Soleil Royal by Hubac's Historian - Heller - An Extensive Modification and Partial Scratch-Build

[Hubac's Historian]

So, now I have left and right kissing cousins that are not yet identical.

 

I will paste together both profiles, temporarily, and true them up with needle files and a blade before rough contouring.

 

Then, I’ll mount them to my small masonite backer and carve in some detail.

 

I’m not sure this first attempt is going to work out as well as I planned, but maybe it will still be good after the reconciliation.  We’ll see.

[Hubac's Historian]

The reconcilliation of the two halves worked out neatly enough, and now they are twins.

I’ve begun the rounding and relief work, and hope to make moulds and begin casting by the end of the week.

 

In the meantime, I am adding a detail that I often see on the French arsenal-style models to the timberhead faces of the sheer rails.

 

 

While I like this frame and panel effect for its own sake, I am hoping to accomplish a bit of visual trickery, in an effort to minimize one of the design defects of the kit.

 

It is my opinion that the height of and spacing between the timberheads is exagerated, on the stock kit.  The side members of the added frame detail will help close the space between timberheads by almost a 1/16”.  And the paintwork will help to focus the eye on the smaller framed panel; I will paint the frame yellow ocher and I will use the darker ultra-marine blue for the sunken panel.  The moulding on the outside of the caprails, themselves, will be done in gold, as will the caprail dolphins.

 

Edited May 7, 2018 by Hubac'sHistorian

[yancovitch]

something i'm looking forward to see, is your technique for painting all that decoration

[Hubac's Historian]

Fine sable brush; good light; controlled breathing; quality acrylics; the willingness to take as much time as is necessary.  Those are the ingredients of my technique.

 

I used to be a pro at cutting right up to the  ground without bleeding over.  I want, for example, to paint not just the outward face of the wales black, but the top edges as well, for a better three-dimensional effect.  The space between wales can’t really be masked with tape, so it has to be done by hand.

 

It has been a while, since I did this, but as with most things in life - patience should carry the day.  And, of course, there’s always a certain amount of retouching.

 

I am curious to see how well Herbert Tomesan’s patinated wood effect translates to the raised, moulded grain of the Heller kit.  Herbert’s models, while scratch-built plastic, are textured with coarse sand paper, and the darker wash coat gets into the scratches.  It’s all an experiment, but it should be interesting.  And I have plenty of spare plastic, in Henry’s donated hull and my own cut away hull bottom, with which to work up finish samples.

[Hubac's Historian]

Just a few work-in-process shots to show the process of shaping and layering in detail:

 

 

These dolphins, across, are roughly the diameter of a quarter.  The tail detail does not perfectly mirror one side to the other, but it doesn’t need to.

 

I’ve saved the trickiest bit - the heads - for last.  The difficulty is that, at most, each dolphin half is only a heavy 1/32”, but you have to sink about half of that to delineate the beak/mouth.  The eye detail will merely be a suggestion, at best, with a hard line delineating the brow.  The hair is the “easy” part

 

When the head is defined, I’ll go back to the body and add in the arced creases, just to give the surface some visual interest.  Then, it’s off to casting!

Edited May 11, 2018 by Hubac'sHistorian

[Hubac's Historian]

The carving continues; starboard side done, and port not far behind:

Ready for central casting!

The sides still mate nicely.  I’ll be interested to see whether the casting resin holds the fine detail as well as I hope.  I had to do a lot of re-work on the arched port enhancements, even though the carving masters looked eye-clean.

 

Edited May 11, 2018 by Hubac'sHistorian

[yancovitch]

.....looks super!! lots of work...lots of time......hmmmmmmm.....how old are you?

[Hubac's Historian]

Ha!  I’ll be a 45 degree angle in August!  Hopefully, plenty of scraping ahead of me.

[Hubac's Historian]

Or, not hopefuly.  Maybe I’ll embrace better technology like these upstart, results-oriented Millenials .

 

An amendment - having read this over - I still hope to live a really long time!  Going for 9-0!

Edited May 12, 2018 by Hubac'sHistorian

[EJ_L]

Wow! Great job! I hope the casting does take all the details as those look very nice indeed. I still have no clue how I'm going to achieve all those decorations on mine so seeing how yours turn out is very fascinating and gives me ideas.

