US Brig Niagara by mikiek - FINISHED - Model Shipways - Scale 1:64 - First wooden ship build

[bartley]

Mike,

 

I just noticed your post about the slings.  On my plans for Royal Caroline The cross trees actually protrude about 0,5 mm above the support beams so that there is a 0.5mm gap between the top and the cross trees assembly (enough for ropes to pass through).  Of course I did not notice this subtlety and so I have the same issue as you.

 

Regards,

 

John 

[mikiek]

Hey folks - just needed to prove that I am still alive and well. Rigging is moving along. I'm still debating whether I prefer all the ropes or something more like an admiralty style build. This one is for Joel and he was always after me to rig the thing so that's what it will be.

 

Sure wish someone would comment on taking pix with all the ropes. For some reason they really stink since rigging started. I've tried various backgrounds, going outside. They all look bad.

 

Be that as it may, here's progress. Main mast is mostly done, still have the forestays to do. Course yard as well. Fore went in next, finishing up shrouds & rats. I'm working bottom up on the fore so I don't even have the top gallant/royal in place yet.

 

Will be doing a little bit of running rig - halyards, braces, lifts. I'm a little concerned that it may not be enough, but then again maybe it will.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[mikiek]

Hello Bob - I'm trying to do all I can without the bowsprit in place. Once I go down that path there's an extra 2' I will need on the workbench. My lighting will be affected as well. Both lamps are clamp on and I will have to spread them some in order to have enough room to get the build on/off the bench. That will darken things a little.

 

Of course I do realize I am just postponing the inevitable

Edited September 23, 2017 by mikiek

[donrobinson]

Looks good Mike, I'm in the middle of rigging myself so I know a little of the frustrations you are going through. Hang in there

[mikiek]

Hey Don - thanks. Good to see you. I haven't seen many posts from you lately. Hope things are OK. Is it cooling down up there yet?

[donrobinson]

Hi Mike, weather has cooled down and we finally got some rain. All is good and I hope to have a small update soon,

[mikiek]

12 hours ago, donrobinson said:

Hi Mike, weather has cooled down and we finally got some rain. All is good and I hope to have a small update soon,

Wish I could have sent a foot or two your way 

[donrobinson]

This weather has been crazy, hope you and loved ones are doing good

 

 

[mikiek]

Crazy like a hurricane. We got rain but that's about it. Of course trying to do anything in Houston was an adventure.

[mikiek]

Getting more serious. I made enough room on the bench to have the boat, masts and bowsprit. Ok so it's on the bench. Turning it around to get to the other side is a bear.

 

Was looking the deck over and realized I never built a bellfry. So I put one together real quick. Must have lost the bell so had to make another. Of course now I'm worrying what else did I forget?

 

 

 

 

 

 

[mikiek]

Odds are 10 to 1 I break that bow sprit before this build is over. 

[mikiek]

Thought I would show some pix of where I am. Rigging has been an interesting endeavor, however I believe I will research the admiralty style build. Maybe not exactly, but no more than the first spar for the masts and maybe it's shrouds and rats. Why? I think what I am ending up with now is too cluttered. It really detracts from all the deck details. Not to mention it doubles the size of the display case

 

A few observations. As most of us do, I added as much rope as I could before stepping. For the main, I actually attached all 3 spars and rigged as much as I could to the side of the boat. That included ropes and yards. When I finally did step the main the top spars were constantly bumping the cabinets above my bench. In fact they were even bumping my lighting which clamps to the bench. For the fore mast - the 2nd mast to be stepped, I just stepped the lower spar did as much as I could do with that, then added the top mast and did the work there. As you can see from the pix I still haven't added the fore top gallant.

 

I also seem to have gone backwards, stepping the main first then the fore. I didn't even bother with the bow sprit until just recently. This order worked out well. The two masts don't need the bowsprit for all that much.

 

There is a question as to how much rigging to do. Most all of the standing rig needs to be done. But the running rig is another question since there will be no sails. Seems like there is a fine line between too much rope running around the boat and not enough. Given that I feel things are getting cluttered already I'll probably end up on the lite side. Personally I feel that most of the ropes that fasten to a sail should not be included in a build with no sails.

 

So here's some shots of the boat - picture quality is still dubious.

 

As you can see I have about 1" before the bow spars bump into the cabinets. Had a few "hold your breath" moments already.

