robdurant

Back to the sails... I've added bolt ropes to BS7, BS8 and begun BS9... I'm gradually working through the 34 sails. Not much to show, but work is continuing.

As always, thanks so much for all the likes - it does spur me on  In the photo below, I'm just adding the last length of bolt rope along the bottom edge of the sail... BS1 through to 9 are all stay sails.

And the lower shrouds are complete. As I posted this I realised that I hadn't properly attached the rear most shroud to the aft pair to help it take the right path on the starboard side. That's fixed now.

Nice to have a pleasant dry day to take photos, too Happy building

20 minutes ago, shipman said:

This is what I use. It's a free download programme and is a doddle to use,

Hi Shipman. 

My desire in writing this software was primarily that it hard-coded the information that sets the rotation on website pages...This rotation information causes a lot of confusion to users who see a photo the right way up on their cameras but then it displays the wrong way online. It may well be that the software you have pointed to does the same, but I had struggled to find something that did that reliably for free

Glad you found an app that works well for you.

Rob

Hi,

If you click the windows button, and type "add remove program" and select "Add or remove programs"

Now , you can search for the Picture Resizer application, select the three dots on the right hand side and uninstall it.

Once that is complete you can install the new version downloaded from the website.

Hope that helps.

Rob

Version 1.13.0 now available on https://www.durant.biz/pictureresizer now supports cropping (with the option to maintain the aspect ratio of the image) on a per image basis as you resize your photos.

Simply select "begin cropping" or click and drag to select a region of the image, then resize it until you're happy with the size. Selecting the "maintain aspect ratio" checkbox will mean that each time you resize the selection it will keep the width to height ratio the same as that of the original image (i.e. 16:9, 4:3, etc...) Then when you resize the image, it will crop the image to the rectangle.   Hope it's helpful

Happy resizing!

Rob

Work has begun on the foremast shrouds...

7 hours ago, Ian_Grant said:

So you made those ropes? They're beautiful! As is the whole ship.

Thank you Ian. You're very kind.

Yes, I made the ropes using the Syren rope rocket and DMC cordonnet crochet thread, dyed with Rit fabric dye.

It is wonderfully rewarding rigging with your own rope, and there's no anxiety about running out

I set up the mainmast shrouds today...

More soon

Rob

Auf deutsch... 

I'm conscious that many of our wonderful family here on ModelShipWorld.com are not native English speakers.

My little offering to brighten your day is Version 1.12.0 of Picture Resizer (available at https://www.durant.biz/pictureresizer/ ) which now supports languages natively for the main application window (I'll add support for the other windows soon). All you need do is install the application and it will show the application in the language your computer uses (It currently supports French, German, Dutch and English) if it can't find your language, it will drop back to English)

Languages are not my area of expertise, so "Calling all linguists"... If you speak German, French or another language, and you're reasonably au-fait with computer, and you would like this application to support your mother-tongue / preferred language natively, please could you translate the following, and I'll add this support into the application...

The English terms at the moment are as follows, and the French, German and Dutch attempts are below (with big apologies in advance for what are a mix of guesswork and google translate... please help me make these better!)

English originals

Resize Images    
Image Quality    
Highest / Largest filesize    
Resized photos go here...    
Folder with photos to resize    
Maximum resized dimension (width or height)    
About...    
Exit    
File    
Help    
Load settings...    
Save settings...    
Modify the resized photo name?    
View each file individually before resizing...    
Prefix    
Resize all images in source folder    
Resize images where destination file with modified name does not exist    
Resize images where destination file with original OR modified name does not exist    
Resize images where destination file with original name does not exist    
Select Folder...    
Lowest / Smallest filesize    
Suffix    

French: 

Thanks Dusan,

I've been working on the table of offsets. 

1. I traced the stations, giving the following table: (note negative values are because I've maintained the right of centre and left of centre frames so I can easily do a visual check of the output with a line graph.)

The second task was to cross-check these against the half-breadth plan, which gave the following offsets:

Finally, I copied these back over the plans, and made a few modifications to the U and S stations at WL5 and WL4 so that the stations flowed smoothly.

