rybakov

I have been following this thread with interest and enjoying the level of knowledge of old shipwrightry far superior to mine.
Nevertheless I would like to put up for consideration my thougts on the matter.
 
First, I think the load waterline marked on the plan marks the desirable immersion of the ship.
To have the ship float at that immersion (draft) is not overly complicated, although the actions taken to attain it would have 
some effect on the ship's qualities.
If upon launching the draft is noted and then after loading a few tons of ballast the new draft is read we have TPI (tons per inch
immersion).
Knowing the distance to the load waterline we know how many tons we may load.
(of course the TPI increases as the draft increases, but we may consider it as an allowance for the timbers soaking up water.) 
The weights of masts riggin and so on are known, crew weight is approximately known so we are left with provisions and ballast
to play around to get the ship to the load waterline.
If we put on board water and food for 60 days instead of 80, or 100 rounds per gun instead of 120 for example, or reduce some ballast, we eventually
will get it floating at the desired draft.
Of course it will have quite different nautical properties than if things were spot on - less ballast to move around to trim properly, less sail carrying capacity in a breeze, if we err in the other direction and have to add ballast we will have a stiffer ship wich, at the limit, could endanger the masts.
 
Well, this is how I think they would go about getting the ship to the load waterline, and it really doesn't need much mathematics.
I try to keep in mind they were practical people.
 
 
Al the best
 
Zeh

Ok, time to take a seat :-)
 

 

 
In NMM is documented, that the marines were positioned in front of the gunroom on two deckers.
 

http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/86584.html  ZAZ6793
 
The Trafagar Companion localises them on the Vic in front of the wardroom, means the middle deck. I checked and found that if all 120 marines were positioned just there, it would fill the area up to the mainmast. As the marines were also used to keep an eye upon the sailors, I split the group and positioned half of them in font of the gunroom, so the lower deck could be observed too. 
 

 

 

 

 

 
And suddenly it gets packed :-)
 

 
Now just missing the food, not that the good mood tilts ;-)
 
XXXDAn

I went throug Nautical Sschool at a time when calculators were not programmable and computers were room sized affairs.
Sometimes in Naval Architecture we were asked to determine the displacement of a ship, at a given immersion, from the lines plan.
We would start by determining the areas of the sections, then plot the obtained results along the x axis of a graph, and then
calculate the area of the graph and that would be the immersed volume, wich multiplied by water density would give us the buoyancy.
To undertake all those calculation we used Simpson's Rule, so named ater an English mathematician Thomas Simpson (1710-1761)-
So I think that from approximately 1750 on the shipwrights would be quite able to figure out immersions and displacements.
 
Anyway, that's just my feeling.
 
All the best
Zeh

Before one has rigged a model, the task seems utterly daunting. This is Stage 1, where you are at. Take a deep breath and get yourself centered. 
 
Rigging is essentially a logical exercise. This should, as a software engineer, reassure you. Every line has a purpose and function, even if this is not immediately apparent.
 
Begin with the standing rigging, lower first, working from forward to aft. If in doubt, there is plenty of help available on this forum.
 
We all began our rigging experience at Stage 1 (see above).

There be a lot of fancy words used there...  we're not but humble pirates.

All good points. I think that the better you get, the more detail you can put into your model. One reason for this is because you are getting better and can do things quicker. If it takes you forever to do the basic stuff, it will take several forevers to make it detailed. Secondly, when you get better your quality improves. Crappy details don't improve crappy models (trust me on that one). However when you have a quality model, quality details improve it.
 
That having been said, there IS such thing as too much detail. I think scale dictates that. Sometimes you can overwhelm a model with too much detail. Personal preference. Take a step back and let the model tell you what is right.
 
Who is your audience? If you are doing if for just yourself, make it for you. If you are making it for the public to see, remember people will only look at it for a few minutes, then go away. Some will look for 30 seconds some for 10 minutes. Make your model so it appeals to all of them in its own way.
 
