JerryTodd

I build my hulls with Titebond III

The prior owner of my house used the shed for his band, and lined it with Homosote board, foam rubber, and carpeting. I pulled out the foam and carpet, but the Homosote walls were great for pinning things up on. Constellation and a smaller Pride plan pinned up on the wall. Pride's full sized sail patterns also got pinned up on the wall. Macedonian on the wall and the bench. Now I've moved and haven't re-set up my shop yet, but I do intend to leave a big wall space to continue this practice.

The 3D printed guns arrived in the post; 5 32 pdr carronades and 5 Blomfield pattern 18 pounders. These I'll make a mold from and cast the model's guns in resin - 5 at a time. 4 extra long guns will be modified a little to serve as Pride's six pounder tubes. Be sure to click on the image for the larger version where you can see the details! Constellation's pivot 10" shell gun and Ivan for scale (Ivan is 2" (50mm) tall) Wooden turned tube and carriage for Pride. HM's crest on the 18 pounders: Ivan and the Macedonian's guns:

I would have liked to cold-mold the hull, that is planking in layers of veneers basically making a boat-shaped piece of plywood, but veneer is hard to find and very expensive here in Maryland.

I level the surface the model sits on, in this case the build table. This is the base. The waterline is marked at the bow and the stern. I measured up the sternpost from the heel for the aft mark, and propping the hull so that it was the right height from the base at a certain station, measured up the stem from the base for the forward mark. In the picture you see a stick under the keel holding the bow up. I measured from the heel aft, going forward on the plan to where the keel was the height of my stick above the baseline, 3/4" in this case, and simply placed the stick so it's aft side was at this mark on the keel. The hull is then securely propped so that both marks are the same height from the base. The hull is also leveled side-to-side using a bubble level - that's why the base has to be leveled first. If your construction was accurate and symmetrical, you should be able to measure from the base to some point up the hull and get the same measurement on either side. You need a block the height of the water line minus half the width of the pencil. I cut the block to the waterline, put the pencil on it, and measured the distance between the two marks, and cut half that off the block. Check it and cut it till it's perfect. If you cut too much, shim it back up with card stock. Check the pencil at both fore and aft marks. The block has to be large enough to be stable while you move it and for the pencil to rest on it securely. The pencil needs to be long enough to reach up under the bilges at the quarters without the block bumping the hull. The waterline doesn't have to be struck in one movement. So long as the hull is secure from movement, the block rests flat on the base,and the pencil lays flat on the block (remember it's usual octagon shape here), it should be perfect no matter where you start. Note in the pics I actually struck it more than once 'cause I wanted it dark enough to see through the fiberglass that would cover it. It's sounds complicated, but then a detailed explanation of tying a shoe lace would sound complicated too.

I use a fine permanent marker on my sails, like .001, and draw both sides, a little bit off to represent the width of the seam. Test it on some scrap before you commit. There is a method where a portion of the cloth, outside the area of the sail, is colored in some fashion, and single threads are pulled through the weave to move the colored portion into the area of the sail. While the effect is impressive, it wastes an amount of cloth equal to the area of each sail. An alternate method is to run a bead of fabric glue above and parallel to the head and pull the threads at the seam locations down while bunching the sail up towards the head. Color these threads and unbunch the sail pulling the threads back in. This gives the same effect without the waste and in small scales is quite impressive. Sewing seam lines is common, but in-my-opinion, nearly always looks out of scale, and typically causes unrealistic puckers in the cloth. It's difficult and tedious to do well. On large scale models, like 1:16th, 1:6th, typically models of small craft; before it's cut, the cloth is Z folded at each seam and sewn. This is as close to a seam as you can get without it actually being a seam. At smaller scales, even 1:24th, it's near impossible for this method to appear in scale to the model. Whatever method you opt for, success will depend on the quality of the cloth used and your patience. Most cloth used is hopelessly out of scale to the model they're made for - another reason I build in large scales.

You're not building an accurate model of an actual boat, but a sort of fantasy boat. I don't think this is much of an issue, especially not structurally. The bottom line is you. It's your model, what do you want? If thine wale offend thee, pluck it off.

I can't tell from the photos what you mean.

