georgeband

Richard, I have used optical fibres to light the interior of my 1805 schooner model in 1/64. The period and scale are quite different but optical fibres have properties that are useful or a pain, depending on what you are trying to achieve. One is that they leak light if you bend them too much so they have to be routed carefully. A second is that if you roughen the surface the light also leaks out. This might be what you need to simulate your fluorescent tubes. I have used 1mm diameter plastic fibre and arrange seven fibres in a hex pattern to face a 3mm diameter LED. The fibres enter the model through brass tube stands (3mm internal diameter) so they are invisible. This also leaves electronics and solder joints outside the model so they remain accessible. The fibres are readily available on Ebay and cheap so a bit of experimenting could give you a solution. George

It was a few years ago and I think that tiny rubber band came from a cocktail umbrella. We had bought a small box of them and each rubber band kept an umbrella closed. George

Phil, Congratulations on being on the final straight, it's just irritating that someone keeps moving the finishing line a bit farther away. You'll get to cross it some day soon. Anchor nun buoy. I made one for my Sherbourne cutter from plastic left-over bits. Think model aircraft drop tanks, bombs, pen tops, there are lots of things that take you along the way. The trickier part is to create the ropes and hoops that all go over each other. The attached pdf is about anchors and describes the buoy in more detail. Anchors.pdf The difficult question is where to store a buoy and its rope. Tying the buoy to the shrouds is reasonable though it would take several sailors to lift it while one ties the first knot. I cannot really imagine where else it could go on a schooner with cramped accommodation below. The rope from the buoy to the anchor is 17 to 18 fathoms (Lever page 68) which on your 1/48 model is well over two feet. That is a big, unwieldy coil to hoist up on the shrouds and then tie in place. Could the rope be kept in the cable tier and spliced or hitched on when needed? Flags. I spent time with a hand towel looking to see how it would hang. Hold it up by one corner and pull another corner so that a short edge hangs vertically. You can now play with folds in the towel/flag to bring forward the bits you want to show. The critical feature is that some of the flag (ideally 50%) falls forward of the halyard; if you want the flag to be fluttering to one side of the halyard then gravity will win and the short 'vertical' edge will hang at an angle unless you put on a scary amount of tension. I will be laser printing onto tissue (teabag paper) later this year when I start on the sails for Whiting. Like you, I am concerned that sticky tape will ruin the fuser in the printer if I have to attach the tissue to stiffer paper. A fall back method that I am considering is to glue the edge of the tissue with a glue stick (Pritt stick in UK). I don't know if anyone else has tried that here, or experimented with different tapes. You could run some trials with that small iron you use for bending planks. George

Phil, I understand your last post and agree that there are choices to make about the level of detail to include on a model. I also ignore trenails but others like to include them. I have copper plated the hull with Amati parts which have representations of nail holes because to my eye plain ones look as if something is missing. My most extreme inclusion is probably the furniture in the captain's cabin on Whiting which is only just visible through a skylight. Methods for serving a rope is something that I have been experimenting on and at present I rely on thick paint; I doubt if the turns of a serving line would be visible at normal viewing distance in 1/64. But if I make myself a serving machine then I might change my mind. To me a joy of the hobby and this forum is that people make their own choices and accept that others can follow different paths. George

I bought a copy of Ashley's Book of Knots and really enjoy it, but it's not a beginner's book for modelling. Prices vary widely so look around before you buy. The Young Officer's Sheet Anchor by Darcy Lever is one that I recommend especially if you combine it with internet searches for specific knots and details. Facsimile copies of the 1800ish book are readily available or you can splash out on an original copy. It's a great introduction to knots and rigging and masts and sailing, and to the language of the time. It's inspirational and it pulled me into the world of ship modelling. George