...and whatever level of detail you decide upon, make ONE thing significantly more detailed. People will focus on that, you will get your "Holy Cow!!!" and people will walk away with a feeling it is far more detailed than it really is, because of the one they fixated on.

Some more petiteness:
 
The salt box for the cartridges ...
 

 
... used my etch monograms and pressed them with my vice into the wood to be more leveled, nice side effect is that they became less high :-) 
 

 
Glued the fittings and afterwards some red paint - careful, explosive!
 
The buckets from Master of Buckets were wooden ones from the lath with brass eyelets and copper handles, for the small ones I wanted to try something else.
 
2 mm poly rod, drilled open and milled out ...
 

 
... and then shaped them with a conical device pressed into it.
 

 
Then cut and filled with PVC and we have a nice water bucket for the small boy, that is supposed to have a wet wipe up on all remains of powder on the floor.
 

 
Then I realised - too much space - pillars were missing ...
Tja und dann etwas bemerkt: Soo viel Platz war da gar nicht Mal, denn das dafi hatte in seiner großen Weitsicht noch nicht die Stützen platziert ...
 
 
 
... so I had to replace some of the stuff
 
Two more shots for the subject: red salt box for the cartridge, round transport case, wad, multi purpose water bucket and a barrel with slow burning matches in case the flint lock does not work, everything as far off the guns as possible.
In P. the wads are hanging in a netting in between the hammocks, I omitted that, as there was not enough space for that.
 

 

 
XXXDAn

Straight after the manger, some man are fixing messenger and anchor cable to each other, called nibbing.
 

 

 
 For that there are no open ends traveling through the ship, I positioned a man at each free end of the nibbing rope walking with it.
 

 
On the other side some men are bringing back the ropes to the bow. 
 
The next tricky job is to untie the nibbing cable in time before the anchor cable disappears in the cable tier. I took out the stairs of the companion way and still should have taken out the grating too, but unfortunately me stupid glued it too well in in my dim and distant past ...  
 

 

 

 
And now the messenger is free to travel back to the capstan to be hammered into place.
 
Looks easy, doesn´t it? One only needs some men ;-)
 
These are just some 40 men, in real life I would guess the double quantity, plus some supplements for special duties, possibly some 100 men altogether.
 
Cheers, Daniel

Here is something I found in the net I forget where.
Some things puzzle me.
First the title - "3rd officer's messroom", I never heard any space of a warship refered to
by that name, at least in the period of the drawing 1804, or 08.
Then we have a light in the bulwark that I also had never seen.
As for the rest it's pretty normal the partition can be canvas over a wooden frame,
the gun is in the normal position with normal rigging.
Another thing to note is the small cupboard near the deckhead and the folding stools.
 
I hope that someone can enlighten me about this
 
 
All the best
Zeh

A bit more to the South but this site of Texas A&M University might be worth a look.
They have a good section on naval archeology.
 
http://nautarch.tamu.edu/shiplab/01George/Fernandez.htm
 
All the best
 
Zeh

A bit more to the South but this site of Texas A&M University might be worth a look.
They have a good section on naval archeology.
 
http://nautarch.tamu.edu/shiplab/01George/Fernandez.htm
 
All the best
 
Zeh

I think that the answer is both yes, and no.  The answer being dependent on the customs of the individual ship, squadron, navy, country, and even that most granular of data points, the individual sailor.  There is clearly documentation to assert both positions.  Most likely there was a time and place for being barefoot, and likewise for wearing shoes.  However I think there may be something of value that I can add to the discussion in relation to the realities of the footwear in question.
 
I participate in living history events, a.k.a. reenactments, focusing on the late 18th century.  Mostly I give an impression of a private soldier in King George III's army.  Admittedly, this gives me no special knowledge as to what it was like to sail on the ships of the time, but there is an applicable link.  Period shoes.  I wear replica late 18th century, early 19th century shoes when at these events.  Here are a few things to ponder when it comes to wearing shoes in period.
 