A fellow on the left coast, Tom Bowman, got wind of my Macedonian project and contacted me a while back. He's another big Hornblower fan and a fan of the British frigate as I am. He's also a builder of large scale working tanks from scratch - armored fighting vehicles that operate and are beautifully detailed. I shared my Mac plans with him and he plans to build another Lively class boat, the Spartan for RC, but in 1:24 scale. Until then he's purchased and is detailing one of SC&H's Crusier class kits, also in 1:24 so Spartan will have a play-mate. How the kit hull comes; note the tank pictured above in the upper left for scale Where it is as of this posting; it's already becoming a beautiful model. Since Tom's modeling the guns for Spartan in SolidWorks to be 3D printed and used as masters to cast the rest, he's actually doing a set of masters in 1:36 for me to produce Macedonian's batter from; Blomefield pattern 9 pounders, 18 pounders, and 32 pounder Carronades. These are gonna be great

I've always been fond of the "jack-a$$ bark" or hermaphrodite bark rig. It's a meld of bark and barkentine, or just a bark with a fore-n-aft main course. I did this sketch in 97 to show what I was thinking of building what would instead become Constellation.

You might add something like this to the running

Once I get the plans nailed down, I'll build this one much the same way I did Macedonian. In fact, I'll be using the left-over forms from Macedonian recut for this one. The big difference is this one will be planked in balsa. My friend Mark gave me a 1" x 10-3/4" x 6' plank of hard balsa that was dunnage in some cargo and he found on a dock. Besides Gazela, he's going to plank up a 46" schooner with it in the same manner. A mold may be made from this one to produce a couple of hulls in fiberglass. Mark and I met as teenagers and sailed together on several boats, including Gazela. He and I sailed a 16' day-sailor, Lydia 200 miles down the Chesapeake Bay from Baltimore to Norfolk, Virginia. He's a licensed captain and runs tugs out of Baltimore. He's built a great many models, in fact when I first met him he was bringing a model of the skipjack I was working on down for the captain to see - it was about 3 inches long and loaded with details, oysters on deck, netting in the dredges, and he was 13 years old. Marks most recent sailing model is his Son of Erin which is about 30" long and convertible between a sloop and a schooner rig. Well, coffee's gone, it's back to work setting up the shop.

Actually, this one was closer to turning a roll of tape into a ship Thank you

Black iron bands may not refer to color, but to the use of black iron. Wouldings would need to be tarred

Way back in 1978 and 1979 I had the privilege of crewing on board an old Portuguese Grand Banks fishing vessel turned sail training ship, the barkentine Gazela Primeiro. Of all the boats I sailed for pay or pleasure, Gazela is my favorite and my fondest memory. It was a combination of a sturdy and trust-worthy vessel combined with a crew of wonderful people; that made me feel at home and safer than any other boat I've known. <= an 18 year old me after morning wash-down on Gazela. A bit of the ship's history is available on My site. I've always dreamt of building a model of Gazela but I could never find her lines. I spent a lot of time searching, contacting people like the builder of the model in Philadelphia. Six sheets of plans were drawn up around the time I had sailed her and a profile from that set was included in a book by Allison Saville about the ship. This was printed on a tabloid sized sheet, and while not perfect, was usable, but I still didn't have a body plan. One contact had built an old Scientific kit of the boat and still had the instruction sheets. He photo graphed these for me. Another contact who had the plans, sent me a a paper photocopy on a tabloid sized sheet. I scoured the Internet for any images of the boat I could find, especially those of her hauled out of the water. I tried to reconcile what I had to each other to come up with a working set of plans in the 1:36 scale I wanted. It was very tedious with all the photography and scanning distortions. I was getting near to something I could use, but wasn't there yet. I eventual found the plans drawn up in the 70's at Mystic Seaport. They were very expensive, but I set my teeth and ordered them, only to hear they they were restricted in making copies. They steered me towards the Independence Seaport Museum who apparently hold the originals. These folks are not set up to provide copies of plans. They offered to digitally photograph the plans for me, or send them out to be digitally scanned. The cost they estimate for that would be astronomical. In trying to get across what I'm after, they told me the plans were missing! Since then they've found two of the six sheets and sent sample photos; they are the same two sheets I show you above. At this moment, I'm still negotiating with the Museum to get usable copies of Gazela's plans. If this doesn't work, I'll have to resort to my make-do attempt detailed above.

I wonder how many captains would invest the time to paint the mast bands a different color to serve no purpose other than it looks nice, especially in war time? In peace time, I can easily see a captain keeping his crew from being idle with such chores. In the 1860's Constellation's captain regularly had the copper scrubbed, paint above and below, and rigging rerove. He even had the gun stripe painted out, and a month later repainted back on. While that was wartime, Constellation was in the Mediterranean cruising between Italy and the Levant "showing the flag" and not much more - there was a LOT of idle time.