 

 

 

Since I'm eliminating a lot of the running rigging, I've come to realize there will be a lot of empty belay pins. IMO this looks sort of weird so I am adding some "dummy" coils to fill in the spaces. A real seaman would scoff at this but most people would never know.

I gotta wonder who they sent up this high. Probably someone they didn't like very much. How the heck did they get all the way to the top? The rats don't go that far.

I'm holding off on trimming the ends of the big ropes in case I have to rework something. Would hate to have to replace a stay now!

I used 7mm hearts from Syren. I like the way they look but I wish they had some a little bigger.

Cheap basswood part. Broke the thing 3 times while fitting the harness to it.

 

 

 

 

[Nirvana]

Mike,

You are doing a great job there, the rigging looks good.

The idea of using the hearts from Syren made a difference.

[mikiek]

Dr Per - good of you to stop in!  Thanks for your comments.

 

Interestingly, the hearts from Syren even have the teeth (dont know the real name) on the inside and they really do grab the rope. Just wish they had some additional larger sizes.

[donrobinson]

Looks good Mike, even if you decide to omit the sail related lines there will still be lots to look at and she'll be a fine looking ship. Recently B.E. showed a picture of his Victory, I can't remember where, and all he had was just the lower masts and the the related standing rigging looked real good. A little late for for you now but might be something for in the future.

[mikiek]

Thanks for the likes and feedback everyone. Always good to have your support when I am in doubt about something.

 

Don, I'll try to find that. It's exactly what I am envisioning for future square rigged builds. We do so much hard work adding detail to the decks. I just feel like rigging detracts from that. Lower masts with shrouds should be enough to give most people the idea of rigging and still leave a clear path to what's on deck.

[mikiek]

Well I've hit the point where I have to add the fore top gallant/royal to the mix. Nothing else I can do until then. I think the bowsprit came out OK. There will still be a few more ropes fixed to that when I add the last spar. The top gallant has a couple of backstays and some forestays and a couple of stays from the main still need to be fastened to it. I'll add the braces between the fore & main and probably call those two done.

 

Which leaves me with the spanker. I think I have everything rigged on the boom and gaff. Just have to tie them off.

 

Thinking about it, that'll be almost everything. I may need some pushing from you guys to finish off the last details. I'm pretty bad about not finishing things. If I am not mistaken, this week 2 years ago I started this build.

 

Here's where she's at:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[donrobinson]

She is coming along fine Mike, all looks good. If you need a push consider my foot very close to your butt right about now. Final contact will happen very soon if you keep talking like that. Get to Work!!

[mikiek]

Now that's the ticket!  Thanks Don. T' gallant will go on tonite.

[mikiek]

A slight hitch in the plans. Was just about to start tying down the t' gallant when I realized I haven't raised the top yard yet. That's gotta be done before the t' gallant goes in. That rope parrel is a bear. I may end up cheating on this one.

 

And if that wasn't enough, the square opening in the top where the t' gallant foot is supposed to go - I ran several of the stays thru there   May have to redo a few of those. At least they're on top of the stack.

[Elijah]

The rigging is looking nice Mike! She's starting to look ready to go somewhere!

[mikiek]

13 hours ago, Elijah said:

The rigging is looking nice Mike! She's starting to look ready to go somewhere!

Thanks buddy - I've learned a lot of do's and dont's during this task.

[mikiek]

The good news - the rats are all done. The bad - I'm about to give up taking pix of the rigging. These suck, as usual. Just can't get the right angle and lighting.

 

Good news - I came up with an easy way to tie cow hitches on the outer shrouds and half hitches on the shrouds in between. Bad news, it would take a video to show it. No way I can describe it verbally. Interestingly, 3 of the 4 steps are identical and the other one is just the reverse. Of course it took half a boat to get it figured out. I'm not overly crazy about the tan rats on black shrouds. Will use something a little darker (dirtier) next time. Will also probably go with dark brown for standing rig.

 

So I added the top yard.

 

 

Then inserted the top gallant mast and began fastening that down - shrouds & rats first.

 

 

 

 

 

As the rigging goes up I have been working with rope coils on belay pins. A lot trickier then one would think. The ropes from the masts are wrapped around the pin 1 time then glued and cut. Coils are made separately on a jig with some straight pins stuck in it.Rope is wound around the pins and the ends are CA'd to the coil. Kinda half way hiding them. Next, something to smear on the coil so it will keep it's shape.