The following changes were made:

U, WL5 = 2190

S, WL4 = 3018, WL5 = 3788

The following image shows the original lines traced off the plans in white, and the updated lines taken from the half-breadth in green. As can be seen, the differences are fairly negligible, except at the extreme breadth, where they become a little more significant. The difference amounts to a maximum of 7.7 centimetres at 1:1 scale, so nothing too dramatic.

This image shows some of the differences more closely - cyan is the plan lines, and orange the updated lines from the half-breadth.

The next step is to begin working out framing distances, and lofting the frames using the curves these stations produce...

Anyway - that's enough from me for now. Happy building, all.

Looking at those pictures it really is shocking how close the lower gunports were to the waterline. The idea of these ships heeling under sail is scary.

Thank you for sharing this research and build with us all. Simply fascinating.

Okay - so today I added the bolt rope to another sail - no need to add pictures for that. It's another stay sail, so they would look pretty much identical to the previous pictures I've posted. Then, as a change of scenery, I began adding the mizzen shrouds. These are using (as a note to self as much as anything) 4 strand, 2x threads per strand, from #50 DMC Cordonnet thread, dyed in Rit Cocoa brown die. The captain's clearly a showy so and so, so he's used contrasting natural #20 DMC cordonnet thread for the lanyards.

The lanyards are something of a challenge. I've added two starboard pairs and one port pair so far (alternating sides, beginning to starboard), and because the dead-eyes are inside  the railing, and the lanyard needs to pass through the railing  from the outside on the lower deadeye, it took me lots of fiddling with tweezers, super-glue strengthened end of the lanyard and summoning of patience, before I realised that it was possibly simply to bend the deadeye in towards the centreline of the deck to rig it, and then bend it back out again. This is by far the easiest method I've found, and it's made the task achievable (still fiddly, but possible). I'm not sure whether leaving the deadeyes detached until this point would have helped matters, as I haven't tried that approach, but certainly one for builders of this model to watch out for.  

Here are some photos of progress so far. I haven't put watered down Aliphatic resin (carpenter's glue) on these yet, so the ends are left long intentionally. I'll do the whole lot in one go, once I'd happy they're all a good length.

One deadeye is rigged off the ship (I have a little template to keep the distances consistent), then the shroud is wrapped round the mast, through the crosstrees and top, and brought back down to have the other deadeye rigged. Before I rig the second deadeye, I put on the first lanyard, so that I can gauge where the second deadeye should go.

Thank you to everyone for the likes and encouragement.

2 minutes ago, gak1965 said:

Yikes. Another reason to not put on sails...

Yes, it's a work of patience, definitely .... but I find it quite relaxing

Thank you for the likes.

I haven't stopped working on this, but it takes me a good couple of hours to put the bolt rope on each sail, so here is sail BS 4 getting bolt rope...  COnsidering I haven't done a lot of sewing before, I'm pretty pleased with how it's coming out.

I couldn't resist seeing the model so far jump off the drawing board into real life, so I've started to make a basic paper half-hull mockup at 1:96 scale to get a sense of the lines. At the moment there's no lateral support for the frames, so they're all over the place, but an interesting exercise nonetheless, and adding the poop / quarterdeck / upper gun deck will help matters no end. The deck locations are marked with solid lines and waterlines are marked with dashed lines. This half-hull should help me work out how to go about realising the internal structure.

Progress so far... 

Just now, druxey said:

What program are you using, BTW?

Thank you Druxey. I'm using QCAD Pro (https://qcad.org) - I used a mac and linux for a good while, and this program is robust and works beautifully on each, but also on Windows which I used now. It has a free version which did the vast majority of what I wanted, but I was so pleased with it, I thought it worth supporting the developers. It can generate dxf files which import into blender, so there's no great problem if you want to take the work and use it for 3D work, too.

I spent a few hours working on the station lines yesterday - these are a first draft, but they contain the waterlines and upper and lower deck limits, which should help me double check them against the half-breadth.

