Draque

After more years than I want to think about the hull is finally, finally planked. Finally. It isn’t perfect, but the worst crimes are below the waterline where I can hide them with paint. All in all I’m pretty happy with it. Some scraping and sanding will clean it up nicely and it shouldn’t need much filling. Next up is the rubbing strakes then I can start remodeling the deck.

Thanks, Håkan. @Jaager said in an earlier post that on my plans the stations would have been spaced three frames apart and that I could work out my frame dimensions from that. Was this a standard way of drawing plans? If so, how do these dimensions look: Distance between stations: 1680mm Dividing by 3 gives 560mm for each room+space 560mm-305mm(1 foot) = 255mm (almost exactly 10 inches) So, frames 255mm sided and spaces of 305mm? So, is this about right (I haven't made the effort to taper the frames as they rise):

Thanks, everyone. Tony, thanks once more for your input. That was pretty much what I was thinking. I know these schooners would not have ever been expected to withstand any serious gunfire, but would room and space be sturdy enough to fire their own cannon from? Håkan, I somehow overlooked your Atlantica build and now, having had a quick look, I love it. I'll read through your build log properly as soon as I have a chance. I hope mine comes along as nicely as yours looks. @No Idea, to be honest, at this point I've got more information from Tony and Jaager and Craig than I've managed to dig up for myself. I'll be sending some emails out soon to some museums and historical societies in the hope that someone has some more information or a framing plan or a high resolution photo of one of the schooners framed up and unplanked on the slipway (I can hope, can't I?). I haven't had time for much work on the plans over the last few days, so I don't really have an update for the build log. I have had time to think about what I want to do with it and I'm starting to lean towards making a model that represents all five schooners, rather than just Renard specifically. The only information I have about Renard specifically is the RMG model, but I have photos now of the others.

That looks really good, nice work. Especially considering you’ve only recently started using either program.

I love these old photos. Good find. I've made some decisions about this model. Basically, I'm going to build Renard like this: So, 1/24, plank on frame, fully rigged, planked on one side. I doubt that I'll have any crew figures though. I've been trying to work out what the framing would look like. A few posts back Jaager provided some figures which I used to make a rough model of some frames in Blender: The dimensions are: Distance between stations: 1682mm (~5'6") Three pairs of frames between stations Frame width: 200mm (8") Frame thickness ("moulded" per Jaager's post): 254mm (10") Keel depth: 280mm (11") Keel width: 254mm (10") Am I doing this right? The ketch model above appears to only have single frames with larger spaces between. The frames that I've drawn look very chunky to me.

That last article was interesting. I wonder how hard it would be to get hold of a copy of the journal, or any of the journals or logbooks of the sailors on these vessels. I did a quick search on the ANMM website but found nothing. Your searching skills are definitely better than mine. Thanks again for posting these photos.

Thanks again, Tony. I was busy typing away while you were reading my mind. It's great to see photos. Interesting that they have different colour schemes. Also, it looks like Alacrity (formerly Ethel) does have the clipper bow.

Thanks, Tony. Finding the plans was almost no work at all. After discovering the model, I just emailed the museum to ask and the very helpful and efficient person I spoke to there found them and posted them. I don't remember what it cost, but I had the plans in a couple of weeks. I also wondered about the bow. I figured they probably just went with a simpler and cheaper version for the naval vessels. Maybe Ethel had the clipper bow and these drawings were based on her. In any case I like the simple bow of the Renard model. I don't know who drew the plans but they do have Cuthbert's name on them, along with two others. I don't have a photo that shows them clearly and I don't have the plans handy to check. I'll post a photo when I get a chance. I didn't know any photos of these vessels existed. I would really like to see them. Do you have any idea where I can find a copy of Bastock's book? The local library here doesn't have it and I'm not in Sydney any more so my library options are limited. Abebooks has some copies but they're asking for more money than I'd like to spend to look at a couple of grainy photos. I don't even know where to start looking for the originals. I've started drawing up the lines in Blender. I measured as precisely as I could off the plan and recorded all my measurements in a spreadsheet. I used the spreadsheet to scale everything up to full-size dimensions (just multiply everything by 24). I used the full-size dimensions to create coordinates for the curves in Blender. After I've got all of the lines smoothed out and agreeing nicely I can scale it back down to model-size and any errors from distortion of the plans or my measurements should be negligible. It's working well. I can build up the 2D lines as a set of Bezier curves then offset them along the third axis to get a 3D shape,for example: The curves need a bit of tidying up and I'm undoubtedly going to have to tweak them to get the waterlines to match the body plan, but so far they do at least look like the plan.

This is fantastic work. Please keep posting updates.