 

I didn't like my first attempts at white glue & water - I think I had too much glue and the rope looked glued. Then I went on to my favorite, acrylic matte varnish. The rope looked OK but for some reason the coils began to twist as they dried which looked kinda dumb. There's a pic that shows this. So tonite I went back to white glue & water at about 1:4. We'll see how this works.

 

Would love to not use anything but I am afraid that over time the coils might get kind of wild.

 

Then there is the amount of rope used for a coil. In real life, many of the coils would have been huge. The rope having to go from the deck up to the 2nd or 3rd mast spar in some cases. The problem is, with that pin layout there just isn't room for huge coils, especially if they are side by side on the pins. You can see this in a few of the pix.

 

So the approach I ended up with is all rope will be 0.012mm or less and no more than 6 turns around the pins in my jig. As I mentioned previously, since I am not rigging sails there are a lot of empty pins on the rails. I am going to fill some of those in with coils, just to fill out the rails a little.

 

 

 

 

Lastly as you may notice, I have placed the coils directly around the pins. There seems to be some discussion as to whether coils would be placed like that (actually around the pin) or if the fall of the coil was pulled thru the center of the coil, up over and behind the coil and then wrapped around the pin. So the coil ends up hanging there. I can see points from both sides of the argument, but in the end I went for coils directly on the pins.

 

 

 

Edited October 21, 2017 by mikiek

[Tigersteve]

Can't you dye the ratlines if you do not like the color?

Steve

[mikiek]

Hey Steve - I imagine you could die them if you did it before you hang them. But at this point I'm afraid it's too late to do anything. I have some honest to gosh linen thread that I was going to try to use to make rope out of. It didn't work too well for that but the stuff is almost snow white. I have dyed material (sails) brown using walnut ink crystals. Works quite well and can produce various shades from light to dark. Unfortunately, again, at this point I think it is too late.

 

I've heard of people doing their rats with the same color rope as their shrouds. That's an option, although I think I would want at least a little contrast between the two. I've tried to keep this build historically accurate. At least some what, but this probably ends up being more about aesthetics than reality. I believe all one color would make it tough to see all the detail (read work) that went into the rats.

[donrobinson]

All is looking good Mike

[mikiek]

Thank you Don. There is a faint glimmer at the end of a dark hole.

[mikiek]

Worked thru probably one of the most difficult rigging tasks this morning. First off, it was my own doing - created a problem by adding the futtucks before this task. This made for precious little room under the main top.

 

I was about to start the braces - working from the bottom up. So you have a rope seized to one end of the course yard - let's say the fore course. This rope goes back to a block on the main then down to the belay rail. Well it happens that this block is seized to a shroud right before the shroud loops around the mast head.

 

 

In that area where the futtocks run outside or over the the shroud.

 

 

 

Seems like a pretty difficult job, but one I'm sure we've all faced before.

 

I've mentioned before the sliding seizing and this is how I tackled the problem. This technique can solve so many problems like this, I am amazed. The only downside is that sometimes you have to use a really long piece of rope and you will waste a lot of it. With this in mind I saved my Syren rope and used a piece from the kit. It wasn't going to show anyway.

 

 

So the long rope is looped around the shroud in preparation for seizing.

 

 

The catch here is I need 2 loops with a seizing in the middle. One loop around the shroud, at the other end a loop for a block. This is pretty common and is done with a figure 8 seizing. You can see the 2 loops below.

 

 

Then you do your seizing.

 

 

And when you're done you have your 2 loops.

 

 

I will add here that the actual seizing technique I used is nothing new. You can find plenty of YouTubes showing it.  So you make the loop for the block smaller by pulling on one of the ends.

 

 

Prep your block by drilling out the holes. Syren blocks are good about that but the last thing you need is to have to try to drill one out after it's installed. Then insert the block in the loop and pull the end tight.

 

 

 

So now you can take the other loose end and slide the block  and seizing all the way up the the shroud.

 

 

And there you go.

 

 

The whole idea here is not to do all the twisting and contorting with all sorts of tools where the seizing will end up. Instead, that long piece of rope allows you to bring the work out to a manageable place and you can do your work right in front of you. When you are done, the sliding seizing allows  you to slide the work where it needs to go.

 

This will take a little practice, but I was able to do 8 of these buggers in no time at all. With very few one syllable words I might add.

 

Hope it helps someone.

 

BTW - I didn't invent this. It is just a compilation of several techniques I have come across.

 

 

[Elijah]

Hello Mike! Here is a picture I found of the Niagara replica's fife rail. 

[Sailor1234567890]

The rake on those masts is astounding.