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[RdK]

Hello Ab and welcome here!

 

Your models are stunning! As is the work of your son!

 

There is a gallery option here, how about you post your ready models there, somehow categorized? That way it would be interesting to see a nice collection of Dutch vessels.

 

I would like to see your paper modelling techniques presented, as it is always a great joy to learn from the best!

 

Rgds,

 

Radek

 

[flying_dutchman2]

Welcome to the forum. Your models that you put in the gallery are beautifully built.

I have been a fan of yours for a long time. I have many books and publications that you have authored in both Dutch and English and have learned many things from that. 

 

I built the Utrecht and now I am working on the Boyer. The plan is to built many of the 17th century Dutch merchant ships.

Your latest book from N. Witsen on shipbuilding has been an education for me. It is an excellent source that I use on my buulds. 

 

When I visit my mother in Heerhugowaard, I always spend a day in Amsterdam and visit the Rijksmuseum and het Scheepvaart museum. Next year when I go I plan to visit both the Maritime museum in Rotterdam and the Zuiderzee museum in Enkhuizen. I take notes and pictures of ships that I plan to built 

 

I do have a question. What are the sizes (height) of the figures you use in your models? I know it depends on the scale of the ship. 

Or do you create them yourself? 

 

Regards, 

Marcus 

[Chuck Seiler]

Ab,

 

     I just bought your book on 17th century Dutch mechants.  I plan on building a pinas.  Your models and photos will be an inspiration and treasure trove of information.

[Ab Hoving]

Well, we will have to end this thread or it will go on forever, as it seems.

Thanks again, all of you.

Good to hear that I have fans :-)).

Some people asked for the figures I put on my decks. I am not really an advocate for placing people on models, but in this case, because of the plans I have with these models, making life-like posters of them I thought it OK.

For this who are interested: I ordered them from an English firm 1001models. Here is the link: https://www.1001modelkits.co.uk/172-scale-figures/233926-red-box-rb72081-english-sailors-16-17th-century--4820316720814.html

 

Maybe a good moment to show my warships here: A Dutch one, Alkmaar, and an English one, Lenox. All in paper. Hope you like them.

 

[EdT]

Welcome to the forum, Ab.  I know I am speaking for many others here when I say that it is an honor to have you join us and share your wealth of knowledge and experience.  Like many others, I have immensely enjoyed your book and drawings on Dutch Merchant Ships.  I look forward to your contributions here.

 

Ed

[hollowneck]

A warm welcome Ab,

Thank you for your posts. Your work and your son's is excellent. What is his name?

You will experience a very sincere and friendly group here. Like many other members, I look forward to seeing and reading your future contributions.

Ron

[andante]

So glad to see you here. I´ve been in love with Dutch ships and boats ever since I saw Björn Landström's drawings of a Dutch flute in his famous book The Ship, not to mention my visit to the National Scheepvaart Museum in Amsterdam in the late 70s.

[Old Collingwood]

On 10/18/2018 at 6:53 PM, Thistle17 said:

You have dwelt where very few have had an opportunity to witness and study the masters of their time. They were an inspiration to all, past and present. I suspect "living" within in this realm you may calibrate your work against theirs. It is hard not to do. Also when it is a work project one cannot always take the time you would otherwise invest if it were your own.

 

Within this forum there are modern day masters that we all, at times, compare ourselves to. For myself I have been inspired by and learned from them. 

 

Welcome to MSW.

 

Joe

Very well said joe.

 

OC.

[Bob Legge]

I Like your books. Especially Witsen, Tasman Ships and Dutch Merchant ships (Text and plans).

Regards,

Bob.

[Kopape]

Beautiful models, Ab!
What amazed me: yellow instead of gold at Lennox !!!
I thought it was going to be gold !!! ???

[Ab Hoving]

This may come as a surprise to many of you, but gold was never used on ships. Except for some small details in the (royal) crest and sometimes on the beakhead lion. Instead yellow oker was used, covered with a shiny varnish, so that it looked like gold in the sunshine. Convince yourselves and watch the contemporary paintings.

I said it before: we tend to make our models far too beautiful.

If you want to make a beautiful object, don't let me take away your pleasure in using gold. But if you want to make a life-like lookalike of a historic ship, forget about gold and use yellow instead.

[Kopape]

8 minutes ago, Ab Hoving said:

This may come as a surprise to many of you, but gold was never used on ships. Except for some small details in the (royal) crest and sometimes on the beakhead lion. Instead yellow oker was used, covered with a shiny varnish, so that it looked like gold in the sunshine. Convince yourselves and watch the contemporary paintings.

I said it before: we tend to make our models far too beautiful.

If you want to make a beautiful object, don't let me take away your pleasure in using gold. But if you want to make a life-like lookalike of a historic ship, forget about gold and use yellow instead.

Thank you very much for this information!

[Daniel Caramagno]

What are the ship carvings made from. Are they carved wood or do you sculpt them using Fimas, Sculpy, or a similar plastic clay product?

[Ab Hoving]

The latter. I use Magic Sculpt, but there are other two-component products. 