I was asked to bring the model to the Fell's Point Maritime Museum in Baltimore on July 22nd, 2012, for a one day display to commemorate the anniversary of the first 7 letter of marque vessels to sail out of Fell's Point for the War of 1812. It wasn't possible for me to fully complete the model in time, or even get it sailable, but I resolved to do as much as I could to make her presentable for display. The Pride of Baltimore II would be there, and I had sailed on Pride with her captain, Jon Miles, ie: someone intimately familiar with the boat I was modeling would see it, but hey, no pressure. In preparation though, I bolt-roped all the sails, worked out a chart of what rigging blocks she would need, and began making them. The sails are roped with a three-stranded nylon cord. The bolt rope is glued to the sail with fabric glue as well as sewn in an abbreviated version of the way real ones are sewn on. A bolt rope isn't sewn the the edge of a sail, but rather to one side of it right at the edge. Each stitch passes between two strands of the line, through the third, and into the sail, where it takes a turn back around and repeats in the next strand. Each turn is in the direction of the lay of the line sew the stitching disappears into the lay of the bolt rope. In stead of every strand, I stitched through every three or four strands. The stitching is somewhat visible at this scale, especially on the "back-side" of the sail from the bolt rope, but the glue makes up for the reduced structure. Eyes, cringles, garnets, etc, along the edge of the sail were made with the bolt rope. grommets in the sail are burned with the pointed tip of a soldiering iron. This is a nice feature of using Supplex, holes can be made for reef-points, for example, that are heat sealed and require no further reenforcing. Eyes are formed around a round toothpick to maintain constant size and keep the from closing while sewing's in progress. Grommets are burned in near each eye for and the bolt rope is seized on either side, just as a real sail is constructed. Well, this IS a real sail, just a small one. By-the-way, did I mention I used to work at Ulmer Kolius sail makers near Annapolis? I didn't usually sew on bolt ropes there, that I learned working on boats such as Pride; at Ulmer I did things like putting ducks on Flashers (a genoa/spinnaker hybrid). The yards got foot-ropes and I made some unsheaved blocks to cover for this display. The sails were attached to their spars, the main and fores'l to the mast hoops, Halyards rove, and bit by but, Pride was dressed. I was ready. I even cobbled together a slide show of the models construction and loaded it onto an e-frame, and made up some hand-outs with specs on the model and the real Pride. Unfortunately, the events schedule was changed to a day I would be out of town for something else - so Pride didn't get publicly displayed. Later, I made and attached fairleads to the fore tops'l for the bunt-lines which I made from a bamboo chopstick. I found the new information on the pump heads mentioned previously. And noted a sort of rub rail under the hawse pipes of the original boat and a difference in how the wale finished at the bow. I took a shot at turning a gun barrel, one in pine, one in cherry - neither of which I'm satisfied with. The carriage was better, but I had to draw scaled plans as Gilmer's drawings of the guns were a bit cartoonish. The model's been moved to my new residence, as I move out of my house. With no consistent income since being fired in January 2012, after 18 years, the house is being foreclosed on. For the moment, Pride sits on top of a cabinet in the living room waiting for the new shop to come online.

Wow, is it that time already? Thank you

Spars All the spars were made of white pine, since it's been working so well so far. Rough cut to size, square stock was made 8-sided, etc, etc, to round. Gaffs and boom were fitted with jaws made from aircraft plywood and tried for size. The boom has a shoulder cut in the end for the ring-tail iron and a bolster that keeps the mains'l clew out-haul held off the boom. The main mast was fitted with a saddle and knees for the boom to rest on, after the mast's hoops were loaded on. All the spars got stain and paint, and all the brass was blackened and painted. The coarse yard got stuns'l boom irons, stuns'l booms, and jack stays. Cleats and holes for sheets and the like... and a clew iron for the main boom The yards and boom

Bait tub?

