Triton cross-section by tkay11 (aka Tony) - FINISHED

[tkay11]

Thanks for the likes!

 

Dupree: TurboCAD is for me an almost essential aspect of the model as it allows for accurate part making, dimension checking and making all sorts of jigs. As for making mistakes I agree they're an essential part of learning. That's why I try to highlight the ones I make for others to learn from as well.

 

Dirk: thanks a lot for the suggestion. It's a good one, as always. I'd thought about oil but then was worried about putting it on surfaces that were to be glued. Anyway, when I've finished assembly I'll practise with oil as you suggest. I always enjoy learning!

 

Tony

[tkay11]

Thanks to various comments (notably Dirk's -- thank you Dirk!), I decided to experiment a bit with oils. I decided in the end to make up my own Danish oil, seeing that I already had the ingredients. I followed the advice given by Bob Flexner at http://www.popularwoodworking.com/techniques/finishing/oil-finishes-their-history-and-use The recommended dosage to start with is one-third of each, so that’s what I mixed.

 

 

I liked the results, so that’s what I’ll stick with for the rest of the build.

 

I planked just over half the gun deck, along with the lower strakes of the gun deck walls. I then oiled the inside of the lower walls and the two decks -- leaving the outside of the frames and the wall planking above the gun deck.

 

 

 

I need to finish the planking of the gun deck walls, sand down the fore and aft section faces, and then I’ll be working on installing the eyebolts for the cannon and making up the gangway brackets.

 

Tony

[ChadB]

Nice job- looking good! I love the look of oiled wood!   -Chad

[tkay11]

Thanks, Chad and Dirk! I feel slightly ashamed (edit: maybe 'embarrassed' would be a better word) when given such encouragement from those whose work I admire, since I don't think I'll ever produce work that's as beautifully finished and precise -- but it is indeed encouragement and much appreciated at that! And I certainly enjoy learning from you, so keep on building and logging if only for my benefit!

 

Tony

Edited December 24, 2016 by tkay11

[mtaylor]

Just "Wow!!!"   The oil really makes this section pop into pure eye candy.

[tkay11]

Thanks, Mark. Even I was surprised at the change a drop of oil makes. Turns it from banal to something even my wife liked! I'll have to try some on myself.

 

Tony

[tkay11]

And best wishes of the season to you too, Dirk, and your enterprising partner!

 

Tony

[AnobiumPunctatum]

It's looking really nice, Tony

[Gabek]

Beautiful work, Tony! In the back of my mind I was contemplating a cutaway on my Triton, and seeing yours has convinced me!

Looking forward to seeing more on your build...

Clear skies,

Gabe

[tkay11]

Thanks, Gabe. The main motivation (apart from developing skills in making plank-on-frame models) was really to learn for myself and give anyone who's interested some understanding of how these ships were built. Almost nobody in my circle of acquaintances has much idea that there's even a hobby devoted to this kind of thing, let alone full builds, so they're quite intrigued, and, as I had guessed, simply cannot see the blunders that are glaringly obvious to my own eye -- and that's exactly as it should be.

 

Tony

[Gabek]

I hear you, Tony!  What I find ironic is that I'm deep in the heart of North America  https://clubrunner.blob.core.windows.net/00000050077/Images/Winnipeg.gif and I'm a nut about Nelson-era ships! Having said that - I've been able to touch the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic Oceans. 

 

I have also found this Triton build has really honed my understanding of ship-building and increased my respect for ship-builders before the industrial revolution.

 

Clear skies!

Gabe

[tkay11]

A ROUNDABOUT WAY OF DOING THINGS

I ended the last part of my log with the statement “I need to finish the planking of the gun deck walls, sand down the fore and aft section faces, and then I’ll be working on installing the eyebolts for the cannon and making up the gangway brackets”.

Well, it became a bit more complicated than that.

I did start by planking the gun deck walls, but then worked on the gun carriages in the thinking that it would make more sense to fit the bolts once the guns were done.
Then, once the carriages were done, I reckoned I’d need to place the gangway knees so that I’d be clear about the placement of the bolts. That drew me into a discussion about where the aft guns would be rigged to since the gangway knees cover exactly the correct position (according to the plans) for the bolts for the gun rigging.