Shoes of the time period are made of 100% natural materials.  Although, this may seem like an obvious point, any modern could easily overlook just how time consuming it is to maintain a daily use item made from natural materials.  Especially items as prone to heavy use as shoes.  It takes only one long day to noticeably wear period shoes.  A long day and a hard march over even a little bit of rough surface can destroy a pair shoes.  Though the deck of a ship is far from rough terrain, the constant flexing involved in maintaining one's balance on a pitching deck would definitely strain the materials in the shoes.  The need for maintenance and repair is clearly shown in the link to JackTar's blog above, and here : http://usscm.blogspot.com/2014/02/slip-shod-truth-about-early-navy-shoes.html Modern shoes have a complex structure embedded in the soles called a shank.  This structure gives our arches support, and helps to prevent Plantar Fasciitis, as mentioned above.  Period shoes have no such structure.  The soles are only a few pieces of thick leather stitched together.  The heel is assembled with several more layers of the leather, and bound to the sole with iron nails and an iron heel plate that looks like a miniature horse shoe.  The shoes give no support to the structure of your foot, especially when one's foot is on something as narrow as a rope.  A sailor may have used the triangle in between the heel and the sole to trap the lines, but the heel would have been susceptible to being ripped off of the sole. Every two days of use, the soles need to be roughed up in order to keep them safe.  The leather on the bottom of the sole quickly takes on a polish with use and moisture, making trekking up even a modest grade on grass next to impossible without hob nails, or using the heel plate to dig into the ground.  Imagine what that would do to the deck of a ship.  A shoe that was roughed up in the morning to help with traction can be worn smooth again by noon. Foot rot...  It does not take too much imagination to ponder what happens to one's feet when perpetually kept in tight leather cases that do not breath like today's shoes. Again, I think that the answer was highly variable and dependent on a variety of factors.  Probably most sailors wore shoes sometimes, and not on other occasions.  The only experience that I have with period vessels was on-board the US Brig Niagara, where I observed that most of the crew wore those shoes that are supposed to simulate being bare foot.  You know, those crazy shoes with individual toes.  Not judging, if they work, they work.
 
I hope that this adds to the discussion, and gives some more information for people to ponder.

I was barefoot throughout my childhood in the 1950's in a suburb of Perth, the capital city of Western Australia. I only started wearing shoes on a regular basis when I went to high school. Before that it was Tuesday evenings (I was in the cub scouts) and on occasional trips to Perth.
 
I found shoes constricting, and they're bad for the development of a child's feet. I had very tough soles to my feet, and I could walk on stony ground and some (not all) thorns without being bothered. The only major problem was stubbed toes - they could be painful and bloody, but they healed up pretty fast. If any kid had worn shoes at my primary school they would have been laughed out of the place.
 
Nowadays I wear shoes all the time, and my feet are as tender as anyone else's, but if I go somewhere where I need a good grip (like walking on the roof of the house) I prefer to go barefoot. 
 
After all, barefoot is the natural way to go - our ancestors were barefoot for a million years before shoes were invented. They seem to have done all right.
 
This doesn't answer the question of whether all sailors were bareoot on shipboard, but from my own experience there's no reason they couldn't have..

For what it's worth I met as a child some people that still went around their daily business barefoot.
What impressed me the most was the thickness of the sole - sometimes almost half an inch.
One of them while attending to an horse being shoed stepped on a hot horseshoe and only withdrew the foot
when someone noticed the burnt smell.
So most seamen going barefoot at the time seems more than likely to me-
 
Zeh

Well, I had a feeling, but against proof .....
I am convinced.
My excuses to Force9, I was writing  as you were posting.
 
All the best to everybody
 
Zeh

I presume you should specify when and where the sailor would be employed and thus if wearing/not wearing shoes. A sailor in a John Company vessel is an entirely different sailor compared to a sailor pressed in HMS navy ... As a common sailor in HMS navy you would be required to pay the leaches for your slob clothing and shoes. Shoes would be a luxury in my view ... why pay if your soles would be hard enough ... You wouldn't get of th eship anyway ...

