Henry Grace a Dieu (Great Harry) by Louie da fly - FINISHED - Scale 1:200 - Repaired after over 50 yrs of neglect

[Louie da fly]

More fiddly stuff. 

 

King Henry with one of his courtiers glued to the deck. I think I'm going to need a few more figures - they look a bit lonely standing there by themselves.

 

 

And the anchors with their reinforcing bands - in progress and finished. I made them out of strips of paper I'd blackened with a spirit pen.

 

 

 

    

 

 

Starting to attach the starboard fore "chains".

 

 

That's all for now.

 

Steven

[druxey]

Nice work, Steven. Is a spirit pen something used in seances for automatic writing?

[Louie da fly]

22 minutes ago, druxey said:

Nice work, Steven. Is a spirit pen something used in seances for automatic writing?

 

[BANYAN]

Looking great Steven; if the séance work you can ask Henry directly about the rigging etc

 

cheers

 

Pat

[Old Collingwood]

Great work  - you need more figures.

 

OC.

[Louie da fly]

Henry looked a bit lonely so I've added a couple more figures. I also moved him from the weather deck to the (quarter?)deck where he's a bit more obvious, and I think more in keeping with his station in the Grand Scheme of Things.

 

         

 

   

 

 

 

Also another sailor - he'll be climbing the ratlines (when I get them in place).

 

        

 

        

 

And I thought I'd show the process I use to put deadeyes on. I've made a little jig to standardise the spacing of the deadeyes - copied from other people's builds. (I should have made it earlier - the earlier deadeyes might end up a bit higgledy-piggledy because of that.)

 

First put the wire jig through the extreme holes in the corresponding upper and lower deadeyes. Note this doesn't work as well on mine because I have tiny triangular deadeyes which rotate when you try to pin them down, so I just use a dab of glue to fix the shroud to the top of the triangle.

 

       

 

Then gradually wrap the shroud around the deadeye, gluing as I go.

 

      

 

 

Trim the shroud to length and "feather" the end to get it to merge into the rest of the shroud like a splice. And voila!

 

 

Oh, and I've (possibly too early - I hope I don't break it) added the fore topmast.

 

 

It struck me how tiny this topmast is - then I noticed that though Landström's reconstruction has topgallant sails, it doesn't have a topgallant mast! Looking at the Anthony Roll picture, it gets even worse - he's drawn it as though the mast is a single unit, all the way from the deck up to the truck!

 

 

As topgallants were very new at this time, and contemporary pictures show topmasts as being pretty tiny, I'm going with Landström. Maybe they hadn't yet developed the idea of a separate piece of mast for each sail, at least up to the topgallants.

 

Steven

 

 

Edited May 13, 2021 by Louie da fly

[Snug Harbor Johnny]

'Love the tiny figures ... I've done a couple Ren fairs and have a 'Henry' outfit - but I'm nowhere near fat enough.   Johnny

[Louie da fly]

10 hours ago, Snug Harbor Johnny said:

I'm nowhere near fat enough.   Johnny

 

 

He was a big guy (over 6 feet), and solidly built, but he wasn't really all that fat until the end of his life. But the fashions of the time emphasised bodily "bulk". I've seen his armour from various times of his life, and it wasn't all that tubby.

 

Steven

[druxey]

And, as a young man, very athletic.

[Louie da fly]

Yes indeed. He was pretty much Europe's "golden boy" in his youth. He seems to have gone sharply downhill physically and mentally after a very severe jousting accident in which his leg (thigh, I think) was very badly injured and never really recovered from it.

 

Steven

[Balclutha75]

On 10/12/2018 at 8:22 PM, Louie da fly said:

making new frames to accommodate the new shape at the stern.

Just started reading this fascinating build. Steven, if you don't mind a newbie question, early on, like posts #13 and #21 for example, what kind of tools are you using to shape these frames. Apologize if this is discussed elsewhere in the log. I'll eventually get there Thanks..

[Louie da fly]

Thanks everybody for all the likes. Much appreciated.

 

It's going a bit slowly at the moment because I'm doing these deadeyes and they take a fair bit of time with the technique I'm using - and I want to make sure that each one is finished and the glue dried before I start on the next, so I don't stuff up the previous one. I've pretty much used up most of the "in the meantime" projects I can get on with while I'm waiting for glue to dry so I spend a fair bit of time sitting on my hands.

 

Balclutha, I used a No. 11 scalpel or craft knife, but that's because those frames are made of balsa. If the timber had been anything more substantial I'd have used a saw.