So I made the knees following Grant’s Triton build, but then reckoned that it might be better to complete the outer hull planking before working on the inside – in the belief that with all the handling of the outer hull any more done on the gun deck and gangway might well suffer. So I did the planking. And then I realised that unless I documented progress in my log, the task of writing it would become too big and bothersome.

So although I’ve completed the gangway knees, I’ll just concentrate in this section of the log on the guns and the hull planking.

THE GUN CARRIAGE BRACKETS

Having had experience with the small cannon in the Sherbourne, I wanted to avoid the problem of drilling holes through the brackets when they are not parallel to one another. So I made a jig, as documented in the following photos.

First was getting the angles right for the jig.

 

 

 

 

To save time, the jig allows for several pairs of brackets to be cut at once. I’m only making two guns, so there’s more than enough room for the jig.

Setting the height for the table saw was simple using the template I’d made with TurboCAD.
 

 

 

QUOINS

Using a simple template and making the handles with the Proxxon drill being used as a lathe was quite simple:
 

 

 

 

 

 

DRILLING THE BRACKETS FOR THE BOLTS

When it came to drilling the brackets, I decided to double check the verticality of my drill stand, as I’d noticed that when making blocks there seemed to be a very  slight deviation. There was. It was small, but enough to be a problem. Luckily, the solution was the simple addition of a 1.5mm wedge into the stand as shown in the following picture:



And with that corrected, I then unglued the outer part of the brackets jig, placed another template on the side, and drilled away.

CAP SQUARES

I fiddled around a bit with black paper to make the cap squares, but finally thought it would be better if I could make them from brass. My efforts didn’t turn out nearly as well as those of the experts around here, but I still enjoyed the process of learning.


 

 

 

 

LOOPS FOR THE CARRIAGE RIGGING

Instead of using simple bolts for the loops, I decided to use David Antscherl’s measurements for the loops and make some loops of my own. This was far simpler than I expected, using 0.5mm black-coated copper wire as follows.

 

TRUCK STUBS

I decided I’d try out Frolich’s method of making the truck stubs. This involves making a cutter from brass rod, and cutting in a lathe.

 

 
 
 

TRUCKS

It was easy to turn the trucks on a lathe and then cut them off with the table saw.

 

 
 
 

The pins for the trucks were made from bamboo strips passed through a drawplate and then stained.

 

The vertical bolts were then added as brass rod and then blackened with lead patina using the tip of a paintbrush.

 

 

CARRIAGE BEDS AND TRANSOMS

The beds and transoms made and fitted.

 

 

DRILLING THE TRUNNIONS IN THE CANNON

I thought I’d try a more accurate method of drilling the trunnions than the one I used for the Sherbourne. First off was to cut the cannon whilst leaving both ends of the brass rod at the same diameter. This would mean any vertical drilling would be easy.

So after turning the brass cannon on a lathe, I made a box to the exact diameter of the outer stubs. I then made a cover with a template of the cannon that would fit just inside the top of the box. The height of the box was made a little smaller than the diameter of the cannon stubs, and a piece of sandpaper fitted to the inside of the lid: that would ensure that when clamping the jig the cannon would not roll round whilst drilling.

I used as a marker the edge of the reinforce ring nearest the trunnion.

 

 
 
 
 

 

I’ll show the assembled guns in a future post, but my next section will deal with the planking of the hull.

Tony

[tkay11]

PLANKING THE OUTER HULL

I thought I’d have a bash at anchor stock planking for the wales. This proved to be a bit tricky without making a special jig from metal. I did try using a sander, but in the end the method I used was to paste a template on to wood and sand that down using a sanding stick. It would be far better with a jig, of course. Perhaps next time!

Having prepared the planks, an important question was how to place them so that the butt ends would lie over frames. So I used TurboCAD to superimpose the planking outlines layer on the frames layer and move it until the ends covered the frames.

This worked fine for the port wales. And on the port side the planking went easily enough. I decided to leave a section unplanked just to show how the hull was structured.