Shrouds fitted to fore mast The mispositioned shrouds came off the masthead with no problems at all and I re-used them starting from the aft end of the foremast. The first pair is a pendant and one shroud, both fully served by painting the linen thread, set to aft and starboard. Then follows a similar pair to port, then two forward pairs of shrouds to starboard then port. The final pairs use Ropes of Scale 0.6mm thread with the middle section painted to represent serving. The lay of the thread shows through the paint and I might give it a few more coats or learn to live with it. The pictures show the masthead from aft and starboard The holes in the back of the masthead were predrilled to take three eyes for blocks; the lowest of these is now covered by shroud ropes and I will probably put a new one between the two existing, exposed holes. So much for planning ahead and preparation. Sails Currently I have been drawing sails which is an iterative process with the yards from which they hang. The lengths of the yards are based on drawings for another schooner, but a sail is an integer number of cloths wide, and the distance from the top corners of the sail to the cleats at the end of the yard depends on which sail it is and the notes provided by Steel. So I start with a yard of nominal length and see what width of sail fits it best, then adjust the yard so that the sail sits properly on it. It gets more complicated for a gaff sail where the runs of cloth are not necessarily perpendicular to the yard and you can also adjust the angle of the gaff. Computers do make this step easier and I use Powerpoint simply because I am familiar with it from work. (Work is no longer a distraction for me 😁.) I know that there are better drawing packages available but I would have to climb another learning curve to use them. One other change I have to make to 'finished' tasks is about the number of hoops on a mast for a gaff sail. I had allowed for two hoops to each cloth in the sail which gives about a dozen for the fore and main gaff sails. Steel in his drawings of gaff sails shows one hoop per cloth so my preloaded mast has far too many hoops on it. They are easily removed with a snip and this is much easier than trying to fit more hoops on at this stage. The pictures below are the fore gaff sail and the completed lower section of the fore mast George

Thank you Trevor and Henry for your suggestions. I do like the idea of moving a sheet and tack from their cringles on the (short) sail to the cringles on the lower corners of the bonnet. Toggles would make it a quicker procedure. Darcy Lever discusses toggles on page 115 of The Young Sea Officer's Sheet Anchor and there are small illustrations on other pages too. He says that a cringle on the sail is made just large enough to pass the eye on the end of a rope through it. The toggle is then put through the eye. (My childhood experience with duffel coats was that the toggle was tied into the end of the rope. To use it the toggle was passed through the equivalent of a cringle and then turned 90 degrees to lock it. Obviously it did not follow naval practice from 200 years earlier.) As a further complication on a schooner, and probably a ship, a stay sail or jib had two sheets on it so that the windward one was slack and ready to be used after tacking. The 'eye at the end of the sheet' becomes an eye at the end of two sheets for the toggle to be inserted. I will be delighted if anyone has information on this detail but will make something reasonable if nothing surfaces. At 1/64 scale the fine structures of splicing and seizing soon disappear. George

A bonnet was an extension that was attached to the bottom edge of a sail to increase the area; a reef could only make the area smaller. Steel gives good descriptions of how they were made and how they were attached. This is enough information for me to make a stay sail with an attached bonnet, and I know from a sub-Lieutenant's log book that this was done on HMS Whiting. What I do not know is what happens with the sheet and tack at the bottom of the sail. The stay sail would have its original sheet and tack when it is without a bonnet. When the bonnet is attached it will also need a sheet and a tack otherwise it becomes a curtain that flaps in the breeze. Do both sheets belay to the same point, and similarly do both tacks belay to one point? Or do they belay to different points? Or do the original sheet and tack become redundant and are coiled and hung somewhere out of the way? Steel is silent on this topic unless I have missed it. Any assistance will be gratefully received. George

