene strips, but I didn’t want to go back to the hobby store and I had a big surplus of 1/8” stripwood. Someone with better ship-modeling knowledge than me would use precise thicknesses and taper the thickness from lower deck to middle deck, but for me, the 1/8” (approximately a scale foot) helps the appearance just enough.
 

 
Now that I had all the gunports in order, I made a list of extra things to add to the hull—
Bolts and trennals (NOT!) Wale scarfs Fenders and ladder rails Anchor linings Scuppers Stern plate extensions My reference for these was Peter Goodwin’s Construction and Fitting of the English Man of War 1650–1850. I made a leap of faith in thinking that shipbuilding technology in the 1690s wasn’t all that different in la nation de boutiquiers across the Channel.
 
NUTS TO BOLTS—
I planned to add bolts. I even went online and bought a shi(p)load of 2” HO bolt-heads from Tichy Train Group. God, they were TINY!
 
A lot of ship modelers add bolt-heads to wales as a matter of course. They also indicate trennals (tree-nails) on planks. It looks cool, but it has always bothered me. Were bolts and trennals really all that visible on ships of that period? They show up in period artwork, but they aren’t that apparent on the HMS Victory or the USS Constitution. These are ships from a century later than the Soleil, I know, but still. The remains of the Vasa in Stockholm is covered with bolt-heads, but they’re all modern replacements to keep the rusty iron of the originals from further corroding and damaging the ship. There aren’t many other period ships to examine for guidance.
 

 
2,000+ exposed bolts on the surface of a wooden ship’s hull doesn’t make sense to me anyway. 2,000 bolt-holes exposed to the sea? Dry ship? No way!
 
So what does Goodwin say about trennals and bolts?
 
Trennals—“The advantage of wooden dowels was that when they got wet the wood expanded, thus tightening the fastening.” After boring the plank and frame underneath, “the trennel was then driven in, and made flush.” So, no surface indication for trennals.
 
Bolts—“It was considered good practice to bore out the timber on either side, to a depth and diameter of the head and the rove. Once the bolt was fastened the remaining space was filled with some form of caulking, and faired off with the faces of the timbers.” No surface indication of bolts, either. And I can’t imagine a premier rang French flagship being built without “good practice.”
 
That left the question of why all those bolt-heads show up in period drawings. In truth, I don’t know the answer, but in the end I opted to go with instinct and forego the bolts. My Soleil Royal would have smooth sides and wales, like the HMS Victory.
 
Whew. Too bad I bought all those bolt-heads. On the other hand, I don’t have to drill 2,000 holes in the wales. That’s a relief. I think my old Dremel would die screaming.
 
WALE BUTTS—
Say that three times without cracking up. One thing that I could fix easily was all the butt joints Heller’s die-makers put on the wales. Should be scarfs instead. I filled in the butt joints with Tamiya white putty and referenced one of J.C. Lemineur’s drawings of L'Ambitieux (cribbed from online) to place some scarfs.
 

J.C. Lemineur, L'Ambitieux
 
It took very little time to scribe in the new ones. Here’s how they looked a little further on, after some primer had been applied.
 

 
Have a good look. The scarfs will be invisible when the wales are painted dark brown.
 
FENDERS and ladder rails—
were added using Evergreen styrene strips. According to Goodwin, the dimensions were usually 14”–16” proud from the sides of the ship by 4”–5” wide, but those honestly looked too big and distracting. I cut them down to about a foot. Goodwin also says there were usually 4 or 5 fenders per side, but he’s probably referencing later English ships. I opted to copy a drawing of the 1693 Royal Louis and added three.
 


 
ANCHOR LININGS—
I got out the kit’s anchor castings, built one, and swung it from where I supposed the catheads would be to figure out where the anchor linings should go. Goodwin’s book also had diagrams. Built them from more Evergreen strips. The gap between the main wales was filled in from the anchor linings forward. My linings are probably too robust—but they’re going to have a lot of distracting detail close at hand, so I’m not inclined to perform a do-over.
 