Thank you, Wefalck and Druxey. Regarding the use of a scale rule; please don't think that I'm ignoring or rejecting this undoubtedly good advice, it's just that my circumstances make it a bit impractical. I live in a regional part of NSW and I would expect to be waiting at least two weeks for delivery, even if it weren't Christmas time and I'm hoping to make some progress in drawing up my plans before I need to get back to work. Also, because I'm building in the same scale as the plan I'm working from and I work in metric, it altogether seems more sensible to me to measure directly off the plan in mm and punch those numbers into the software I'm using. Craig, I printed out your scale, but my printer got it wrong and it came out slightly oversize. I could probably solve that problem but I don't have the patience to argue with a printer. I've been researching, trying to gather up as much information about how Renard might have been built, in particular hoping for something that will tell me specifically how it was framed. A framing plan for Renard or a photo of the ship under construction seems too much to hope for, but there is some useful information out there. First, I went looking for frame models of similar sized vessels from the 19th century: Those are the best I've found, all of them from the National Maritime Museum's website. Not all schooners, but similar sized vessels, not too distant in time from Renard (I really like that ketch, I might have found a future subject). I think they're all British-built, though, so I wanted to know if colonial ship-building followed the same practices. I also wanted to know a bit more about the shipbuilder, John Cuthbert, and his shipyard at Miller's Point, thinking there may be some clues there. I found scraps of information about Cuthbert here and here, as well as some photos of his shipyard (no exposed framing visible, unfortunately): but was stunned yesterday, when I found this: https://www.nautical-association.org/publications-store "A Shipwright in the Colonies" is a 187 page research paper that gives about as thorough a biography as I could ever have hoped for. I haven't read all of it yet, and the section that covers Renard and her sister ships is not quite as detailed as I would like, but there is some information here: "With an overall length of 80 feet, a hold 9 feet 6 inches deep and a beam of 18 feet 6 inches, the hulls of these naval schooners reflected the best in colonial construction and materials. Fastened entirely with copper, the vessels were built with ironbark keels, black butt and blue gum frames, kauri pine planking and sheathing of 18, 20 and 22 ounce Muntz’s metal over chunam." There's also this: "The use of the diagonal technique by Cuthbert in his commercial vessels promoted new standards for the colony, although the idea appears to have been transferred from England to NSW much earlier." So the question I have is, would Cuthbert have used diagonal planking in his naval vessels? If so, would that have affected the dimensions of the framing?

One more thing... Could the position of the wale be derived from the planksheer? I don't know enough about how these things are done, but wouldn't the wale follow the same line just a short distance below? Edit: Actually, never mind, now that I think of it that doesn’t make a lot of sense. I was thinking that the deck beams would sit on top of the wale, but of course the wale is on the outside of the framing.

Thanks Jaager. All of this is exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping for. I can understand this. If the futtocks and keel were just butted and nailed together I would think the same. It's the neat interlocking of the various pieces of wood that interests me. And the curves, of course; I would probably never have developed an interest in boats at all if not for the graceful shape of a hull. A half hull is an interesting idea. I've wanted to do one of those in the past, but never considered it for Renard. It might be a good way of checking that my hull design is fair and get a sense for how the planking will run before I commit to the bigger POF build. When I do go ahead with the full build, I would like to be able to point to it and honestly say that it accurately represents the ship as it would likely have been built. I can be happy with a simplified or incomplete reconstruction, but wouldn't do something that I knew to inaccurate. Thanks again, Jaager and Craig and anyone else who's taken an interest. And please keep coming up with information and problems for me to solve.

Thanks, Jaager, for putting all of that together. I'll need to spend some time going over all of those numbers before I can make proper sense of it. Part of my attraction to POF, and wooden boats in general, is the internal structure and joinery. I know I won't be able to exactly replicate this particular ship, but if I can frame it up using the principles that were used at that time and place for this type of ship I will be happy. This will be my first scratch build, but I'm a furniture maker, so the woodwork isn't beyond my abilities. I just need to make sure I'm working to an accurate plan.

Druxey, that seems like good advice. My problem is that I can only get metric scales from the local office supplies store and these plans are in that other system. I mean to build at 1/24, so I can just take my measurements straight from the plans and multiply manually whenever I need to. I'm drawing up my plans on the computer as vector graphics, so I can adjust the scale that way too. Craig, thanks for checking on that. I'll get more precise measurements later, but your figures seem realistic.

Thanks, Paul. Craig, just measuring off the plan with a ruler (so, not super precise), I get about 2.6mm at the midship station and about 1.7mm at the stern. At 1/24 (the scale of the plans) that gives about 62mm and 41mm. I don't know whether the garboard would really have different thicknesses along its length, maybe there's a bit of inaccuracy in the plans.

Well, that seems obvious now. Thanks, Craig. Okay, so that rabbet depth suggests the garboard should be about 50-75mm thick. Scaling up the maximum beam and subtracting that from the designed beam gives planking higher up at about 20-30mm. Do those numbers seem realistic? One more question, a couple of the photos of the model at NMM shows the rail stanchions. Would these just be extensions of the frames? If so, maybe there is enough information to make a plank on frame model...

