rybakov

I found the following quite interesting and thought some of the members would as well.  
https://aeon.co/essays/how-european-sailors-learned-celestial-navigation
It follows:
In 1673, in a North Sea skirmish that killed nearly 150 men, the French privateer Jean-François Doublet took a bullet that tossed him from the forecastle and broke his arm in two places. How did the precocious young second lieutenant choose to spend his convalescence? Doublet repaired to the French port city of Dieppe, where he signed up for three months of navigation lessons. 
This might seem a strange decision; Doublet, who had gone to sea at the age of seven, already knew the ins and outs of navigation. Why would he bother paying for lessons? The school in Dieppe – the Royal School of Hydrography – was renowned for the calibre of its lectures, attracting passing tourists as well as naval trainees. Doublet was keen to learn some more advanced techniques from the teacher, Abbé Guillaume Denys. In his memoir, Doublet explains a practical motive too: if he got injured again, he would retire and open his own sailing school.
Bold adventurers had a chance to enjoy considerable profits at sea in the early modern period (the 16th to 18th centuries) but they also risked their lives on every voyage. For Doublet, it was important to have a backup career plan. He never ended up teaching – he would spend the next three decades traversing the Atlantic and hobnobbing with famous admirals before, as a retirement project, writing his memoir. It might seem surprising that Doublet felt that teaching navigation was on a par with privateering, which was essentially legal piracy, with handsome prize money. Clearly, in the late-17th century, even knowledgeable sailors sought out more education. Records of these early schools are scarce – but Doublet’s detailed account of his time in Denys’s classes offers a rare glimpse into the technical education that early modern European sailors might have received
       