 
SCUPPERS—
According to Goodwin, there were six to eight per deck per side. I settled for seven. Goodwin said they should be flush with the sides, but I like them standing out a bit, as J.C. Lemineur has drawn them in one of his detailed renderings of Le Saint Philippe. Cut from Evergreen square tubing.
 

 
STERN EXTENSION—
When I started, I had the idea of using most of the kit’s quarter galleries, just moving them aft about 1/2 inch to clear two of the gunports. In order to do this, I figured I needed to extend the stern 7/16” at the taffrail and slanting down to 3/16” at the lower edge of the stern plate. This was done with 2mm sheet styrene. That exaggerated the already-too-high taffrail even worse, so I redesigned the quarter galleries yet again (you’ll see them in a later post) and ended up chopping off most of the new stern extension. I left the 3/16” at the bottom edge, though.
 

 
Can we glue stuff yet? Not anywhere close.
 

 
I still have to think about what I'm going to paint this thing. Next week, we’ll see what goes into that decision and find out where some of the divergent information about the Soleil Royal’s paint and color—um, diverged.
 
Fluctuat nec mergitur. Happy modeling .
 
 
 
 

Post seventy-seven
 
Waist Beams
This section completes the framing over the waist.

1286

1285
2028
The beams slotted into place without issue.
I’m glad I made the decision to replace the beam supports over the head ledges with ‘iron’ stanchions on my particular build.
 
The shipyard is now closing for a week.
 
Cheers,
 
B.E.
08/09/2023.

Post Seventy-six
 
Carlings
These slot beautifully into the beam mortises.

2002
I use clamps to ensure they sit right down once glue is applied.

2005
Only the outer carlings, adjoining the breast beam, were a tad slack in the fit, and needed a little fettlin’.

2022

2021
The more I look at this framework, the less I want to cover it up.

2023
 
It will be an interesting exercise to work out how I can use the minimum planking to the best effect.
 
As I move on forward of the Qtr deck I had a change of heart about using the kit provided pillars atop the head ledges.

2006
They somehow look out of place, maybe because I raised and cambered the head ledges.

2016

2017
From this point on I decided to use ‘iron’ stanchions, they suited my eye better for this position.
I will continue to use the provided pillars for the  deck located beam supports.
 
Moving onto the Foc'sle framing.
 
B.E.
06/09/2023

 

Post Seventy-five
 
Fitting the Qtr deck beams
With the Qtr deck beams painted, fitting can begin.

1997
Slow and careful is the order of the day. Moving from aft forward each beam is test fitted before gluing, and the central support pillars gradually trimmed to height to fit beneath the beams without forcing the camber.

1998
Constant checking is a necessity.
 
If plan sheet 3 is used to aid location, there is a note to leave beam 14 off until part 103 (Carling) is fitted.
This would be a mistake as it would prove very difficult if not impossible to retro fit 14 after the following beams have been fitted.
Section 373 of the manual provides an alternative and more practical solution.

1991
I had a brief moment of panic fitting the final deck beam of the set (No9). I was expecting that it would be fully supported by the Main Jeer Bitt standards. Not so, it only catches the forward edge.(by design)

1989
The final beam is the Qtr deck breast beam supported at its centre by the Main Topsail sheet Bitts standards.
Before fitting I gave it the heat treatment secured over the former, to ensure the camber was properly set.
 

1993

1999

1996
The Capstan barrel extends down to the lower deck and will be trimmed to height once the Upper capstan is seated on the  QD step.

1995
I do like the shaped breast beam of these Ardent class ships.

1994
The final step will be to add the carlings.
 
B.E.
05/09/2023
 
 

Post Seventy-four
 
Stanchions on my mind
I wasn’t really satisfied with my pillar conversion, so I had a play around with metal.

1969
Using square brass tubing (2.3mm) with the original wooden pillar tab inserted, I formed the foot of the stanchion. 1.5mm square section brass was used for the stanchion, ca’d into the top of the foot.

1971

1974
Chemically blackened, they provide a stronger contrast to the wooden support pillars.

1975
I think they look more representative of ‘iron’ stanchions.
I will finish the top end brackets once I have the determined the correct height, as I fit the deck beams.
 