One interesting point was that there is an vertical extension to the bulwark at the forward end of the poop deck which allows the height between quarter deck and poop deck to be sufficient to accommodate the ship's wheel without having extreme camber on the poop deck. This extension doesn't show up on the Winfield Leopard 50-gun ship, Leopard plans. (My CAD from RMG plans on left, Winfield on right)

The same images are shown below super-imposed: red is the sketch from Winfield, and black, from the Bristol NMM plan. Here, we notice that either the gunport location was slightly different (a matter of different framing?), or the Mizzen mast was moved between Leopard and Bristol, by a few inches (the more likely, I would think.) Nevertheless, the difference in height for the poop decks (between the beams) would have felt pretty significant if you were on the helm all day. 1.86m for Leopard at the centre line, and 1.92m for Bristol, or 6' 1" and 6' 3" in old money. Being 6' 2", I think I would have preferred Bristol!

I also reconciled the mid-point stations for the aft stations (l.h.s of the plans) and the forward stations (r.h.s of the plans), and was concerned that they were miles out - until I realised that I was very zoomed in, and it worked out as a difference of 1.3cm on the full size ship - or 0.2mm on the model. I think I can live with that - a brush of sandpaper, or swipe of the scraper should reconcile the difference!

2 hours ago, ccoyle said:

the system seems to have randomly dumped extra copies of the photos at the end of the post.

If you upload images to the "drag files here to attach" section of the post box (rather than dragging them straight into the text, and then you don't actually insert them anywhere in the post text, they will be added to the end of the post. In your post it looks as though you uploaded 13 photos, but only added some of them into the text - perhaps you deleted the others from the text - and so it added them automatically at the end of the post. To avoid this, you need to manually remove the images you have uploaded but aren't using from the "drag files here to attach" bit at the bottom before you click "submit reply".

With that said, I enjoyed seeing the extra photos, so thank you for including them

Rob

Some progress to show. I've started getting the plans into CAD ready to begin designing the skeleton of the model.

A long way to go, but it's good to make a start. The actual plans are colorised, with different parts on different layers so I can separate them easily. Near the stern on the half-breadth plan some of the waterlines divide into two lines as they approach the rabbet. I've never noticed that on plans before, so if anyone knows what that represents I'd be interested to know.

More soon  

Rob

Hi all,

I've finished hemming the sails, and now it's onto bolt ropes. For this, I made some thinner rope (3 threads per strand of #50 DMC cordonnet thread). The bolt ropes come to an end at each corner of each sail, and they're used to attach the corner fittings for the sail. These were blackened ready for use. I've simplified what the instructions call for a little, but things are going well so far. 

Here's a photo of the photo-etch corner fittings.

Step one is to attach the over-length bolt rope.

Step 2 is to attach the corner fittings... This results in something of a spiders web at each corner, but it all gets tidied up once everything's attached. In the photo below the photo-etch corner fitting has been attach to the left boltrope, but not the right.

And here are all the hemmed sails laid out ... 34 in all!

Plenty more sewing to enjoy... After this step - which will take some time! - comes reefing points, attachment holes, and lots more work on the yards to get them ready.

Thanks for looking in

Rob 

5 hours ago, gak1965 said:

Putting up sails - you're a braver man than I. 

 

Looking great!

 

George K

Thank you George I'm either brave or foolish... but nothing ventured, nothing gained. 

I was inspired to build this model when I saw a model of a clipper with sails in a museum. It was such a sight I couldn't resist. I am a bit nervous about rigging tensions for the stay sails so that they don't sag, which is one of the reasons the bowsprit goes right through to the deck so it will have a really good ability to push back against all that pull. I'll try and make sure the lines below the bowsprit are anchored well too.

Inevitably the rigging will end up being an indication of full rigging for the sails rather than every single line, but I still need to work all that out. Plenty still to do

Thanks Rob, and everyone for the likes. Not much to update, really. I've just been steadily working through the sail set, double hemming them. Today I needed to make some more rope, too.

Once I got to the stay sails, there's no rigging to hold them at the moment, so I was forced to empty a tin of shortbread to provide somewhere to keep them safe 😁 There are two more stay sails to make, and then four stunsails and I'm done on this stage!

Happy building  

Rob

Congratulations. What a beautiful model. Thank you for showing us so much of the process of building her. You have built a model to be very proud of.

You're very welcome, AnobiumPunctatum. Glad to have you following along. 

Thank you for that insight Mark. It's fascinating to hear how much we know about this model. It would have been truly amazing to be a fly on the wall in one of these model builders' workshops.