BTW folks: Don't forget you can click on the images in these posts to see them full sized. I took Pease's book to the local hardware megastore and had thier paint department use their color gizmo to create a sample jar of the cream color Pride's inboard things were painted; the sides of the cabin, hatch coamings, base of the masts, and eventually, inside of the bulwarks. This ran about $3 US and I should be able to get the color matched easily if I need more. It's funny actually, both the real boat and my model of her will have their inboard surfaces painted with latex house paint. I wondered about what to make mast hoops from. I liked bamboo, but I didn't have any that wouldn't require a lot of work just to get into the right sized strips. Just for giggles, I tried 3/32" sheet bass. Cut it into a strip the right width; shaved the ends down so they tapered to nothing; wet it in warm water; and wrapped it around a 1" dowel. That worked so well I tried another and made a few. Then I precut all the rest of the strips plus a few, cause a couple snapped while wrapping them around the dowel. Once made and glued up, I dipped them in oak stain. I made the cleats that go at the base of the foremast. They were glued and pinned on - after loading the mast with it's requisite number of hoops. Two weeks before, a couple of yards of Supplex arrived for the sails. When I cut out Constellation's sails, it was a pain. To seal the edge of the after cutting it I would run it along a hot soldering iron. It didn't take much, just the slightest pause, to burn a scallop in the edge. This time I resolved to use a hot knife. Oddly, I had a very hard time finding one for my iron, so I made one. I happened to have a couple of copper machine screws in my loose fastener bucket that had the right threads to fit my soldering iron. I drilled a hole, then cut a slot and inserted a portion of an XActo blade. I pressed the slot closed onto the blade and peened a bit of brass rod in the hole to rivet it all together. The first sail I cut with it was the mains'l, and it worked like a charm. There's a little technique to it, but you pick it up fast. When I was researching making one online, everyone said it's best to cut on glass so as to not wick the heat off the blade, so I used an old picture with glass in the frame as my cutting board. I had the knife made on June 2nd, and laid out and cut the rest of the sails by June 3rd. I even made Pride's pennant and that ugly Lord Baltimore eblem they had on the t'gallant sail. The panels were marked on the cloth with a very fine point black marker, just as I had done on Constellation. Other parts of the sails were cut with the knife; reef bands, tabling, corner reenforcing, that ugly emblem, etc. These were applied to the sail with fabric adhesive.

As shown above, there's no space in the counter to install linkages for steering the model remotely that wouldn't be glaringly noticeable and intrusive, so, another way to steer the model had to be devised. The real boat was steered by a tiller. Some 8 feet long and a foot square at it's largest, tapering down to about 6" diameter, and standing about as high as your hip. Under way, you could feel everything the boat was doing which made steering Pride often feel like sailing a yacht. But, if that tiller wanted to go somewhere, it was going no matter who had hold of it. It either pulled away from you, or took you along for the ride, usually depositing you in a heap in the waterways. To tame the beast, a block and tackle were hooked into an eye-bolt in the waterway and attached to a pendant on the tiller. Typically, only one relieving tackle was used opposite the weather helm, but on occasion, two were attached. Maneuvering around the harbor, in and out of the dock, etc, no tackle was attached, but the pendants became a permanent fixture of tarred line turks-headed onto the tiller. Not having a way to hide hard linkages between servo and rudder, I've opted to steer the boat using lines from the servo to the tiller and rig them so they look like relieving tackles. This isn't unheard of but it will require the tiller to be something more than a varnished bit of wood. Actually, I started with a varnished bit of wood... The real tiller though would be of metal, with the wooden part hiding that fact. A steel collar was sweated to a copper tiller and the rudder post hole drilled out. The collar was attached so the set-screw was angled off in a way it could be reached with an allen wrench. The wooden tiller was epoxied and screwed to the metal tiller. The rudder post rod was cut down so the tiller would be at the right height, and a false rudder head was built up to hide the collar. The steering cable will run, port & starboard, from the tiller to a block in the waterway, over to the lazerette hatch where it will go below and to the rudder servo under the cabin hatch. Two brass tube come through the lazerette hatch coaming to guide the steering cable below. A couple of wood blocks glued to the underside of the sub-deck anchor the tubes in place. The tubing was cut flush with the hatch coaming and is hardly visible. A pair of top masts was made from white pine. I look at a lot of photos, especially in Greg Pease's book, Sailing With Pride, to get their shape and finish correct for 1981 as they changed, and were even replaced, through the boat's life. The fid holes are lined with brass tube epoxied in place.