[flying_dutchman2]

Questions

When the Dutch build ships for the French, did they do this in France or the Dutch republic?

Did the Dutch use the shell-first method or conventional method? 

Was the Vasa built shell-first? 

 

Marcus 

[Ab Hoving]

The ships for foreign countries were usually built on private shipyards, for instance in Amsterdam, but Dutch shipbuilders also went abroad to build ships there.

I don't know what you call a conventional method, but the Dutch used shell-first up to the end of the 19th century. Only the Admiralty yards were more progressive up from 1725.

The Vasa was certainly built shell first.

[flying_dutchman2]

Ab, 

Thanks for answering my questions. Conventional would be how the Brits or Spanish etc. did it. 

Marcus 

[Ab Hoving]

The question is how the Brits and the Spanish did it. Were their methods comparable? I don't know. We know of two different methods in Holland and they do not seem to be connected. Conventional is a strange term in this respect...

[Jaager]

Ab,

Some of the old illustrations and ones that you have used, show the erection of about 3 to 5 bends along the keel  that affect and maybe effect the exact shape the shell takes.  

Was this a part of the shell first method or the alternative one?

 

Dean

[Ab Hoving]

Shell first as described by Nicolaes Witsen (1671), means that the planking of the bottom and the turn off the bilge was done first. Frame parts were installed after that.

The alternative way, as described by the Delfthaven shipbuilder Cornelis van Yk (1697), uses four pre-erected frames, to which splines were attached that defined the hull shape. Frame parts were added and the planking was done after that.

The remarkable resemblance is that in both methods no preliminary plans were made.

Two different methods with a distance of less than 50 kilometers between them. I studied these during half a century and still don't understand how such a thing was possible.

[Jaager]

Ab,

Thank you.  

A feud between two powerful shipbuilders each with an epic stubborn streak - perhaps a script writers explanation.

 

Pieces are coming together for me on the evolution of west European Atlantic coast building methods.   The method describer by van YK 

differs from the English et al. frame first method by not all that much.  For this initial frame first method, no plans are needed

if the key individual can "see" them in his mind.  It is a result of being born a genius.  It can't be taught, the in your mind part,

but if lesser followers in other countries like this method and its more predictable results, they can learn to do on paper, what the first guy did in his head.

While back home,  the rules of the first guy are used. 

 

Dean

[Ab Hoving]

My views on the matter of the development of shipbuilding in Europe is extremely limited. I have only been busy with Dutch efforts. There are very good studies done, for instance by Larry Ferreiro: 

• Ships and Science: The Birth of Naval Architecture in the Scientific Revolution, 1600-1800 MIT Press 2006. ISBN 9780262311472 OCLC 743198863
• Bridging the Seas: The Rise of Naval Architecture in the Industrial Age, 1800-2000

Mr Richard Unger has written something about the subject too if my memory serves me well:

• Dutch Ship Design in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (1973)
• Dutch Shipbuilding before 1800: Ships and Guilds (1978)
• Ships and Shipping in the North Sea and Atlantic, 1400-1800 (1997)

I think you can find answers to your questions in those books. I'm just a model builder and not even a good one :-).

[Jaager]

It is not the design aspect that is my interest.  It is something a lot more mundane. 

It is the mold loft product and what it actually was.  I think the present description is

true for very late 19th C thru early 20th C.   It was probably heavily influenced by what was

necessary for iron and steel.  Materials that require much more precision and engineering, than does wood.. 

After 30-40 years of the dominance of iron,  I think a short lived fad for large wooden hulls took hold and

those workers and architects who were back to building larger wooden hulls had probably been filtered thru

the 'new, modern' iron techniques and applied that to wood.

 

At the beginning - the era of van Yk - starting with 4 lofted bends and all the other timber shaping done by eye on the ways,

it was probably a long evolution until every timber was shaped using a pattern from the mold loft. I doubt that

even by 1860,  that degree of pre engineering was at all common.  I suspect that the replacement of wood with iron for the larger hulls

produced a situation where those with the necessary skills and experience to eyeball the needed wood cuts aged out and they did not

pass on what they did to enough workers to support a large industry. 

 

Our practice of lofting every frame timber is a copy of what was done around 1900,  but not the replication of actual practice before 1860 that we pretend it is.

 

[Ab Hoving]

I totally agree with you on the last point. For me it even the question if Van Yk used a mold loft floor at all. In my opinion it is very well possible that the shape of the four initial frames was drawn on the wood right away, without a drawn design on paper or on a floor. Rules of thumb work that way. Taking the shape for a new frame-part was done from the splines that that were fastened to the four frames. Even after 1725, when the first Dutch war ship (Twikkeloo) was built on the Rotterdam admiralty wharf by Paulus van Zwyndregt after a pre-drawn design, the same yard only placed 10 or 12 pre-drawn initial frames on the keel and proceeded taking the shapes of the missing parts from the ship itself. The advantage was a obvious: The demands for the quality of such a frame-part was much lower that whatever was made after a drawing. So the hybrid method of working after a drawn design and the shell-first method actually continued in the practice on the yard for ages.