I plated my 1/64 model of HMS Whiting (Caldercraft Ballahou schooner) with Amati plates and it took me about 100 hours to finish the job. Apart from being a slow worker I trimmed the plates so that they did not overlap and betray the overscale thickness. It's a slow process. The picture below shows part of the stern, and a fingerprint to prove that I did it. There are a few narrow gaps between some plates but they are not visible at normal viewing distances. I used grade 0000 steel wool to clean the surface. It caught in a couple of places where a corner of a plate was slightly proud so remedial work with superglue was needed. I wanted to keep the copper shiny. Partly this is personal preference because I want to reflect lighting in the display case when it is finished. The other reason is that the copper remains shiny under the water; the brown or green patina requires air for it to develop. I chose Renaissance wax as mentioned above by RossR and applied it with a miniaturised version of the technique shown in the film Karate Kid - wax on, wax off. A couple of years later the copper is still bright. George

I have browsed through a downloaded copy of Steel's Masting and Rigging, 1794 edition, and he does provide corroboration for Marquardt. There is nothing specific for schooners but I looked at the main (aft) mast of a brig and the only mast of a cutter which have similar layouts to a schooner mast: gaff sail and no square sail. Pages 220 and 222 in Steel have the relevant entries and one states ‘The after-main-shroud must be served from the mast-head to the dead-eye, to prevent its being chafed by the main-boom and gaff.’ It seems that the model which Petersson used for his excellent book was not aware of this. I will be making changes to the fore mast when I get back home. In the meantime I have the slowest internet connection which is similar to the pace of life while on holiday. George

Tony, Phil, Thanks for your comments and information. It is a puzzle with incomplete evidence for either option. I'm off on holiday for a while (no grandchildren this time) and will ponder the alternatives over a glass of something fizzy. Perhaps someone else will join in with a definitive answer George

I think the picture is doing the rounds just now. A friend found it on Facebook and asked me for comments. I was pleased to say that it's a load of balls and can be disqualified for a large number of reasons George

Second thoughts about the shrouds Having fitted the shrouds to the mast head of the fore mast I checked my references again and now doubt my interpretation. I followed the drawings in Peterssen (pp 74, 75) with the pendant at the fore end of the group, then a served shroud, then two more shrouds which were only served over the top quarter as for square rigged vessels. Marquardt (pp 171-3) states that the order was reversed on schooners with the pendant set at the aft end of the group and the aft-most shroud fully served. The justification he gives is that the aft shroud would be in contact with the gaff sail and had to be protected from wear. This sounds quite logical to me, especially since a lower square sail was unlikely to be carried below the spread yard. The rake of the mast also makes it less likely for a square sail to touch a shroud on its mast. Option 1. I trust the model that Peterssen has drawn and ignore logical arguments, and leave my model as it is. Option 2. I assume that Peterssen's model does not necessarily represent all schooners or might be mistaken, and the logical arguments put forward by Marquardt prevail. I strip off the shrouds from my model and reposition them. The repair is more irritating than difficult if I follow option 2 and at the moment I am leaning towards that choice. Does anyone have evidence that the shrouds and pendants on a schooner mast were positioned in reverse when compared with a square rigged vessel? George

Contemporary documents often copied each other (and still do) so mistakes were repeated and became a truth (and still do). One example that I took a while to get past was the Wikipedia entry for HMS Whiting 1805 which states that at one time Lieutenant George Roach was her commander. Wikipedia gives its references and being a doubting soul I follow them up; the chain ends with Winfield's great history and begins with the Naval Chronicle. The Chronicle got it wrong and the person who should have been named was Sub-lieutenant John Roach. Why am I so confident? Because his log book says so. The commander at the time of Roach's appointment as one of the first sub-lieutenants was Lt John Orkney. There was a George Roach who was in command of a force of Fencibles at the time. Lloyds register in my experience is another reputable source which copied news articles without fact checking them. George

Phil, I used a very similar technique a few years back on my Sherbourne. The difference was in forming the little loop early on in the process. Part of the answer is to make the loop come up over the coils from deep down below and then hook it over a belaying pin. The picture below is page 93 from my book on Sherbourne. Here are the finished coils on the fife rail. The one on the left has a long loop, and the belaying pins are bulky clubs from Caldercraft which I did not replace. The ropes (Caldercraft) are quite hairy at this magnification. George