During the 16th to 18th centuries, Europeans embarked on thousands of long-distance sea voyages around the world. These expeditions in the name of trade and colonisation had irreversible, often deadly, impacts on peoples around the globe. Heedless of those consequences, Europeans focused primarily on devising new techniques to make their voyages safer and faster. They could no longer sail along the coasts, taking their directional cues from prominent landmarks (as had been common in the preceding centuries). Nor did they have sophisticated knowledge of waves and currents, as did their counterparts in the Pacific. They had no choice but to figure out new methods of navigating across the open water. Instead of memorising the shoreline, they looked to the heavens, calculating time and position from the sun and the stars.
Celestial navigation was certainly feasible, but it required real technical skills as well as fairly advanced mathematics. Sailors needed to calculate the angle of a star’s elevation using a cross-staff or quadrant. They needed to track the direction of their ship’s course relative to magnetic north. Trigonometry and logarithms offered the best way to make these essential measurements: for these, a sailor needed to be adept at using dense numerical tables. All of a sudden, a navigator’s main skill wasn’t his memory – it was his mathematical ability.
To help the average sailor with these technical computations, maritime administrators and entrepreneurs opened schools in capital cities and port towns across Europe. Some were less formal arrangements, where small groups of men gathered in the teacher’s home, paying for a series of classes over the course of a winter when they were on shore.
Illustration of a small Dutch classroom from The Golden Light of Navigation (1697), by C H Gietermaker. Courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam In other instances, the crown set up official schools, usually footing the bill for young men who were expected to then serve in the nation’s navy. Many of these were modelled after the first official school, established by the Spanish crown in 1552 at the House of Trade (Casa de la Contratación) in Seville. It was counterintuitive to teach sailors in classrooms – most were barely literate – but educators chose to follow the pattern set by traditional universities: lectures, note-taking and formal examinations. Administrators devised ambitious, theory-heavy curricula, but they provided no instructions about how to teach this material.
In the 17th century, navies and trading companies began requiring their mariners to pass an examination if they wished to be promoted – to master, lieutenant, eventually even to captain. While sailors who were already competent navigators might not see the point of sitting through classes dedicated to theory, they were motivated by the prospect of upward career mobility. If you could read and had a head for numbers, you could climb the ladder quickly. A master or navigator (pilote in French, piloto in Spanish, stuurluy in Dutch) earned three times as much as an able seaman, and many would eventually secure commissions as captains. Sailors flocked to the classroom.
Sailors needed to learn the terms that would have been familiar to university students studying cosmography
The first schools in northwestern Europe popped up near the docks in Amsterdam, Le Havre and London. They were run by ambitious entrepreneurs who wore multiple hats: a number of them invented new instruments or wrote introductory textbooks, all of which they hoped to sell to their students. Some were mariners themselves, but most had virtually no experience at sea. Still, they harnessed the power of the printing press, and instruments galore, to help teach new mathematical concepts.
One teacher in Rotterdam, Jan van den Broucke, published a small textbook, Instruction about Navigation (1609). The humble volume was illustrated with the latest paper tools: tables, diagrams and moveable instruments. Van den Broucke offered keen sailors practical advice about how to get up to speed on astronomy. He reviewed basic definitions: what is a pole? Where is the equator? Sailors needed to learn the terms that would have been familiar to university students studying cosmography (the celestial parallel to geography). The Instruction included a list of 12 key concepts – from the signs of the zodiac to charts and compasses. Van den Broucke advised his readers to ‘hang the list over their bed [and] review it every evening for a year’. If they found such memorisation onerous, they could come take classes with him instead.
Van den Broucke taught readers and students a useful technique: how to use the Little Dipper to tell time. The handle of the dipper points at the North Star, and the bowl of the dipper rotates around it over the course of 24 hours. That means that when the two farthest ‘guard stars’ moved 15 degrees, one hour has passed. Once the constellation has rotated 90 degrees, six hours have passed. This functionality was so useful that most early textbooks included diagrams, often with volvelles, moveable discs that help the reader understand the concept.
A Volvelle (Dipper) from Instruction about Navigation (1609), by Jan van den Broucke. Courtesy Leiden University Library Van den Broucke’s Instruction also offered a more elaborate tool for mastering the heavens: the ‘zodiac song’. To help students remember the stars, the song rendered all the constellations in 12 rhyming verses. In the northern hemisphere in March, for instance, you first see Andromeda’s belt rising in the sky, pursued by Cetus the Whale, followed by the ear of Aries the ram. These verses were set to the tunes of familiar hymns. Devout sailors could sing along, or so seemed to be the intention. It is doubtful, however, that many sailors learned the constellations through music. Claas Gietermaker, author of the immensely successful nautical manual Golden Light of Navigation (1660), included two different songs in the first edition of his Dutch textbook. But Gietermaker left the songs out of subsequent printings. He did retain two volvelles, suggesting that sailors found the hands-on spinning discs more useful than the verse and tunes.
By the time Gietermaker published the Golden Light of Navigation half a century after Van den Broucke’s Instruction, nautical manuals had evolved. The definitions that had been so important – pole and equator, zenith and meridian – had become common knowledge, and sailors now focused on a different set of essential skills: addition and subtraction, multiplication and division. The volumes burst with the newest tables and equations. Teachers took their students outside to make observations along the shoreline. Other classes piled into small boats so that they could sketch the coastline, training their eye for estimating distance as well as for cartography. At larger institutions, pupils might get to practise working the rigging of real or model ships. More often, a small group of men would gather around a table with a blank workbook, a set of drawing compasses and a globe. Teachers usually had all of this equipment available for purchase (and might even rent out a storage drawer for a small fee).
The Kaatje training ship in the courtyard of Amsterdam’s Seminary for Navigation. Courtesy Rijksmuseum Classroom activities involved a fair amount of rote memorisation, and students were expected to copy out their teachers’ lectures verbatim. By the 18th century, teachers petitioned central administrators to ask that the students not waste time by copying out the textbooks – let them simply buy a copy!
Students owned manuscript workbooks where they copied out definitions of key concepts and answered questions. Some mariners spent more time on decorating their notebooks with calligraphy or doodles than on mathematics. But the manuscripts are invaluable: they let historians track which topics received the most attention, where students made the most mistakes, and what they did each day in class.
‘What course shall the man of warre shape to finde these pyrates?’ 
The most important textbook questions had to do with the boat’s course and position: ‘If your ship intends to sail west but is forced off-course by the wind … what is your true course and distance sailed?’ Straightforward trigonometry could give the answer. But sometimes a teacher would put more spin on the problem. Richard Norwood, in his Trigonometrie (1631), presented the following scenario:
What is the next step? Naturally to hunt down the pirates! Since the merchant had ‘sailed since at least 64 leagues betweene the south and west, what course shall the man of warre shape to finde these pyrates?’ For more than a century, variants on this ‘pirate question’ appeared in textbooks.