I went throug Nautical Sschool at a time when calculators were not programmable and computers were room sized affairs.
Sometimes in Naval Architecture we were asked to determine the displacement of a ship, at a given immersion, from the lines plan.
We would start by determining the areas of the sections, then plot the obtained results along the x axis of a graph, and then
calculate the area of the graph and that would be the immersed volume, wich multiplied by water density would give us the buoyancy.
To undertake all those calculation we used Simpson's Rule, so named ater an English mathematician Thomas Simpson (1710-1761)-
So I think that from approximately 1750 on the shipwrights would be quite able to figure out immersions and displacements.
 
Anyway, that's just my feeling.
 
All the best
Zeh

One image from the waterline for effect....I'm currently finishing the mizzen...then I need to add standing rigging to the yards.
 
I'll probably add the royal sail first.
 
I'm sorry..I didn't start this Log any sooner, but I had some downloading problems and a new job to deal with....which as you are probably aware is a lot to handle.......for some any way.
 
I hope this far has been an encouragement for some.  I feel, a dioramic story is more powerful a theme to convey emotion and involvement then a  static display.  
That is just me......I want to entice an emotional connection......to bring the viewer.....if for a moment...closer to the adventure of what is ships and ship building...and to appreciate the powerful  significance of maritime history.
 
Thanks for viewing.
 
Rob

The Yards Part 1
The yards,the larger yards have octagonal center sections, and the ones I made when building Pegasus I thought were only just about acceptable, and the way I made those was to file the octagon shape from the dowel. I decided to try a different method for Diana s yards,the two yard sizes, at the large diameter point, are 8mm & 6mm, I tried my new method on a mock up yard in 8mm which proved successful so this is how they were made.
I cut the dowel over length by 20mm, I then ran some tape around the dowel at the ends of the center section,then started to reduce the out ends ( mainly to allow the dowel to go into the small lathe further) I the reduced the center section down from 8mm to 6.8mm, and then I laid in four 4mm x 1mm wood strips top & bottom and both sides,then when dry filled in the gaps with wood filler,when the filler was dry  I filed clean the wood strips, and then filed the filled gaps so that all sides where the same width,this gives a really nice octagonal center section and at 8.5mm just .5mm over size I can live with that.
The next step was to shape and tapper the yard from the octagonal section to the ends in my model lathe, then I cut off the 10mm over length each end to give a nice square end. I made all the yard cleats from ABS plastic adding them as oversized bits and filing to shape when dry. I then added some tape around the octagonal part to simulate the iron bands.
 
Reduced center


 
Building up the center



 
Center now octagonal



 
With cleat and band

I am very conspicuous about the gun drill shown in the start of this thread ...
 
The breech should usually be loose on the outside of the carriage to avoid chaffing. Also the use of the wedge is not really ship shape :-)
 
There are some good contemporary instructions existing. Her is a rendition performed by some HMS Victory crew.
 
The full crew was up to 14 men for both guns on each side of the ship. Strictly numbered, 1 gun captain, 2 second gun captain, 3 loader, 4 sponger, 5 sec. loader, 6 sec. sponger and 7 - 14 auxiliaries to pull the strings.
 
First picture for clarity without the auxs. One can see nicely, loader and sponger within the breeching ropes, sec. sponger and sec. outside bringing the next items as wad pads or balls. The gun captain is pressing a small leather bag against the vent, for that it is air sealed, for that no smoldering ashes are pressed by air pressure into the vent and that for by retrieving the sponge a vacuum is created that will put off all smoldering bits.
 
The second gun captain is here shown organising the tools like worm and the bars, his time will come, if he has to take halve of the crew to work the opposite gun if battle on both sides is required.
 
As one lieutenant was always taking charge of several big guns, Lt. Williams of course is present here at this excercising the great guns.  
 

 
And it gets really packed, once the auxiliaries are added to pull the strings
 

 
Also nice to be seen is that sec. loader and sec. sponger have to stand outside the side tackles. Also see the stick of the sponge protruding largely outboard.
 