 

Steven

[druxey]

Good things take time. However, I would have thought that you could find another project to work on while glue sets up. More crew members, perhaps?

[Louie da fly]

You're a bad, cruel man, Druxey .

 

In fact I'm looking at painting the "cloth of gold" decoration on the sails - just chickening out at the moment. This is another thing that I didn't do back in the day when I first built the model, and I'm not looking forward to it . . .

[Louie da fly]

Working on the fore shrouds. I'd already (way back when I was 17) glued the ratlines to the starboard shrouds, thinking it's be easy to add the deadeyes later (how wrong I was!). Since I took this photo I have tightened the lanyards, glued them in place and cut the free ends off (also very fiddly).

 

 

And the port shrouds were new. Unfortunately my clever way of setting up the spacing of the deadeyes just didn't work. The shrouds ended up too long, and I ended up having to strip them off, cut off the top end and glue them back on. A lot of mucking around. I'm hoping that with experience I'll get better on later ones.

 

 

 

 

And I did some test painting for the "cloth of gold" sails. Here's the original painting from 1545, and the reconstruction painting from Björn Landström's book The Ship, which I used as my model.

 

 

 

I traced the repeating pattern and made a template for it, but wasn't satisfied with it so I made another by photocopying the pattern and sticking it to  thin card from a manilla folder.

 

 

 

  

 

For the first test run I used gold acrylic - looked good, except they didn't have gold paint back then. So I ended up trying out various combinations of yellow, brown and black acrylic paint, doing it in layers, and finally mixing them to try and get a convincing colour (far right). By the way, the colour values are very bad - the fabric is really a canary yellow and the paint colour is a sort of brownish greyish yellow.

 

 

I hadn't wanted to do it this way, because it's so hard to get separate "batches" to match each other, and acrylic starts to dry the moment you expose it to air. But that turned out to work best, so I have to grit my teeth and do great long stints of fiddly painting until the current batch runs out and I can take a break (not wanting to waste my limited supplies of paint). So here's  the fore topsail painted and the foresail and topgallant marked out for painting.

 

 

Since I took this photo I have painted a little over half the pattern on foresail. More to come.

 

Steven

 

Edited May 29, 2021 by Louie da fly

[druxey]

As if model sails aren't enough of a challenge without decorating them!

Edited May 29, 2021 by druxey

[BANYAN]

I admire the challenge you have set yourself Steven.  What you have done already looks good.

 

cheers

 

Pat

[Louie da fly]

Thanks everybody for the likes and comments. It's interesting that the original painting shows the "cloth of gold" on the back of the sail but not the front.

 

I think that as the artist shows the ship from aft this is a device to show off the pattern - and it is followed in the reconstruction painting.

 

I believe it would actually have been on the front where it would have been more easily seen, and as shown in many other pictures of ships of this period. So I've pretty much decided that I'll have the pattern on the front (lets not even think of painting it both sides).

 

Steven 

[Louie da fly]

It's been a while since I posted any progress. It's taken some time to get things done.

 

Well, here are the sails all painted . . .

 

 

A bit of variation in the colour - a result of having to mix the paint up in separate batches, as it dries pretty fast. But not too bad, overall. I'm pretty happy with it.

 

At this scale I wasn't prepared to do separate cloths for the sails or do stitching to indicate it - instead I did what I did back in the day - mark the joins with a 2H pencil. Looks pretty good.

 

 

 

I had forgotten to add the wooldings to the main and foremasts. Not too much of a problem with the main:

 

 

But as the foremast was already in place (when I was removing everything else to fix the ship up, I'd been unable to remove it without causing damage) I should have put the wooldings on before I added the shrouds. As it is I'll have to thread the cord around the mast past all the shrouds and the tyes for the foresail. It sucks a bit, but it just takes a bit more work. First one under way - a few more turns still needed.

 

 

Steven

Edited June 9, 2021 by Louie da fly

[Baker]

Very neatly painted sails Steven

[allanyed]

The painting on the sails is super!!!   Bet it would look great on silk span sails and a lot easier without that large weave on the cloth sails.

It is fun following your build as there are so few that go back to the 16th century and at such a small scale.  Kudos!

Allan

[druxey]

I'm amazed that you can get such clean edges painting on a  woven material like that, Steven.

[mtaylor]

The sails look great. 

[Louie da fly]

Thanks everybody for the likes and comments. The weave of the cloth isn't as coarse as the camera makes it seem, and apart from keeping my hand still (and taking frequent breaks so I didn't start making careless mistakes) it was just a matter of following the lines I'd traced on the fabric through the template. I used a very fine watercolour brush and watered-down acrylic paint.