There were also more idiosyncratic problems: one Dutch student carefully drew a trapezoid to answer a question about four old ladies sewing – how far apart were they from each other, and how many yards of cloth did each stitch? One common classroom exercise required students to trace out hypothetical routes for vessels as they zigzagged through a day’s sail. To make this interesting, teachers designed fantastic courses – castles, anchors, hearts – that students constructed in their notebooks, connect-the-dots style.
From the navigation workbook of William Spink RN (c1697-1731). Courtesy National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London Such questions aimed to make technical material as memorable as possible. Textbook publishers, for their part, did not want to dedicate costly paper to these sizeable diagrams – they appear almost exclusively in manuscript workbooks. Here again, the discrepancy between published book and student work tells us which parts of the extensive curricula were truly important. These classroom records reveal the theoretical material that sailors actually used at sea. 
Thanks to the French privateer Doublet, we can get insight into the 17th-century ‘student experience’. We know from Denys’s own correspondence that he had been running a navigation school in his home since the 1650s. When Louis XIV’s main advisor Jean-Baptiste Colbert asked him to convert it to a royal college, Denys sunk money into renovations, for which he was never properly compensated. (Teachers, always underpaid, lodged many such complaints. They often supplemented their income with private tutoring on the side, but this could cause problems; their favourite students never failed the exams.) Denys’s school was on a noisy corner; he reported that it could be hard for the students to concentrate over the din of women selling their wares. Denys grumbled to Colbert about his feud with the merchant who sold the only magnets in town, obviously an important piece of equipment for mariners. Despite these issues, Denys’s hundreds of students evidently loved him, and he stood as godfather for several of their children.
Doublet tells us about Denys’s school itself. In 1673, he paid 50 livres a month for room, board, laundry and the necessary books. (These were almost certainly Denys’s own pioneering textbooks, which introduced trigonometry to French sailors.) Doublet notes that most students started with the basics – the tides, altitudes, and simple instruments such as Gunter’s scale and the sinical quadrant – but Doublet easily worked his way through spherical trigonometry and Euclid’s Elements. The young corsair turned out to be so proficient at the advanced mathematics of celestial navigation that Denys offered to foot the bill to keep him on in Dieppe as a teaching assistant. ‘You would oblige me infinitely by staying, for you would ease the puzzle of this [large] number of students, the majority of whom have heads as hard as stone.’
Denys made typical complaints about students. If some were bright and diligent, others stole school supplies or sold their textbooks for a profit. Absenteeism was a problem. French administrators experimented with paying senior naval officers to attend classes as role models – but that did not stop them from playing hooky. The navy then docked the wages of men who didn’t show up for class. At a Dutch school for officers in Batavia, the best student in class earned a sword.
Doublet needed no such coaxing. When his squadron leader ordered him back to sea after three months, Denys pushed back so that Doublet could stay in the classroom for three months more. Doublet was thrilled: he scored ‘six months of room and board for which I only paid three’.
After this stimulating scholarly interlude, the Franco-Dutch war (1672-78) continued to intensify so Doublet hurried back to sea to harry the enemy. But first, he did something that was increasingly obligatory for sailors: he took his navigator’s exam. (Denys covered the cost.) As was the custom, Doublet stood in front of a panel of ‘Four old captains and four pilots, who questioned me from all sides.’ The bright young corsair passed with flying colours. After a celebratory feast with Denys and his sister, Doublet finally headed back to his squadron.
Captain Dering, an overconfident young Brit, failed to correctly calculate the time of high tide at London Bridge
If Denys was unusually gifted at Euclidean geometry, many other average mariners followed him into the classroom to face the examiners. By the 18th century, sailors spent some portion of their training in a schoolroom. Navigation was no longer an art learned by apprenticeship – it was a science. Textbooks poured off the presses; sailors filled their workbooks with trigonometry. Although exams might not have been mandatory in every locale, mariners were keen to pass them. The Dutch author Gietermaker included a model exam paper in his Golden Light of Navigation. This simple two-page innovation made waves. Other authors quickly copied Gietermaker, and before long, most Dutch textbooks included a practice test.
Soon after this, mariners started cramming for exams. Instead of paying 36 florins for an entire winter of lessons, Amsterdam-based mariners paid just 6 florins for a crash course focused on the oral and written portions of the tests. Later manuscript workbooks confirm this strategy: students often focused on the questions they knew would be on their exam. Teachers at the close of the 17th century were already ‘teaching to the test’.
What were these exams like? Evidence is sparse, and Doublet is regrettably silent on his own experience. Admiralty records do preserve records of those who ran into difficulty: men who desperately wanted to earn their certificate, but repeatedly failed their examinations. Some flunked due to seemingly minor errors, while others persisted, and eventually earned their credential. For instance, Captain Dering, an overconfident young Brit who had ‘pretended to be a lieutenant after having been [on] one voyage to Wyborne’, failed to correctly calculate the time of high tide at London Bridge. This was one of the most straightforward and essential tasks – so he was summarily sent back to his ship, and told to reapply at a later date.
A practice exam in the navigation workbook of C. J. Boombaar (1727–32). Courtesy Het Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam. In the 1760s, a Dutchman, Frans van Ewijk, already held a position as a merchant captain. Unfortunately for him, the Dutch East India Company passed a rule making exams mandatory even for captains. In October 1768, Van Ewijk presented himself in Rotterdam for the exam – and promptly failed. He was deemed ‘very deficient in theory and practice’, and unqualified to serve as captain. He blamed his servants for distracting him with ‘much confusion and trouble’ at home, but the committee was not sympathetic. Undaunted, Van Ewijk showed up at an exam room in Amsterdam six weeks later. This time, he answered the questions satisfactorily. (Perhaps he had taken a crash course?) The following summer, Van Ewijk once again sailed as captain of a ship.
Another English candidate, Charles Hadsell, wished to get certified as a ship’s master in 1670. Just returned from the Caribbean, he had sailed for a decade with the notorious Captain Henry Morgan. In spite of more than 10 years at sea, he failed the master’s exam – twice! The panel of naval examiners found that ‘he could not give any Considerable answere to moderate questions in Navigation’. Even if he knew every cove and reef in the West Indies, they were clear: ‘We doubt of his Capacity in navigating a shipp on the greate Ocean.’ We cannot know if the Admiralty disliked Hadsell because he’d associated with the notorious pirate, but it seems clear: to please the examiners, he should have studied some practice questions. These mariners needed more than vessel-handling skills – definitions and theoretical concepts demonstrated your expertise to those around you.
In their quest for these credentials, maritime men sought out formal schooling. Pirates, privateers, merchants and navy hands did not just sail a boat from point A to point B; they needed to be able to track its position, to compute time and place. To do this, they needed mathematics.
Fortunately, in the 17th and 18th centuries, practical mathematics took off. For a reasonable fee, anyone who wished could acquire this bookish knowledge. Europeans felt the stakes were high, for their colonial fortunes rested on the shoulders of these navigators. In response, maritime educators developed an innovative hybrid form of training. Early modern navigation students memorised definitions and took notes but also got their hands on instruments, and answered many, many practice questions. Zodiac songs, creative diagrams, hands-on lessons along the beach – this combination of memory and mathematics caught the imagination of mariners, making it easier to grasp the technical skills needed on the high seas. Far from being drunken sailors, these men were clever mathematicians, using traditional approaches alongside the latest technologies to reach the far side of the globe.