On the capstan one can see the powder monkee, having prepared already the next cartridge. He is supposed to stay as far as possible for security reasons and to only handle the cartridge to the loaders and to nobody else. Also this was not a job for jung boys as generally thought, in fact Captain Duff of the Mars strictly forbid this as his log states. For the boys was to clean loose powder with a wet swab.
 
I like the two marines that were stationed on each big gun, gives a nice touch of color :-)
 
And also if I was a sponger and loader, I really would look out for that the man on the back tackle had a good lunch and that he makes sure, that there are no 3.5 tons coming towards oneself if a big wave is moving the ship ...
 
Some more pics to enjoy ...
 

 

 

 

 
... or a bit more inside the melée :-)
 

 

 

 
Cheers, Daniel

If one is unsure, best get a specialist to sort things out. And I could not have found anybody better :-)
 
My I present, Mr William Rivers, Gunner of the Victory since 1790*.
 

 
Aged 50 he is already one of the oldest on board and lives since 15 years on the starboard aft end of the lower deck. he told me, that his nice wooden peace-time cabin was replaced by a batten-canvas construction as it facilitates removal during war times. But as he had some materials and documents to keep, he was the only one to get a real door.
 
The gunroom also was separated by a batten-canvas construction from the lower deck. Also the cabin underneath the weep was done this way, the middle cabins of the gunroom and the two extra cabins in front of it were pure canvas hanging from the beams. 
 
Through Mr River I had als the joy and honor to meet Chaplain Reverend Alexander Scott. In his typical black suit he took me to the so called school table where he held some lesons for the boys and midis.  
 
 
 

 
While Mr Rivers tries to circle around the group, holding his hat in the hand as the max headroom is very poor, this scene is watched attentively by two 2nd Lieutenant of the Marines, Mr Lewis Rotely and Mr Lewis Reeves.
 
 
 
Just some impressions, seen from the gundeck ...
 

 

 

 
... our fancy group ... 
 

 

 
... and Mr River, coming out of his cabin and trying to squeeze his way through.
 

 

 

 
Cheers, Daniel
 
*(1793?)

And here comes another round of cardboard dummies with refined partitioning before I move on to produce the final ones.
 
As the Vic was an admirals ship in 1805 there were a lot of extra personal on board. This made me opt for a forth cabin as shown on Royal Sovereign in 1807.
ZAZ0083  http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/79874.html

 

 

 

 

 
XXXDAn

Here are some pictures aut of my Harland Seamanship, showing the steering by the chains and other stories.
 
XXXDAn

I love this photo for a lot of reasons. here it serves well to illustrate the flags position in relation to the square sails and the point of sail the ship is on. In this case the ship is being sailed as close to the wind as possible,  she is trying to point in the same direction the wind is blowing from. She can't sail directly into the eye of  the wind. But if she braces her yards around as far as they can go, so far that the sails are contacting the stays as is visible in the photo, she can get within six points of the eye of the wind. She is said to be "Close Hauled" and in this case she is close hauled on the starboard tack, since the wind is coming over the Starboard side. The flags as you can see are streaming aft and to port. 
The flags are ACTUALLY indicating a very very slightly different direction of the true wind since the speed of the ship through the water makes them behave a tiny bit differently than a stationary flag on a fixed point in the wind would behave. So if she was sailing past a rock with a flag on it, the flags on the ship and the flag on the rock would be at very slightly different angles. The one on the rock indicating the True Wind and the ones on the ship indicating the Apparent Wind.

Usually the anchor chain was divided in eight 15 fathom lenghts conected by patent links or shackles. Normally eight such lenghts.
To keep track of how much chain was out a number of links on both sides of the shackle were painted white.
Also  a lenght of wire was twisted around the stay of the corresponding link, i.e. the third shackle would have three white links on either side
of the shackle and a twist of wire on the third link on either side.
As for red connecting links I don't really recall seeing it
Sometimes a dozen or so links nearer to the anchor were also painted white to make it easier to see when nearing the surface an start
reducing winch speed.
I wasn't sailing in the 30s but I sailed on some trawlers not much younger and I'm pretty sure the way they were run by the bosuns wasn't
that much different.