[Hubac's Historian]

Hi EJ - well, one mould came out great and produced a relatively clean casting, but the other produced a kind of textured surface on the casting.  I noticed that this second mould had some uncured residue of the mould rubber on it’s surface; I suppose that I didn’t quite get the ratio equal for the two-part mould medium.  I’ll re-make that mould and try again.  Will post pictures of the difference later.

 

Yeah, this whole exercise in making miniature carvings is a real head scratcher. I like what I’ve come up with, so far, for this build, but the appearance of these castings will be significantly improved with paint.

 

If I were making an arsenal model, in wood, I would strive for a more crisp and clean presentation because the surface is the finished product.  If my resin carvings pick up some light and shadow, and show some visual interest, then they will be a success.

[yancovitch]

yea...very tricky to mix small amounts of casting material or resins.....have to be so accurate......

[Hubac's Historian]

Okay, so here is an attempt to illustrate the first defective mould next to the much better mould.  The defective mould and casting are marked in red, and on the left.

 

My overhead lighting makes it difficult to really see how much of a difference there is between the first and second castings, but it is significant.

 

This next picture shows the difference in the moulds a little more clearly.

 

You may notice that both these moulds have “cracking” around the perimeter, where it does not impact the casting.  I wonder whether this has to do with the age of the product; although I have kept the stuff in a cool and otherwise neutral location, it has been some time since I first broke the seal on the containers.

 

My port enhancement moulds did not show this cracking.  Maybe one has to skim off and discard the top layer of mould medium, if they haven’t used the product in a while?  I’m using the “Amazing, Super, Marvillosa” mould putty.

Edited May 14, 2018 by Hubac'sHistorian

[Hubac's Historian]

My decision to continue this frame and panel motif through the waist rail will, ultimately, be worth the effort.  The project is not without its challenges, though.

 

Chief among them is finding some way to neatly and uniformly cut stepped haunches into the vertical framing elements, so that they tuck neatly around the sheer moulding, itself.

 

The parts are so tiny, that they can’t really be held and worked with your fingers, alone.  My solution was to use blue tape to mark the shoulder of the haunch onto a steel ruler, and to then pinch the part between the ruler and an emory board, using a spacer block in-line with the piece being cut.

 

I could then use my free hand (holding the 1/8” chisel blade like a pen) to make a series of shallow waste cuts, lengthwise, before aligning the back of the chisel blade with the edge of the ruler, to cut a square shoulder for the haunch.

 

Just as you would for any other repeating part, I had to do a few test pieces, in order to get the dimensions right.  Once I had it, though, the pieces fit snuggly along the length of the waist rail without additional fiddling.

 

What you see, here, has not yet been leveled and a spot of filler, here and there, will be necessary.  I just think this gives much better dimension to the timberheads and gives the whole thing a more finished appearance, befitting of her stature as a Capital ship.

In other news, casting continues alongside this little project, and my castings look good and clean.

Edited May 15, 2018 by Hubac'sHistorian

[yancovitch]

hmmmm.......i think that after you've finished all the modifications, you should make a mold for each complete modified section........you could make castings of them, and sell the enhancements....or, if that's illegal,  make a deal with heller to make them available to potential kit builders.....but then again if  you want to keep it all to yourself, and be the only one in the world with the original hubac....then that's fine too

[mtaylor]

Great work there, on those fiddly bits.  Yancovitch is right. I'm not sure if all the aftermarket PE people pay a royalty or not. 

[Hubac's Historian]

Hey Vic and Mark, thank you for your kind words and comments.  And a hearty thanks to everyone else reading along and for their likes and comments 

 

Vic, you raise an interesting question concerning at what point an existing product has been sufficiently and substantially modified to become a new, independent product.  I suspect that despite changing the dimensions and profile of the upper bulwark pieces, as well as, clearing away 85% of the moulded detail - I suspect that what remains is still substantially and recognizably a Heller product.

 

It is an interesting question, but not one that I have any interest in pursuing.  My hope was to inspire others to take this kit and apply their own interpretation of primary sources; to, in other words, kit-bash the hell out of it and see what they came up with.