Brass is always polished in the marine environment. Bronze is not. Brass would generally be limited to light sheet metal work trim aboard ship. This would be things like compass binacles and lamps on period ships. Brass, an alloy of copper and zinc, requires constant polishing or it will quickly tarnish, forming verdigris green oxidation in salt air. Bronze, an alloy of copper and tin and other metals in varying proportions, is a far stronger metal than brass and was used for guns and some cast fittings. It oxidizes slowly, forming a patina with a brown color. "Gunmetal" is an alloy of copper, tin, and zinc, used for casting long guns and oxidizes to form a dark grey patina. Some bronze alloys with higher copper content employed in marine applications will form the familiar copper green patina, such as that sometimes seen on cast bronze statues. The color of the patina on any "yellow metal" piece will vary depending upon the proportion of alloyed metals, exposure to salt air, and weathering and friction on the part (i.e. handling, as seen on coins, etc.) The spectrum of color is quite varied.
 
Iron simply rusts. Cast iron rusts more than does wrought iron. Wrought iron was used for metal fittings fashioned by ship smiths. Early iron-bound guns were made of wrought iron pieces, later supplanted by cast iron guns. Aboard period ships, iron was always painted, generally black, to prevent corrosion. 
 
Yellow metal patina palate:
 
    Gunmetal, showing the effect of "new" surface green oxidation from exposure to salt weather and "mature" grey patina where the green has worn off in places. 
 

 
 
 

Actually I am looking for both, brass and cast iron to show the difference in my slices 🙂
 
I have no idea when the marines started to polish everything for the polishing sake. 
 
Steel gives a  choice of about 5 different recipes in one of his books, just can´t find the place right now.
 