 

After all the paint was properly dry I went over the sails with a soft eraser to get rid of as much of the remaining pencil marks as I could. I'm now in the process of adding bolt-ropes (photos later) - by gluing cotton thread to the edges of the sails with PVA (white) glue. I did a test piece first and it worked well. Once the glue is properly dry, I can cut around the outside of the bolt-ropes - doing it this way means the sails don't warp and lose their shape (particularly the lateens, which are cut diagonally across the weave) after cutting. I developed this technique on my previous build, the lateen-rigged dromon.

 

Steven

[BANYAN]

Great job on the sails Steven, as Druxey points out, remarkable definition considering the weave of the material.  Good luck with the woldings on the foremast; perhaps using a curved needle (sacking/suture or the like) might assist?

 

cheers

 

Pat

[Louie da fly]

Good thought, Pat, but the thread is pretty stiff and isn't all that hard to thread through. Just fiddly and time-consuming.

 

Steven

[Louie da fly]

I've added boltropes to all the sails

 

 

And cut them out

 

Foremast sails, including bonnet for the forecourse:

 

 

And all the sails - from left to right; foremast and spritsail, main mast, mizzen (including lateen topsails!), bonaventure mizzen

 

 

Unfortunately I stuffed up the bonnet for the main course - first I made it too shallow, then I cut it on the wrong line, so the join between the course and the bonnet was not square to the sail. Fortunately I was able to trim the course to size, but the bonnet had to be re-made:

 

 

And here are all the sails with the new main bonnet.

 

 

And I've done the wooldings for the main mast:

 

 

And the foremast:

 

 

Just need to trim free end from the the top woolding, and clean up the glue, which is a bit intrusive.

 

Steven

 

 

[mtaylor]

The sails are looking sharp, Steven.  At the rate you're going, you'll have her ready for display very soon.

[Louie da fly]

Thanks, Mark. Still a lot to do - I've just been thinking about what I should do next. Probably attach the bonnets to the courses - fortunately the painting of the Santa Caterina do Monto Sinia shows the way they were laced. Though this pic is a bit lacking in detail, I have a better resolution picture in a book and it's pretty clear. 

 

 

 

Then I guess I'll attach the sails to the yards. I've made the sails a little wider than the yard to allow for some "bellying". Though using individual robands is the correct way to do it, back in the day I didn't know that, and I'm going to attach them the way I did in the original incarnation, with a single continuous thread lacing the sail to the yard.

 

Then glue the mainmast in place (finally!) and add some deck furniture to the weather deck - the hatch cover and the longboat. I can't do that until the main mast is in place, because I have to be able to see through the hatch to make sure the mast fits into the mast step properly. Then main shrouds and upper shrouds to main and foremasts,  stays and backstays, and do the same thing for the mizzen and bonaventure; and only then will I start putting the yards in place and add the running rigging.

 

Oh, and lots of flags and banners.

 

Once that's done, I suppose it'll be nearing completion. A bit hard to believe after all this time.

 

Steven

Edited June 16, 2021 by Louie da fly

[Louie da fly]

Bonnets "stitched on". Actually I cheated - I glued the bonnets to the bottoms of the courses with a bit of overlap before I started stitching - I couldn't see any way otherwise that I could hold everything together as I stitched - I'm not all that good at sewing. And that's really not the way it was done back in the day, though it looks enough like it for the job at hand.

 

Here is the main course with the bonnet attached and the sewing partly done, seen from behind. (The funny thing is the stitching seen from in front pretty much vanishes into the pattern painted on the sail. Almost feels like "All that work, and nothing to show for it").

 

 

Here are the two sails with bonnets seen from the front

 

 

 

And from behind. You can see the join between the two lots of stitching on the main course, where I ran out of thread and had to start again with a new thread. I took the opportunity to start from the other end (so the end of the glued join between the course and the bonnet didn't come adrift just as I was getting to the end of the stitching).

 

 

And here's a closer view of the stitching on the main course, seen from the front. I'm pretty happy with the consistency of the stitching - not perfect, but I think this is as good as I'm likely to be capable of.

 

 

As a first attempt the forecourse was not too bad, but as I got better with the main course I'm considering re-doing it. The question is whether there's any point doing so. Are the inequalities in the stitching bad enough to warrant re-doing it, considering the back of the sail really won't be visible when the model is on display?

 

Fortunately, those are the only two bonnets.

 

Steven