 

What remain my intellectual property are the carving masters that I am making to embellish the kit.  I suppose that, if someone really wanted them, I could make new rubber moulds from those masters, for their own use.  I would hope, though, that most would want to take a stab at making their own carving masters and castings.

 

I hadn’t done it before now, and the relative success of it really propels the project forward.  It is what makes all of the truly tedious stages like scraping off perfectly nice existing detail, or building up my sheer railings worth it.  Because I now know that I’ll be able to put my indelible stamp on the kit, just as I drew it on paper.  Nothing about this will be perfect, but it will be mine.

 

As a side note, I have begun taking small-work to work with me.  I have a union sanctioned break and a decent lunch time with which to get something done, and most days I do.  This is so much nicer, in the day, when I’m fresh.

 

Little by little; incremental progress day by day.  It’s been a couple of years now, since I started drawing and modifying, but when I look at how the parts have transformed, I am amazed by the progress of the project.  I’m glad, now, that I didn’t wait around for a “better time” to get started.  I’m also glad that Dan Pariser persuaded me to start a build-log.  The log, itself, is a huge motivator.  Thanks, again, Dan!

[Hubac's Historian]

Work on the railing detail continues.  Pics of that, soon to follow.

 

In the meantime, I found a really excellent photo essay of a 1/350 Heller Soleil Royal, in a diorama setting.  I do not know who made the model, but it is very well done.  The sails, in particular, are really good.  It is hard to achieve a good billowing effect in a larger scale, let alone this small.

 

There's so much to like about this model, but one thing that jumps out at me is the effect of a slightly more pronounced rake of the main mast.  The 1/100 Heller kit has the main mast nearly perpendicular to the waterline; the rake is very slight - maybe a few degrees.  That also appears to be consistent with the Louis Quinze model in the Musee de la Marine.

 

This model, however, appears to have doubled that, and the effect is more in keeping with what I have observed of other contemporary art work from this period.

 

Edited June 3, 2018 by Hubac's Historian

[Hubac's Historian]

After much scraping and re-touching and glue clean-up, I have finished the panel framing of the timberheads:

 

This was tedious, but well worth the effort, IMO.

 

Next, I set about making these scalloped details that define the aft edges of each step in the sheer railing.  I cut these from really thin sheet styrene - maybe .020".  Not sure, exactly, but thin enough not to stand proud of the lowest moulded detail on the upper bulwark pieces.  This same thickness of sheet styrene will also, eventually, be the base of the new frieze.

 

I wanted there to be a bead moulding on the trailing edge of the piece, and considered engraving it into the plastic with a scratch-stock.  Ultimately, I discovered a method of gluing styrene rod, that is about 1/32", to the edge of the part using phenolic plywood as a base, and blue tape as my clamp.

 

Here are the scalloped pieces without their bead mouldings (except for the one wider one):

 

Here is a piece with the straight (and mitered corner!) bead glued in place, before setting the curved bead:

 

Here, I've set the beads tight to the scalloped pieces by burnishing blue painter's tape all around the perimeter:

 

I had made a few extras, and not all of them had perfectly tight joints, but I was able to discard those and use the best.  After lapping the backs on an emmory board, and scraping the faces and edges clean of glue, I trimmed them to size and glued them in place onto the bulwark pieces:

 

Here you can better see the slight moulded detail of the applied bead:

I am not yet sure whether I will actually carve out the scalloped area of the backing styrene - the bulwark, itself.  My plan is to glue one of my discards to Henry's extra bulwark pieces and cut out the scallop to see what that looks like.  Ultimately, I may simply blacken this small crescent with the same flat black that the backs of the timber heads will be painted, and let the yellow ocher of the timberhead framing, and scalloped pieces pop.

 

Before getting into the installation of my sheer railing dolphins, I will next build up the low poop-royal railing, at the stern.  Although, I did cut away the a-typical fourth sheer step, from the stern, I do still need some height back there, to accommodate the poop royal deck, itself, and to conform more closely to the Berain drawing, which shows a timberhead railing, continuously, right up to the stern lanterns.