The kit ladderway stanchions (or newels)are represented by brass etched posts with an eye, thro’ which line is threaded.
On my builds from Pegasus onwards I have passed over kit stanchions in favour of something more stylish.
For the stanchions I am using the same system  I adopted for Pegasus, which was based on the detail in the fffm Vol 11.

6989(2)
The makings involve having donor stanchions, the ones I use are 0.9mm ø with a 1.3mm finial. For the rings 0.3mm eyelets, (Caldercraft) are used, and 0.5mm ø brass rod for the rails.

1253
A spot of silver soldering is required to bring it all together.
Silver solder paste in two melt points 690º and 671º are required.

7044
Full details of the procedure can be found in my Pegasus log (page 4 – post 91) but I used the same  process on my Sphinx build (above)

1983
Main ladderway.

1986
Aft Ladderway.

1987
Main Hatch ladderway.
 
Forward to the Qtr deck beams.
 
B.E.
03/09/2023

 

Post Seventy-three
 
Back to the decks.
Pre-occupied with the deck beams I nearly forgot about the gundeck ironwork.
The kit provides etched eyebolts for the Training (relieving) tackle connection.
These should strictly be ringbolts and I used 2mm rings and Amati fine eyebolts to make up the required number running along the deck binding strakes.

1950
For the first three sets aft of the Riding Bitts I have used 3mm rings to represent the stopper bolts.
Apart from any other consideration ring bolts look nicer when looking down on the deck of a model.
 
There is then the shaped deck support pillars and in particular those within the area of the Capstan.

1956
There are four within the radius of the Capstan bars which even with a modest scale 9’ length would impede movement.
I think these would more likely be hinged iron supports that could be lifted out of the way when the capstan was in use.

1963
I have modified the pillars to represent such items, and which from the available viewing point would probably pass muster, at least to a blind man on a galloping horse.

1958

1967
I still may re-visit the iron stanchions and try a 1mm ø brass tube version.
 
B.E.
31/08/2023

 
 

It is Nipper, in my opinion they are the trickiest sections that can make or break the look of a model. Always a relief when those two tasks have been completed, hopefully with satisfaction.
 
Post Seventy-two
Quarter deck beams
This section starts with yet another not very exciting task, that of prepping the Qtr deck beams.
These are nicely proportioned Pearwood beams with the necessary camber and containing the slots for the carlings.
These need careful cleaning up as they are heavily charred on the top and bottom surfaces. The danger is that with the camber it would be all too easy to put too much pressure on a beam resulting in breakage.

1936
Soft hands are required for this job, and I use a cambered former to support the beam during cleaning of the top surface.

1935
I begin by scraping, using a scalpel blade to remove the heavy char, it would soon clog a sandpaper.

1938
Fitting the beams is a slow business with great care needed to avoid breaking the tabs off the beam ends.

1939
The aftermost deck beam is fitted first.  A tricky exercise involving cutting away sections of the mdf frames both sides and sanding the ends of the beam. I found that the recesses at either end of the beam needed a lot of fettlin’ in order to sit right down on the beam housing.
Note:
Were I starting this section again I would have trial fitted the beams before I set the gun carriages in place.
 
I found that I had to remove sections of all the mdf frames to get placement of the beams without the risk of stress both to the beams and myself.
My veneer saw proved useful for this task.
The forward beam at the break of the Qtr Deck has a classic curved design typical of the Ardent class of ships.

1941
Chris has designed a former over which to shape the laminated beam to give it the proper camber.
I will retain this little jig, it has potential for use on other projects.

1943

1945
The forward beam sits perfectly over the Main  bitt standards.

1946
The final check is to confirm the beams are seated properly and present a level surface across all points.
Two days work on this task, I can now remove the beams for a final cleaning up and painting.
 
B.E.
30/08/2023
 
 

Post Seventy-one
I’m now at the six-month stage of this build, altho’ I’m a fair way behind those of my fellow Indy builders who started around the same time.
A photo set to mark this milestone point.

1912

1915

1918

1916

1917

1919

1920

1923
The gun barrels are only temporarily in place.

1931

1932
 
The heavy construction element has now been completed. There should be a lot less clutter and dust around from this point on.
I am now getting close to the stage of a build that I enjoy best.
 