Next up, I started on the bowsprit. It was made from white pine. I wanted the masts as strong and light as I could make them, the bowsprit I wasn't quite as concerned about in that way. The bulwark had to be opened where the bowsprit came through. the bowsprit is square where it passes through the bulwark and it's top tapers as it goes aft almost down to half it's height. The bowsprit doesn't actually sit on the stem-knee, so I taped some card to pad it out and use it to guide the saw at the correct angle. Forward of the bulwark, it's 8-sided, Just forward of the stem knee, it goes from 8-sided to round. The cap was made from the same plywood as the mast caps, strapped with copper tape as was used to do Constellation's bottom. It's glued and pinned with brass rod onto the bowsprit. The bees are red oak, glued and pinned with brass nails, the nails are CAed just before seated. Spreaders and dolphin striker are also oak. The striker is glued and pinned. Brass rod was used for the two U bolts, but they're just for show and aren't structural. The heel block for the jib boom is morticed slightly into the bowsprit. The jib-boom is made from the same white pine. Started off square, was tapered, 8-sided, roughly 16-sided, then shave generally round, and finally sanded, stained and painted While working on the bowsprit, I actually got around to making the pumps. When I was on board, you could barely see these things, surround by water barrels, and we never used them, so I had no memory of how they were constructed, especially the ironwork the connected the handle to them. I actually found a video of the boat on her maiden voyage that had a glimpse of them I could use, and this is the result. The fellow with the sextant is Melbourne Smith who Baltimore City hired to build Pride. I personally have nothing good to say about the man, so I won't say anything. Turns out this is wrong. The iron V portion between the wooden pump heads is attached to the cabin trunk and not to the pump heads at all. The post the handle pivots on sits on deck. I found this out from a Baltimore Sun Papers photo of Fred, the yard foreman, working on the pumps during her construction. So, with a removable cabin trunk on the model, figuring this out should be interesting, but it looks like the pumps will be attached, all of them, the the cabin trunk and will come off with it when it's removed. So, by the third week of May, 2012, the model was very definitely looking like her namesake, even if I no longer looked like I did then.

I cut paper patterns for the sails and pinned them up on the shop wall above the profile to see how things would look. It looked pretty darned good to me, Let's make some masts! I made the masts using the "Bird's Mouth" method. There's a lot of math and geometry available on DuckWorks if you're interested in trying this system. My friend Mark, who was building a 12' skiff at my place, made the skiff's 12' mast using this method. Made from 12 foot 2x4's, it turned out a mast that was extremely light, and incredibly strong. In short, Using the formulas for the size mast you want, you cut strips of whatever wood; in my case white cedar scraps left over from making Constellation's masts and spars. The bird's mouth is cut into the correct face. I used a V groove bit in a router set up in a table with finger boards everywhere to hold the work down, and against the fence. It took a little experimentation and playing around, but I eventually got the grove at the right depth. screen shot from the noisy video of cutting grooves in strips. These strips do not need to be the length of the mast as you can butt them to get the right length. Just remember to stagger the butts, and not put any beside each other. The strips are then glued together. It's best to lay them out in some order of assembly as you do this. I used Tightbond III liberally, to glue things up. Take strips from your layout starting at one end of the mast and work toward the other end. Use rubber bands to hold things together as you go. You have to work fast because once it's all together you need to make sure it's straight, and you may need to adjust it, which you can't do once the glue sets. Once the mast is made up, check it for alignment, fix it, and let it set up. The spar is made 8 sided by planing off the corners. I then made an 8 sided dowel of pine to slide inside the mast at either end. The bottom one extends about 2" above where the boom jaws will sit, and extends out of the bottom for the step tenon. The top one about 2" below where the gaff jaws will land and extends out of the top about 1/2" for the cap tenon. These pieces primarily stiffen the spar from the step to above the deck, and at the doublings. The mast is shaved to 16 sides, then a rough 32, and sanded, a lot, to get it round where it's supposed to be. I made cross-trees and trestle-trees from the wood I used for the bitts and every joint is pinned with brass rod CAed in place. The mast head at the doublings was squared and hounds glued and pinned with brass rod. The mast caps were cut from 3/8" plywood. I figure there's going to be a lot of stress on this area when she's sailing, so made it as strong and light as I could. Pride's mast head furniture was all painted flat black, so, so is the model's. The rest of the mast was stained and then given a coat of matte clear. The bottom of the masts were painted a cream color, which I hadn't gotten yet.

On any model, it's often best to pre-rig yards and sails, and bend sails to yards, before the yards go on the mast. The less you have to fiddle with with the yards attached, the less your chance of breaking something and forcefully relocating the model to another part of the shop. On that note: A friend has a dart board in his shop and keeps the darts at the bench. When something gets frustrating, he flings a dart at the board, instead of something valuable. If you try this, do not put the board near the entry to the shop area, they don't allow modeling tools in jail cells.