Bruzelius gives this short review of Brady´s recipes, http://www.bruzelius.info/Nautica/Seamanship/Fordyce(1837)_p47.html
 
Blacking guns and shot.
Coal-tar alone, or mixed with a little water, is the best thing for Blacking Guns and Shot. It should be laid on quite warm; and if the day be cold, a hot shot may with advantage be put into the Guns to warm the Metal, and make it take the Blacking better; due attention being previously paid to unloading.
Lay the Stuff on as thin as possible, with Paint-brushes; using hot Salamanders or Bolts to keep it warm.
If well laid on, and wiped afterwards with an oil-cloth occasionally, this process will prevent rust, and preserve the good look of the Guns for a length of time, without ever having recourse to washing with water. [p 48]
It is useful to measure and keep a memorandum of the quantity of Blacking required for each of the operations. A Ten-gun Brig requires as follows:-
 
For Blacking  Rigging, ...  12  Gallons "  Bends, ...  2  " "  Yards, ...  3  " "  Guns and Shot, ...  1  " The time now required for drying the Rigging, &c. may be most advantageously employed in completing Stores, Provisions, and Water.
French recipe for blacking guns.
To one Gallon of Vinegar put ten Ounces of Lampblack, and one Pound and a half of clean-sifted Iron-rust, and mix them well together.
Lay this on the Guns, after a good coat of Black Paint, and rub it occasionally with a soft Oil-cloth.
 
 
Here is Brady in the original
https://books.google.de/books?id=wQxqa5K_zcgC&printsec=frontcover&hl=de&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Page 389 to 393
 
If one looks in the net for life fire, one can find some brass cannons. From the american civil war those are usually quite polished and really shiny ...
 

... or a little bit more dull but still light in color.
 


(OK, this one was wet by rain on top of it)
 
But very interesting is the reproduced gun of the Vasa. When cast still shiny and lightcolored ...
 

... already darker when drilled ...
 

... and nicely brown when fired.



XXXDAn

Thank you,   and the play continue
 
 

Just thought I'd update the record for the full vessel: Here it is with just about everything on board that I've done to date, though quite a few of them are only temporarily in place for the photos. A lot of things "on hold" till other things get done. The big one is being ready to put the lower oars in place. Once that's done, a lot of other things can be finalised and many things already made can be put in place permanently.
  
Steven
 
PS: That's only half the oars - the others are made but they have the inboard end "bodged" so I can fit them on the ship without having to make lower deck oarsmen. 

Thanks again for the comments and likes. Nikiphoros, that's the labarum, isn't it? Maybe one day I'll do a fourth century ship and use it, but I've got too many on my wish list already . . .  
 
I've finished the banner. The first thing I did (after flattening the foil out and removing all the crinkles) was score the surface of the foil with the pattern I proposed to paint.

 
Then I put the paint on with a fine watercolour paintbrush, one colour at a time with drying time between colours. I wasn't too careful about staying within the borders of the "tails" because I was going to cut them out later.

I realised I'd forgotten to allow enough "fabric" at the hoist so I could add the halyard, so I had to ad some more foil with CA. Unfortunately, wherever this touched the paint it messed it up and I had to re-do it in several places. 

And here's the finished Imperial banner. I'm pretty happy with it; the enamel paint sticks to the foil very well, and the foil is so light it supports itself while looking like the tails are moving in the wind.

Another thing I've been playing with - getting a bit ahead of myself, but I tend to do that - is making a three-sheaved block based on one from the Serce Limani wreck of c. 1025 AD. Here's the block as found, plus a reconstruction drawing, from the 1983 thesis of Sheila Diane Mathews for a Master of Arts with Texas A&M University. I've differed slightly with her interpretation - I think for symmetry of forces there should be three holes at the base, not two.
 
I've no idea if I'll be able to use this on the dromon model - I'm not all that good at visualising how blocks and tackle work together, and I'm going to have to do a lot of figuring out of just what fits where - but it was just fun to do, even if I never use it.
 
There's also a single sheaved block from Serce Limani, and I think I'll be much more likely to find a use for this one. However, I haven't made it yet.

Here's the "blank" I made it from. I think it's plum wood, but I've got a bit disorganised with my wood pile. This was version 1.

I discovered that the drill I had (0.6mm) was too big, so I had to go down to what I think is 0.2mm.

That worked a treat, though very exacting doing such tiny work (and without a drill press - I really must get myself one sometime soon).

So there it is. My next projects will be making the chain pump and trying out my design for the upper oarbenches. I've already made (gasp!) the first upper oarsman roughly in plasticiene (modelling clay) and got his approximate shape. Now I'll have to do it more exactly in wax to see how he fits with the bench and the oar.
 