B.E.
29/08/2023
 

Post Seventy
Bits and pieces
Lots of bits and pieces to add at this stage, guard stanchions around the hatches, shot to the garlands, and the gun carriages to secure along the hull.

1891

1910
I also decided to repaint and weather the guns, I could still detect those longitudinal striations given certain light and angles.

1902
What fun it is to fit the shot into the garlands. Lively little beggars, pinging around the deck, bouncing down the ladderways never to be seen again, but most certainly heard.

1901
I found using these broad nose plastic tweezers gave me the best success.
 
The stanchions
As with other ‘ironwork’ I prefer to chemically blacken.

1895
I try to ensure that any tabs from the fret are completely removed from the stanchions before this process.
This macro reveals three examples requiring more attention.
 
Gun carriages.
I secured these using 1mm brass wire thro’ the bed and into the deck.

1892
An Archimedean drill is perfect for this job.

1894
At this point the carriages are all secured. I used ca on either end of the wire.

1906
I think a general tidy-up is called for before I move on.
 
B.E.
27/08/2023
 
 
 

Post Sixty-nine
Capstans
I decided to add ‘iron’ reinforcing rings to the capstan trundle heads.
For this I used my dividers to cut rings from thin black card. I sprayed the card with matt varnish before cutting to reduce the risk of rough edges.

1887
The rings were marked with the iron fastenings; fitting these corrected my initial error, as I was able to re-position the capstan bar retaining pin holes.
 
Manger Boards.
There are rules about Manger Boards concerning their heigh and shape. They fit against the bulwark at the outboard end, and against the Bowsprit step legs, inboard. They are higher outboard and cant down inboard.
For practical purposes I have scaled the height to fit over the spirketting.

1868

1879
The Manger boards are fairly simple to make, cut from some scrap 1mm Boxwood.

1878

1875

1883
They will be clearly visible thro’ the Foc’sle deck beams, so worth adding on a ‘skeletal’ version such as mine.
 

1876
Picking thro’ my scrap box I came across this little fellow, a six pounder carriage from the cutter Alert.
Hard to believe these two are the same scale.
 
Movin’ on.

B.E.
26/08/2023
 

Post Sixty-seven
The Stove.
The Brodie stove is a nicely detailed resin model complete with chimney, condenser, and drip tray. Additional etch is provided for detailing such as the spit chains, lifting rings,
I have constructed stoves using a wood core and etch panels, (Sphinx), all wood versions (Syren) and as with the beautiful Syren version this is all about painting and weathering to get a realistic look.

9150
The 'Syren' Stove at 1:48 scale, with the 'Vanguard' Cook, a perfect combination.
I enjoy doing this sort of thing, and it makes a pleasant change from the repetitive elements of the build.
 
I am using Vallejo Black/grey for the base coat followed by  weathering powders.

1852
The etch is chemically blackened before fitting.
When it came to the rods for the spit I couldn’t quite relate to the given sizes 0.8mm and 0.4mm, all I could find in the kit box was 1mm and 0.7mm.
I found 0.6mm suited best for the upper chain rod, and I used 0.7mm for the two lower rods.

1854
Assembly of the chain mechanism is a delicate business that tested my eyesight to the limit, but the result is excellent particularly at 1:64 scale, kudos to Chris for the design.👏

1858
I didn’t want to over-weather the look. A light touch using Black, dark brown, and a touch of slate grey to represent ash marks, I thought sufficient.

1859
The sharp eyed may notice something missing from the condenser jacket.
Wearing the wrong specs I mistook the water inlet and overflow pipes for sprue and cut them off.😒
 
I wonder if the condenser should even be shown as ‘iron’.
I note that on the Victory Brodie, the condenser is shown as made of copper, which sort of makes sense given the purpose.
I may re-visit this.

1862
One other thing that caught my eye were the taps for the boiler drain. Something very Victorian about the cast valve taps (Parts BS8), so I omitted them.

1143

1866
I did think about adding a few whistles and bells to the stove such as rails and swinging arm to the range grate, but decided it was not worth the effort given the scale and ultimate view.
 