Thanks guys. I've started taking measurements from the plans. I have some questions for anyone who understands these things better than I do: Are the hull lines to the inside or outside of the planking? How thick would that planking be? In the image below, does the line the arrow is pointed to correspond to the level of the deck? Thank you, Michael

Some years back, while I was admiring the models in the National Maritime Museums online collection, I found this: https://www.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/rmgc-object-67011 This is HMS Renard. As a modelling subject, it ticks a bunch of boxes for me: It’s really pretty: a gaff schooner with raked masts and a plumb bow is exactly my sort of boat; It was built in Sydney, where I grew up; It was intended to serve a noble purpose – suppressing the Pacific Islands slave trade (although, if you read the label attached to the model, the well-being of the islanders doesn’t seem to have been a terribly high priority for the crew); This model was made by one of the sailors who served on her while on board, so the details should be accurate; The NMM have the original lines plans. I’ve wanted to build this model for years and I’ve decided now is the time to start. I’m starting a build log now to provide a little extra motivation to get on with it. I ordered a copy of the plans straight away after discovering it and they’ve been safely rolled up in their cardboard tube ever since. There’s a little bit of information available on the Internet about this vessel. No photos or other models, though. Wikipedia claims to have a photo of her sister ship Alacrity, but it’s definitely no relation (it’s five times the size and a steamer). Aside from Alacrity (which was named Ethel(??) at launch), her other sisters were Beagle, Conflict and Sandfly, all launched in 1872 or 1873. According to Wikipedia, all were sold off in the 1880s. Conflict was wrecked on a reef in 1882. Alacrity, Beagle, Renard and Sandfly seem to have survived longer, but I haven’t found anything more about them after they were paid off. I wish I had some more photos of the deck. There’s not a lot visible inside the bow and stern and working out accurate dimensions from what I’ve got might be tricky. Still, I think there’s enough here. I’d really love to be able to make it as a plank-on-frame model, but I don’t have a framing plan and I don’t want to guess at the internal structure. The plans I have only show the hull lines, so drawing up some building plans will be the first step. Michael

Thank you for taking the time to do this, Kirill. It looks like a useful collection.

Thanks, Kirill. I've more or less decided to model my ship after the one in the armada painting in my previous post (unless anyone can point me to a more suitable candidate). Also, those horses aren't drowning, they're... frolicking. Look how happy they are: It must have been a leisure day for the armada. Anyway, to help me see the details, I've made some adjustments to the painting: Based on this painting, this is what my remodeled sheer line and upper decks should look like: The background is from the rigging plan from the kit. The blue lines show the revised outline of the hull as well as the wales. The orange lines are the new deck and bulkhead layout. I used the little stick men to find the deck level, based on the height of the people in the painting relative to the rails (assuming their average height was about 1.6m or so). For example, the men near the stern have the rail at about their elbows, while further forward the rails is at about their thighs. Of course, I'm assuming that the painter has represented the people accurately. I'm not sure I have the scale quite right, at the very least it looks like my ship is a bit shorter, but I think I can make it work with some minor adjustments. I know I'll have to make some compromises somewhere. As always, I'd be grateful for feedback, especially if you think I'm wrong. Michael

This is some excellent Blendering. I'm pretty good with Blender for furniture models and architectural visualization, but I don't know how I would approach a subject like this. I'd love to see more of it. Michael

I think it can scan, but I've never tried. It can certainly import an image created by other scanning software. It can export to dxf. Don't be put off by the "open source" thing. These are professional grade applications, comparable to their (very expensive) proprietary competitors.

Hi Srenner, Before you spend money on software, maybe have a look at Inkscape as an alternative to Illustrator and Blender as an alternative to Shade 3D. They're both free and open source and should run on whatever operating system you have. I'm a weirdo who uses Linux for everything and they work perfectly well for me, but there are Windows and Mac versions of both. I don't know anything about Shade 3D, but I use Blender a lot for my work. There's a steep learning curve but it's very powerful and I'd be surprised if there's not a way to solve your problem with it. At least, it seems worth a look before spending hundreds of dollars for a temporary license on something else. Michael

Thanks, guys. I got your pm, Patrick, thank you. Kirill, I skimmed through your build log - it's beautiful, detailed work. Early on you said it was hard to find pictures of galleons by Spanish artists and that you were mostly finding works by Dutch painters. That's exactly the position I'm in. I've found two by Juan de la Corte. Did you eventually find anything especially good? This is the best I've found to base my model on so far: The ship is about the right size and shape. They seem to be fishing for horses, I'm surprised to learn that's where they come from.

Thanks, Patrick. I'd be very grateful for any guidance that can help me make this thing more realistic. I didn't have time to do any work on it over the weekend, but this evening I intend to cut up some new deck planking from some better coloured and finer grained wood and add another strake or two. A question came to me while I was thinking about this: were the decks of Spanish galleons (or any ship of that time) holystoned? If not, then the wood should have a grey, weathered appearance, shouldn't it? It doesn't really matter to me, I'm planning to use a pale blonde coloured wood regardless; I've just never seen that discussed anywhere before. Michael