Edited June 4, 2018 by Hubac's Historian

[Hubac's Historian]

As I mentioned in the last post, I've been busy extending the sheer railing at the poop and poop royal level.  This project necessitated creating a strip of stock that matches the profile of the exposed timberheads, as well as a strip that matches the sheer strake, itself.

 

For the timberheads, I laminated two pieces of .032 strip that I cut to slightly over-wide strips.  I then sanded the laminated piece until the edges were flush and I had matched the stock width of the exposed timberheads - just slightly wider than 1/8".  Then, to match the vertical mouldings with which I had framed all of the timberheads, I edge-glued the same .020" x .060" strip stock that I had used before.  The strip pictured, to the left, is my timberhead strip:

 

The caprail strip is three pieces of .030 x .100 strip that I laminated together, in order to match the thickness of the stock caprail.  To this, I then glued to the outside face a half-round moulding that was just thinner than the thickness of the caprail to leave a shallow flat to either side of the half-round.  A slightly better picture of this stock can be seen here, to the right:

 

 

So, next it was just a matter of adjusting an angled cut so that I could join over-long sections of timberhead from fore to aft, taking great care to match the rake of the timberheads relative to the rising sheer, as well as the spacing between timberheads:

 

Before I started gluing these in place, I had made a styrene tracing template of this section of the sheer.  Once I have all of the timberheads placed, I will use this template to trace a parallel line (to the original sheer strake), and thus trim these timberhead extensions down to about an 1/8", more or less.  I will then be able to fix the new cap rail in place.

 

Simultaneous to this project, I have been relieving my sheer cap dolphins from their backgrounds.  I learned from my earlier port enhancements, and this time, I did not attempt to completely sand away the backing of the casting because I now knew that would result in dolphins that were precariously too think in the tail area, and that the general profile would not be terribly consistent.  So, instead, I sanded away the background to within a heavy 1/64", and then used two of my gouges that neatly fit about 90% of the carving's curves to trim away the background.  The area around the head was easily cleaned with an Exacto blade.

 

I have been using Henry's spare bulwark pieces to figure out exactly how I was going to go about in-letting the dolphins into the sheer strakes.  Several early attempts to hold the dolphin in place and trace where it crossed the sheer strakes with an Exacto knife were just too sloppy for good finish work.

 

I realized, though, that by starting with the belly (the largest overlapping glue area), I could use the same gouge I used to design the carving to mark it onto the bulwark piece.  Once I had notched in the belly, I had a better hold on keeping the dolphin in place while I pressed in the intersections of the tail and snout, using a much smaller sweep of gouge

Edited June 11, 2018 by Hubac's Historian

[yancovitch]

so jolly good

[shipmodel]

Beautiful work on the dolphins, Marc.  They will really set off the rails.  Can't wait to see how they work out.

 

Dan

[Hubac's Historian]

Thank you everyone for the likes and comments. I have been having a ton of trouble with my relatively (or at least to me) NEW iphone7, which among other things, will not lately allow me to log onto MSW.  So, for the time being - while I go to war with Apple (who is apparently dodging their warranty obligation) - I make my posts from my home computer, where it is much less convenient, or timely.  Sorry for the delayed response, here, and to all the other builds I follow.  Frustratingly enough, I can view updates in email, on my phone, I just can't link directly to the sight, from email, to comment.  Also, I lost all my phone contacts.  GOOD TIMES.

 

God!, what I would do for the artillery might of the actual SR, pointed in Apple's direction, right now

 

I will say, though, that I have had much success in-letting dolphins into the upper bulwarks, and have almost finished that stage of the modifications.  I have also installed the "poop royal" sheer railing, on the starboard side, and that looks very good, IMO.  So things are moving along.  Pics and a more developed post to follow.

 

All the best,

 

Marc

 

[Hubac's Historian]

I am nearly done with the in-letting of the sheer rail dolphins.  The Forecastle dolphins were particularly challenging because of the intersection of where they cross the waist rail.  In order to inlet them, you must remove most of the waist rail, just up to where it joins the timberhead.  On both sides, I broke away the waist rail, in short segments, and had to glue these pieces back in place, as I glued-in the outboard dolphin halves, at these locations.