Steven 

The awning for the poop, with the Imperial eagles as a pattern in the fabric. First I cut a piece from an old pillow case (the finest weave fabric I've been able to get hold of easily). The idea was to have the awning long enough to form side walls, but have the walls rolled up. I used a toothpick to roll the fabric around.
 Then paint the base colour of imperial purple:

I used the acrylic paint full strength. Unfortunately, it made the fabric stiff. Also I got a bit of PVA glue on the fabric and it made the paint blotchy. 

So on to version 2.
Using several thin washes of acrylic I got the colour right and the fabric was somewhat more flexible. A layer of cling wrap between the awning and the structure to keep the paint from bleeding though onto the wood. But the fabric had a fold in it that wouldn't come out:

So onto version 3.
First I painted it purple (again), then I made a stencil by reducing the photo of the original fabric on the photocopier, rubbing it with olive oil to resist the water-based paint - made it quite card-like - then cutting it out with a scalpel.
 
Next, checking it for fit against the awning structure.

And filling in the detail with a fine water-colour paint brush - the longest and most labour-intensive part.
  
And painting the reverse side so the pattern would show on the rolled up part.

And the finished item.
 
I think I need to tighten the roll a bit, and perhaps put ties around it to complete the picture.
 
Steven
 

Hi Steve and Hans Christian,
thank you for your extremely nice comments.
That does very well and motivates enormously.
And I would like to thank all the others for the many LIKES.

With a small detail it continues here.
The catblock has a very large hook so that the anchor can be fished.

Quelle: Tafel 212 des Atlas du Génie Maritime
 
 

Thank you Gary and Mark.
 
As long as I still keep gathering the input for 1805, I kept working on the version of 1765 to 1788 (great repair) or 1797 (decommissioned).
 
Luckily I did 2 slices in the old and long forgotten days :-).
 

 
One was fitted with deadeyes and chains, but proved to have some inaccuracies, that is why I decided to keep on working on the other one.
First came the frieze. First the base with the medium color then the shadows and the highlights.
 

 
One can see that the chain board was removed. was atop the whales and not on them. The good thing on the painting technic that I use is, that repairs can be nicely done.
First the priming with the classical small pots from Humbrol/Revell.
The 2 shades of brown with the casein paint and blended with the mostly dry brush. As the knees will be on the same place, I took it easy on that part 😉
 

 
Replaced the chain boards and gave it a new color suiting the 1765 model.
 

 
As it was too easy until now, I decided to open one gun port. So back to the heavy machines do dig deep ...
 

 
... cleared the back too ...
 

 
... and faked the inside boards.
 

 
Yes I mean faked 😉 ...
 

 
Also the port with the half lids was updated.
 

 
And then some paint and the reason for the opening. The model shows an interesting color scheme for the middle deck: White insides of the ports with a red rabbet.
 


Cheers, Daniel

The ropes for the hammock cranes have to be tensioned. I did that with tiny thimbles Ø 1,1 mm and lashings.
 
The thimbles on the next image have the following diameter from left to right:
Ø 1,1 mm
Ø 2,2 mm
Ø 2,6 mm

The first attempts with seizings are not very nice.
With a "fake splice" it looks better?

Read it ready

Ok, time for some heretic thoughts. 
After some great basic work from Maik.L in our german forum analyzing the Turner drawings I tried those thought digitally on my small slice.
https://www.segelschiffsmodellbau.com/t7042f1475-HMS-Victory-Spurensuche-4.html#msg155257
Important: This is not about the shade, this is only about the width of the stripes.
 
First the classical V1, as to be seen our days in Portsmouth.
 
 
 
Turner saw and drew the ship before and after Trafalgar. Those scribbles are difficult to evaluate, bat they give some interesting hints.
As there are in his drawings and paintings no signs of the black checkers after Trafalgar, that leads to V2 
 
 
 
In most of Turner´s drawings and paintings the yellow stripes appears larger than the black one that gives V3
 
 
 
Without the checker V4
 
 
 
And if the hinges were painted too, that would give V5
 
 
 
So if you want to crucify me now, you may.
 
Whistling greetings, XXXDAn
 
PS. Everybody only one cross, please.

Young America - extreme clipper 1853
Part 323 – Wrapping Up
 
Finally, 99.999% means complete.  Since the last post it has been a lot of little chores: snipping rope ends, the last few rope coils, touching up with paint, waxing standing rigging lines, clean up, etc.  Some of the "major" chores are described below.
 
The first picture shows the final disposition of the crojack sheets and tacks.  These were simply allowed to hang free from the clue garnet blocks with their full lengths coiled on deck.  They were tied down to one of the beams under the pile of rope coils to keep them vertical and straight..
 