It also was fairly straightforward to make the trim mouldings using an old hacksaw blade tempered over the gas hob to red heat and cooled slowly before cutting with a grinding wheel and filing.

Unfortunately when it came to planking the starboard side, I found that the forward end of the wale was about 1.5mm higher than the aft end. At first I thought it was to do with the curvature of the hull as I thought I had measured the position for the wale fairly carefully. In this blissful ignorance I started the planking above the wale by trimming the immediately next plank to suit. It was only a little while later that I realised that I had not cut the top strake of the wale correctly, and it was in fact at an angle. Rather than unglue everything (I’m getting really short of wood) I decided I’d live with the mistake. After all, I reasoned, I’m not going to be showing this model to anyone, and I’m only using the exercise to learn. Seeing as I’d learnt from the port side, I reckoned I’d be all right for any future builds. Lessons learned!

I followed David Antscherl’s book on the Fully Framed Model by making the plank underneath the wale to be 4” tapering down to the 3” of the planks beneath.



So I’ll now be continuing with the gangway knees and placing the guns.

Tony

[Eddie]

Quite a few tricks there mate I like it

[AnobiumPunctatum]

What a lot of stuff to read this morning Very nicely done and described.

[G.L.]

Tony,

This is an excellent tutorial. It will certainly be a useful guide for me and many others to continue our work on our project.

Your Triton cross section will be a real masterpiece.

 

G.L.

 

[tkay11]

Thanks very much for the nice comments and likes! It's a joy to receive encouragement from peers who really understand the difficulties, intricacies and mistakes of this hobby and who've all been through the same learning experience.

 

G.L.: You made me laugh out loud when you say 'masterpiece'. I keep trying to explain and show in detail every point at which it clearly is far from being at all masterly (so others can learn from my mistakes), but your comment did make me go to have a look at your Oostends schipje and I can say with full confidence your skills far outweigh my own. I'll be following that with great interest from now on as I have the plans for the Brixham trawler Valerian and I want to build that plank-on-frame. I have not yet found any source giving the framing patterns for those trawlers, so the details you have about the framing on a similar kind of boat are of great use for me. I also admire your drawing and lofting skills -- it's all made too easy nowadays with computer programming with the downside that we lose the thinking behind the drafting skills.

 

Tony

[G.L.]

Hey Tony,

Maybe the book: 'From tree to sea' could be a help for you. It is written by late Ted Frost, a former wooden ship builder from Lowestoft. He discribes the building of a wooden steam trawler. It is a book with plenty of detailed images. (ISBN 0 86138 033 9)

 

Geert

[tkay11]

That's really strange! I have just sent you a personal message asking about the dutch books you mentioned in your build log of the Ostend Shrimper!

 

Thanks a lot for the suggestion. I've just looked online and reserved it from my library!

 

Tony

[Pete38]

Bookmark this page, really nice tutorial on how to. Will be real nice to reference back to this if I ever get to this point on my build. Great job. Thanks so much for all the information and how to in your build log.

[tkay11]

That's very nice of you Pete. But your own build seems to be getting along just beautifully and, dare I say it, much neater than mine!
 

Tony

[tkay11]

Thanks again for more 'likes'!

 

Gregor: Nice to hear from you. How's the modelling coming along, i.e. Irene, Jacinthe? I've just bought the Petrejus book about the brig Irene on eBay and waiting to see it.

 

Tony

[tkay11]

THE GUNS AND THEIR RIGGING

I’m still not ready to show what I’ve done with the gangway knees, as I need to finish talking about the guns.

First, the turning and the blackening. I haven’t quite achieved the level of finish others seem to manage, but for now I’m reasonably happy, and won’t be doing any more until I do another model.

As an aside, I should mention that lots of photographic stores still receive film for processing. My local photo shop has lots of film canisters that they just throw away. So I go down from time to time to collect a handful. They’re great for fluids and sawdust (which I use for filler).

I was even able to blacken my guns in film canisters as they are just the right size.
 

Preparing the capsquares was fun. I have already shown the initial preparation of the capsquares in the previous posting. Here I show how I managed to place the rearmost loop.