[Jaager]

Following your encouragement - I will let the reins go a bit looser. 

I followed Anthony Deane's design instructions for a bit.   I tried to use his Body section method to produce the shapes of stations at every second bend.  It would have saved a lot of lofting.  His was a version of whole moulding.  It works OK using intervals similar to those that van Yk described - 4 points along the keel and since his was a drafting table method = using waterlines and buttock lines to fine tune the shape.  Three of the whole moulded sections can be "slud" (moved) along the keel to get fatter or slimmer at the ends - fine tuning the design.   But it is too blunt a tool to be effective for any shorter intervals.  I thank you for providing the key to this insight.

 

For presently used modeling methods for POF - lofting  the outer and inner edges for both faces of every timber - the Body plan is mostly of no use.   For pre 1860,  I believe the Body plan was everything for the mold loft.  It was only the stations that were drawn on the floor at full size.  The patterns for the mid line of the bends that were at the position of each station was what was sent to the wood shaping crew. 

POB sort of uses this method, except that for kits too many stations in the middle get dropped and in any case, the surface area for the lands is not as wide as is really needed.

 

I think we can thank Dizzy Dean for introducing slud as the past tense of the verb = to slide.

Edited October 3, 2019 by Jaager

[Ab Hoving]

Peculiar.

Van Yk describes the location of all of the four frames (of which two of them were identical) and does not mention the possibility of sliding. He does give a trick to derive the aft one from the fore one, counting in the amount of greater depth at the stern and the narrowing of the width of the hull.

Archaeologists found a lot of traces and proof for shell-first building in Dutch shipwrecks, but so far I have never seen a report dealing with a typical 'Van Yk'-method built ship.

There are so many questions to be answered and there is so little knowledge on the subject... The more I learn, the less I know.

[flying_dutchman2]

Different question. 

Book: The Ships of Abel Tasman. 

 

Pg 33, pen painting from vd Velde de Elder.

How can you tell a 600 ton yacht from the rest?

Marcus 

[Jaager]

The sliding part is my conjecture.  Whole moulding tends produce hulls with a generally similar conformation.  Were I a designer at the time and was interested in producing something faster or more stable,

doing the experiment of moving the fore and aft design stations and observing the effect.  would only involve erasing lines that were a failure.  Granted - the vellum was probably expensive and doing a lot of handling of elemental lead was gradually making the draftsman dumber.

 

I have done a very preliminary lofting  of the 7P IV  ,  the big one that followed the famous 7P,   compared to English and French contemporaries there is a long section in the middle where the shape does not change.  It seems that more than a few 17th C Dutch plans available to us replicate the mid ship bend a bit more than those of other countries. It reminds me of a barge with a long sculpted  bow and stern  as opposed to the oft duplicated illustration of a fish superimposed on the profile of a race galleon - an attempt at streamlining?  Where change is constant.  Home waters that are a bit shallow -  a deeper wedge shaped hull would sort of not work out too well? 

[Ab Hoving]

Marcus:

You cannot tell the difference. It is a matter of background. Apart from the big 'retourships' the VOC also built small warships, which they called 'yachts'. In admiralty circles such ships would be called 'frigates' and they looked very much the same. The only difference is in the decoration of the stern. Usually a frigate was a man-of-war with less than 40 guns.

 

Jaager:

I have a document written by Charles Bentam, the English shipbuilder who worked for the Amsterdam admiralty in the second quarter of the 18th century. He describes his method of design and starts with the location of the frames. The location was important for where the gun ports were placed. He is surprised that the Dutch cut their gun-ports after completion of the framing of the upper works. The conclusion must be that the idea of sliding frames was no option.

The philosophy about how a ship should move through the water differed from location to location and from time to time. In the 17th century the Dutch idea of how a ship should sail was that it should more or less slide over the water, instead of cutting through it. The comparison with a duck's breast was made. This way of design produced very 'dry' ships, totally different of what we see in the age of the tea clippers, which were sharp and sailed more under than on the waters.

[Jaager]

Ab,

I am not suggesting that actual frames would slide.  Deane constructed about 4 design cross sections, the dimensions of their arcs were determined by various lines drawn on the initial profile - OK,  their position determined their shape - so no sliding.   It just seems to me that by later "adjusting" their location, interesting effects would be seen in the shape of the hull.  I guess as long as the accepted rules were followed for design, a dud would not end a career.  Take an off the wall chance on a design and if that is a dud, it would on to sweeping out a stable for  a living.

 

I see from the NMM plans that the RN seemed to be obsessed with using the top timbers to frame the sides of the ports.  There are some labor intensive jogs drawn on some.  I think the Dutch were in the decided majority in placing the ports where they wanted them irrespective of where the top timbers were.  The majority seemed to have more wood higher up, so weakness was less of a problem - just add more wood to the other side of the timber. .  The RN seems to have been rather spare with framing in the upper works.   ---- if you plank everything above the LWL in and out on a model, it does not matter anyway.  I make it a solid wall of framing up there.  It locks the frames in position and turns a fragile area into a strong one.