 
The main braces could finally be run, since access was no longer needed to the deck area between the main and mizzen masts.  The next picture shows the starboard brace pendant shackled to the outer boomkin eye.
 

 
The fall of the brace runs from the yard pendant through the lead block on the rail in the center of the picture, then to a deck cleat.  The other blocks on the boomkin are the upper and lower main topsail braces.  Two missing eyebolts still need to be fitted on the rail. The picture also shows the completion of another chore left over from the volume II work, fitting chains to support the boomkins.  The next picture shows both of these.
 

 
The next picture shows the starboard swinging boom, the lower studding sail boom,  being lashed to the fore channel brackets. 
 
 
The alternative would be to store these on the skid beams over the cabin, but this seemed more appropriate, since in port these were often used to moor ships' boats.
 
The next picture shows the model with the dust case removed in the relatively cleaned-up workshop.
 

 
Finally, launch.
 

Please excuse the amateur artwork.  Couldn't resist.
 
Ed

Perhaps if you reverse the windlass easy leaving the bars in the sockets until one of the bars touches the deck (or use a shorter one in that place to have less bending) it would do the trick.
 
Continuing to enjoy your building and research
 
Zeh

Perhaps if you reverse the windlass easy leaving the bars in the sockets until one of the bars touches the deck (or use a shorter one in that place to have less bending) it would do the trick.
 
Continuing to enjoy your building and research
 
Zeh

Perhaps if you reverse the windlass easy leaving the bars in the sockets until one of the bars touches the deck (or use a shorter one in that place to have less bending) it would do the trick.
 
Continuing to enjoy your building and research
 
Zeh

Perhaps if you reverse the windlass easy leaving the bars in the sockets until one of the bars touches the deck (or use a shorter one in that place to have less bending) it would do the trick.
 
Continuing to enjoy your building and research
 
Zeh

Regarding the concept of three turns of line on a windlas or Capstan, or any cylindrical object, you need to understand the term “Tailing”. Three turns around the cylinder provide a long  “bearing surface” where the surface of line and the surface of the windlas or Capstan are in contact. If the circumference of the cylinder or Capstan is 36”, three turns of line taken around it give 108” of bearing surface- this is where the friction occurs. But there can be no real friction unless the turns remain tight on the drum. You can lead your anchor line from the haws hole to the Capstan or windlass and take three turns around it and then you can start turning your Capstan or windlass but those three turns are NOT going to grip the cylinder unless someone is “Tailing” the line. A person “Tailing” is merely pulling on the inboard end of the line. Not very strenuously but just enough to hold the turns tight to the drum and activate the friction of the three turns. Once the friction bites the line,the Capstan or windlas begins to take up the line that’s on it.The person Tailing acts like a clutch and can halt the process of taking in the line merely by slacking the line on his end. 

Good morning.

Good Morning All;
 
I don't know if iMack, who started this thread will see this, but to go back to his original query:
 
The number of frames/ribs in an Admiralty Board Model is equal to the number of station lines used to set out the ship's body. Each station line represents the fore face of the frames heading aft, and the aft face of the frames heading forwards. Note, however, that draughts normally show only every third station line.
 
The number of station lines was dependent upon the size of the floor timbers to be used to build the ship, as it was this dimension which produced the 'room and space' measurement, which was the distance from face to face of successive frames.
 
An important point to understand here is that in Georgian times the room and space was calculated slightly differently to that of the 17th century, when Admiralty (also commonly called Navy Board Models) started to appear. 
 
For models built in the Admiralty/Navy Board style, the distance between the ribs/frames of the model was normally equal to 17th century full-size practice. In those times, the space between the floor timbers was completely filled by the bottom of the first futtock, with the futtock stopping short of the keel. So to decide the number of station lines, it is necessary to know the room and space. See below an extract from a builder's contract from 1652, giving the room and space as 28". As the floor timbers are 14", the lower ends of the futtocks would also have been 14" to fill the space between the floor timbers.
 
the keele with an ynch and quarter Bolt, the Flowre Tymbers to bee in length two and twenty foote, upp and Downe one foote, fore and aft fourteen inches, roome and Space to bee two foot four ynches,  The Dead Rysing to bee four ynches at least; the lower Futtocks to fill the roome, and to have Six or seaven foote Scarffe in the Midshipps, the other Teere of Futtocks to have six
 
Therefore, a model built to this room and space would have a frame every 28". Room and space varied according to the ship size.
 