Onwards,…
 
B.E.
24/08/2023
 

Post Sixty-six
Deck fittings cont’d
Pumps.
The Elm tree pumps are made up using octagonal shaped sections and laminated brass etch for the iron work.

1831
This little assembly project is surprisingly time consuming.
The pump sections are tricky little beggars to char clean whilst maintaining a sharp octagonal profile.
The etch laminations were secured with ca which mars the surface for blackening.
It took repeated scraping of the etch to remove ca overspill to get a uniform cover.

1844

1150
One thing missing from the pumps is the discharge pipes which are easily added.
I used short lengths of brass tubing around 1.5mm ø
 
Capstan(s)
I made up both Lower and Upper Capstans, and they are a delight to assemble with precise and clean fitting.

1839
One thing I would have liked in the kit is an etch or laser board  ring to represent the iron reinforcing ring around the trundle head top.

3534(2)
This shot of the Syren Capstan at 1:48 scale shows what I mean.

1840
I haven’t checked but I hope the Upper capstan follows thro’ on the Qtr deck and aligns with the barrel. 🤞
 
I made a small error in assembling the Capstan, the knowledgeable will spot it, the not so, perhaps not.
The Capstans will be fettled and painted later.
 
The final and most complex item is the Brodie Stove which is up next.
 
B.E.
23/08/2023
 
 
 

Post Sixty- five
Bulwark and Centre line fittings.
The bulwark fittings are attended to next; repetitive, and not the most exciting aspect of a build.

1798
Fifty-two ring bolts to make-up and blacken.

1804
Boring as the process is, I think ring bolts look so much better than simple eyebolts and are the proper connection for the breeching ropes.
Cleaning out the bulwark receiving holes is an awkward exercise using a 0.8mm drill and pin vise. Because of the close proximity to the deck I am careful not to transfer any blackening from the iron work to the deck during fitting.

1806
A set of cleats are fitted along the bulwark to take various lines, the larger ones for the tack/ sheets.
 A set of additional holes are required to be drilled thro’ from inboard to outboard. This represents what would be the fixed blocks, to take the sheet and tack lines.

1811
The Riding Bitts went together beautifully, the Main bitts less so.

1816
As can be seen here my modification allows for a view down thro’ three deck levels, to the Orlop, giving the impression that all deck are fitted out.
 
The slots of the cross pieces to the Main Bitts were a loose fit over the uprights leaving a gap of around 0.7mm. Not too much of a problem if the item is to be painted, but I intend to leave the cross pieces unpainted.

1807
I used small pieces of Pearwood strip to resolve the issue.

1808
The posts will be painted red, and the cross pieces left natural.
 
Bowsprit step.
The kit Bowsprit stop is attached to the underside of the first upper deck beam (UD1)
This is intended to fit in a deck slot forward of the Topsail sheet Bitts, a simplification which for practical purposes has no relevance if the kit is assembled as an oob build.

1827
In practice the Bowsprit stop should fit between the Fore topsail sheet bitt posts and take a mortise to accept the  Bowsprit heel.
 
I made a new Stop cut from 4mm Boxwood sheet. This is glued between the Topsail sheet Bitts which are fitted now rather than much later in the build.

1819
An angled tenon is cut into the Bowsprit end to fit the stop.
This is relevant to my build because my Foc’sle deck will mostly be missing, and I intend to add manger boards which run from the bitt posts.
I did a similar modification on my Sphinx build.
1825

1826

1828
I now have the Stove, Capstan, and pumps to make up.
 
B.E.
20/08/2023
 
 

I had a complicated year, one of the problems being a flood in my workshop... I had to wait for a few months before I could make a new ground and work again on the model. Everything is fixed now, and the Ambitieux is now at the painting stage. I really like how it looks now, and it will still improve when the painting is over. 
 
 

Yes, exactly ! It's mainly due to the fact that I First set the wales and then the planking. Altaya tell us to fully cover the hull with planking, and finally glue the wales. It's more difficult to get a correct result this way.
I Continue the work and it's a real pleasure to see the ship take form. The first metal parts are glued and they are perfect. This kit is a real good surprise !