Although I made a capsquare eyebolt, I couldn’t find chain small enough to make the key with its chain. Perhaps I’ll do that another time.




“IT IS FUTILE TO DO WITH MORE THINGS THAT WHICH CAN BE DONE WITH FEWER”

I reckon William of Ockham (the one born in 1287) must have been a ship modeller, because the phrase above was one he used. He was following many others (probably also ship modellers) who used the same idea in a variety of guises.

The reason I remembered this phrase was when I came to prepare the gun tackles. At first I used a variety of strops and thimbles, rigging them fully, but every time when it came to frapping them for stowage the result was lumpy. I eventually, and step by step, reduced the rigging by dropping the thimbles, then dropping the pieces that wouldn’t be seen after frapping.



Having decided that, the first thing to do was to find out how far apart the blocks for each tackle should be.

This involved rigging the guns in a rough fashion to their loops in the hull and drawing them tightly to the sides.



In order that the frapping should be as smooth as possible, I then stripped a piece of bamboo through a drawplate till it was 1mm diameter and glued it between the shortened stropping ropes.



The second block was then added and the ropes glued to the bamboo strip.





I could then rig the guns to the bulwarks. You’ll note that luckily for me the deficiencies in my turning of the cannon are well hidden by the gunports!



So I’ll now be continuing with the gangway knees.

Tony

[mtaylor]

Tony, your cannons look great.  One has to remember that macro is not our friend and usually no one ever gets that close.    Excellent work on the frapping.

[Jörgen]

Beautiful!

[tkay11]

Thanks, Jörgen, that's very nice of you. But you should have a look at some of the other Triton builds which are very much better done. All the same, these models are beautiful, and, oddly, even my wife uses that word when she sees it from time to time. Part of the reason for doing this kind of modelling is, of course, to enjoy and appreciate the beauty of these ships internally and externally.

Tony

[Jörgen]

I read a lot at the moment in your build log for sherbourne and comparing your first attempt on gun carriages and these on triton... Well, small statement that there is a quite big increase in skill☺️

 

That is a nice aspect of ship modeling. Almost all think a ship model is beautiful. It is much harder to get them say the same for a tank or aircraft...

[tkay11]

Yes, it's very satisfying to learn these skills. I was thinking this morning that there's nothing really hard about this hobby: it's more a process of trying, learning from others, learning from your own attempts, trying again until you understand your tools, understand the geometry, understand the materials, and let problems simmer until at some time you think of a solution. Intensely absorbing and challenging.

 

Tony

[tkay11]

Aaah! You're a real sweetie, Dirk! Thanks.

 

Tony

[tkay11]

GANGWAY KNEES

I bought two copper plates, 1.9mm and 1.3mm thick, so that I could use Grant’s idea [https://modelshipworld.com/index.php?/topic/492-grants-triton-complete/&do=findComment&comment=62850] of cutting the knees from plate instead of constructing them from wood or brass strip.

In order to allow for differences between the plans and the build, I made extra room on the templates for the junction between knee and ceiling.



I thought it would be a good idea to fix the knees with brass nails. However, later, when it came to fixing them to the ceiling, I found it easier to file them off and glue the knees with rapid epoxy.


Grant decided to keep the tops of his fore knees without the small ledges to hold the brackets. I assume he did this so that it would be easier to solder on the brackets for the skid beams. However, the ledge allows for the fact that the bracket edges up to the gangway planking. At first I thought I’d drill holes in the ledges and then fix copper brackets to them with nails and solder that way.

However, I then thought of another way of fixing the brackets as I thought that making the brackets with copper or brass was not at all straightforward. This involved milling out a square section of pear, as you’ll see in the following photos.




When fitting the brackets, I found myself really liking the fact that I could use my holding jig to keep the section on its side.


I then finished off the brackets by drilling holes in their bases to hold the pins that would tie them to the knees, drilling holes in the sides to hold false pins for the skid beams (to give the appearance that they run through the beams) and painting them black to match the knees.


Next up: the gangway, entry steps and fenders.

Tony