 
From early in the 18th century framing methods changed. Amongst other changes, the first futtock now reached the keel.  A small gap, around 2", was left between the face of the futtock and the face of the floor timber of the next station. However, to construct a Navy Board style framed model, the futtock would need to be increased slightly in its sided dimension, to completely fill the space between the floor timbers. Again it is necessary to know the room and space. See below an extract from a builder's contract for 'Warspite' dated 1755. Room and space is 29" (very similar to that of 100 years earlier!) As the floor timbers are 15", the lower ends of the futtocks would be 14" to fill the space between the floor timbers (to build a Navy Board style model, the timbers could all be 14 1/2")
 
Room & Space of Timbers. To be Two feet five inches.
Floor Timbers. The Floor Timbers between Timber three, & Timber C, in the bearing of the Ship, to be Sided one foot three inches, and from 3 to 15 Aft, and from C to H forward to be sided one foot two ins; from 15 Aft, & from H forward, to be Sided one foot one inch; to be in length in Midships twenty five feet, eight inches, and afore and abaft as the draught directs.  
 
If you have a draught which shows station lines, the room and space is easy to find: the draught will normally show every third station line, so to find the room and space, and the number of frames you will need, divide the distance between the station lines into 3 equal portions.
 
To find the shape of the intervening station lines, it will be necessary, as discussed in previous answers to this post, to loft them from the draught.
 
All the best,
 
Mark P

Hello
thanks in Advance for the nice comments and the LIKES.
 
To be continued:
Other tackle elements for the bowsprit were manufactured and installed. There are then later fixed different stays.


I show step by step how to dress a strop with genuine leather.
First step:

Second step:

Third step:

Fourth step:

+1 for the 'goosewing' sails, looks cool
 
I was doing some unrelated research, and completely by accident I stumbled on an Italian website that may be of interest to your lateen sail/yard dilemma. This website has hundreds of drawings of traditional ships and boats, mainly from the 1800-1900's but some earlier. Unfortunately, the images can't be embedded so you'll have to click through.
 
Here are some sail positions of a small Spanish lateen rigged vessel from the 19th century. Maybe this is common knowledge on here, but was new to me Drawings progress from close hauled, to full downwind. A bido describes when the sail is in front of the mast, don't know the english term. Yard was horizontal when wind is coming from behind - looks very much like what is going on in your paintings!: https://www.cherini.eu/etnografia/BEU/slides/BE_873.html
 
He also has some detailed close ups of how the yard was fixed on to the mast on Catalan vessels: https://www.cherini.eu/etnografia/BEU/slides/BE_887.html
 
And also on small-medium (~15m/30 tons) sized 19th century Ligurian trading vessels of the leudo type: https://www.cherini.eu/etnografia/Italia1/slides/023 Leudo.html
 
EDIT: Even better, a simplified version of the above showing exactly what was going on: https://www.cherini.eu/etnografia/Italia1/slides/032 Liguria - leudo rivano - bozzelli - trozza.html
 
I suggest looking through his galleries, might be a lot more useful info that I missed! Even just for fun, they are great drawings

Again leave a link to my new site (details section for ship models)
Here are the latest photos of the construction of the Imperial yacht Standart. The model is almost finished. It remains for me to make four boats and restore order with the help of wax mastic. In the construction of this model, I have widely used the manufacture of metal parts by the method of precision vacuum casting of investment wax. This is the very method I use to create parts for very different ship models.

I've finished the lashings on the lateen yards. Done with the same technique used for whipping a rope's end and then glued. Loose ends cut off with a scalpel.
  

Next I have to work out exactly how to support these yards on the mast. A halyard through the calcet - but should the calcet be abeam (as Prof John Pryor states) or fore and aft (as this picture of Saint Nicholas seems to suggest? And should the halyard simply wrap around the yard, or support it in two places to improve its balance? 
 
And then there's the "truss" holding the yard to the mast once raised. Saint Nick has nothing at all, and most if not all other Byzantine pictures are just as bad. Later mediaeval (Western Mediterranean) pictures sometimes show something that appears to simply be a loop around the mast, as is shown in this 14th century picture

Or this Byzantine one (date unknown)

Or something a little more complex, as in this from the late 13th century.

However, most mediaeval pictures just leave these details out.
 
Modern Mediterranean pictures aren't all that helpful - mainly because they are modern, and of much smaller vessels. So I've looked at photos of dhows still sailing under traditional lateen rig - at least they were when the photos were taken in the 20th century.
  
I'd probably be able to get away with a simple loop, but I'm not sure it would be secure. If anybody has any ideas or suggestions I'd appreciate it.
 
Steven