 

Because I am sensitized to it, I don't love cyano, but this is definitely the glue for this application.  The area around the mouth of the dolphin is only a shallow ledge, so there isn't much support, there.  I think I will probably drill for backing pins before I glue on the in-board profile, just to re-enforce the construction.

 

As I will always try to do, I must note that the dolphin and the scalloped hancing piece below it are not in perfect, parallel agreement with each other, as drawn by Berain.  This, for me, is a matter of comme-ci, comme-ca; I could create a parallel relationship, but I think that the hancing piece would suffer, disproportionately, and look completely wrong.  As it is, each element only looks a little wrong to the very small segment of the world population that is paying attention to the fine details of this particular ship.

 

I am fine with it.

 

So, now, a montage of the poop royal sheer railing:

 

In these next two pics, you can see the relative lowering of the sheer - even with the add-back of the poop-royal railing - as compared with the stock kit:

And a few shots with the railing glued in place:

I think it pretty well captures the feeling of the Puget drawing, below, of the Dauphin Royal of 1668:

[yancovitch]

super hubac....always exciting to watch your painstaking details emerge.......just realised that working with plastic is so much cleaner to work with than wood.......don't think i'll build anymore, but if i did, plastic would be my preference now .....i find the medium ca glue seems not as caustic as the thin ca, which evaporates so quickly and gets in the head....keep it up....

[EJ_L]

Those dolphins look great! Trimming that top rail down does match the painting better than the previous design. How does it look in relationship to the deck? Reason I ask is that my plans are showing the forward edge of the royal poop to be at the bottom of the railing with the side bulkheads starting at 0 and rising towards the aft. Granted this is from memory as I am not at home to look at the plans so I may be mistaken but, I remember having this similar design on La Couronne. My concern comes in again with "safety" trying to keep in mind 17th century standards, the shorter rail, at least the forward quarter of it, would be more of a knee height hazard than a protection.

 

Again, I may be off on my thinking or my plans could very well be off as that has proven true multiple times during the build so I was just curious as to how yours were lining up.

[Hubac's Historian]

Thank you Vic and EJ for your gracious comments, and thank you to everyone else for checking in and for your likes!

 

Vic, I'll have to give medium CA a try.  As the build progresses, I will need to use it more and more, so something less noxious would be great.

 

Well, EJ, the Heller kit's poop royal is layed out just as you have described.  Because I have lowered the sheer, somewhat, this will necessitate re-positioning the poop royal deck, somewhat, and also shortening the deck a bit.  The camber of this deck will also be a little more pronounced than on the poop or quarter decks, so as to provide better central headroom to the inhabitants of these quarters.  Toward that end, also, my inclination is to set the deck just below the sheer of this poop royal rail, as seems to be the case in this other Puget drawing of the Royal Louis of 1668:

 

You can clearly see that the figures standing upon the PR, are fully visible, which implies that the railing must be set very close to the deck, itself.  As a practical vantage point for handling of the ship, I'm not sure how much value this deck really had, back in these days; I imagine most of the command took place upon the poop and quarter decks.  If anything, the purpose of this deck would primarily be to make shelter for the lesser officers, who would have been assigned to one of a series of very small state rooms, housed beneath this deck.  Michel Saunier's model is perfectly illustrative of the arrangement of these small state rooms.  It is my observation of Michel's model that lead me to this conclusion, in the first place.  It also makes sense for the chicken coops to reside here, on the PR deck (as Heller modeled it), as they would be out of the way.

 

The final arrangement of my PR deck will be determined by the two small, octagonal ports or windows that I pierce through the upper bulwarks, in the area just forward of the top finishing of the Quarter Gallery.  I suspect that the purpose of these ports wasn't primarily (or even at all) for extra guns, but to provide some light and ventilation to these living quarters.

Edited June 20, 2018 by Hubac's Historian

[yancovitch]

the one i've been using is ''gorilla super glue'', but i've no idea how it performs on plastic........you must be able to get gorilla glues where you are ?

[shipmodel]

Hi Marc - 

 

Progressing nicely.  Congratulations.

 

I understand that there are 'odorless' cyano glues out there.  They are said to be much less irritating.  Maybe worth tracking some down.

 

Dan

 

[Baker]

Great work!

Very nice detailed. Congratulations 

Greetings, Patrick