HMS Bellona 1760 by SJSoane - Scale 1:64 - English 74-gun - as designed

[albert]

Fantastic work.

[Chuck]

That looks just perfect...I am so thrilled all those window inserts worked out.   

 

Chuck

[dvm27]

That's a flawless collaberation between you and Chuck. If you were going for that contemporary ivory look you nailed it!

[Hubac's Historian]

I’m at a loss for words, Mark, but you know how I feel about the project.  Just awesome!

[SJSoane]

druxey, scrubby, Albert, Chuck and Marc, thanks so much for your kind comments. I am feeling so slow on progress these days, even though I am working at it pretty diligently. It really helps keep me going to get these great notes of appreciation from all of you!

 

I cannot sing the praises of Chuck's work enough. Working with exceptionally tight tolerances, his window frames fit like a glove. The filigree work above is going to be an even greater exercise in close tolerances, and I am still working on how to captures these in rabbets strong enough to hold against a surface curved in two directions. I'll post some drawings when I get a little close to a final idea.

 

And I continue to be amazed at the design of the Bellona in all of its detail. Those guys really knew what they were doing!

 

Mark

[SJSoane]

My main goal now is to construct the stern balcony enough to get drawings to Chuck for the fretwork. But before that I have to build a stub deck at the end of the quarterdeck. But before I can do that, I had to build the stern of the upper deck with the rudder cover and benches, since they will be covered up once I install the stub deck above. And before I could build the rudder cover, I needed to mock up the rudder head to ensure it will turn freely in the rudder cover. And on it goes.....

 

So, here is the mocked up rudder head, checking clearances:

And then the rudder cover itself. Note in the first photo, I somehow built it too wide. The second photo below shows the trimmed down version. I had to selectively deconstruct the cover, then slice out the excess, and reassemble. It reminded me of chopping tops for hot rod models when I was a kid!

 

 

I discovered that if the rudder cover top surface stays below the level of the stern lights, there is not enough room under it to ship the rudder. It will have to be removed and then reinstalled after the rudder is in place.

 

So when I built the benches on either side, I made all of this a slide fit so the rudder cover can be taken out later to ship the rudder when I get around to building it.

 

The benches proved to be unexpectedly difficult to build. They had to accommodate different curves at different levels, since this is all sitting on the fore side of a convex upper counter whose curves are different from the upper deck upon which the benches sit. It was a lot of tedious trim and test, trim and test, for several days. But now it is done, ready to be covered up by the quarterdeck stub deck above. At least I could get some sense of the standard of living for the officers. Not bad, sitting on the bench, elbow on the window sill, looking out at the sea through the wall of windows....

 

Mark

 

 

 

[jdbondy]

Wow Mark, that looks great!

[Mike Y]

The bench really ties the room together  Very realistic and human-like! And a neat description of the dependency chain in the beginning of the post  

[FrankWouts]

Very impressive and beautiful work....
Frank.

[druxey]

A thought: Is it possible that the 'lid' of the cover was removeable or hinged  in order to ship or unship the rudder?

[SJSoane]

Thank you, Frank, for your kind comment. And druxey, I think the removable or hinged rudder cover is an interesting idea. It would be way easier than removing the entire cover, and a tackle rigged over the rudder head could pull straight up.  Regarding the model not the real ship, I found it most convenient to construct the rudder cover as one unit, to keep things square and shipshape. The five sides would have been difficult to keep in alignment to each other without the top as a guide.  So my entire unit will have to slide out now that I have the beginnings of a quarterdeck above that will prevent pulling straight up. I notice that in Rob Napier's Legacy of a Ship Model, pp. 83-85, he and David Antscherl speculated on a similar problem in the Princess Royal model, with a rudder cover struggling to accommodate shipping a rudder once the cover had been installed in the model. Always fun to see how our 18th century predecessors sometimes struggled with the same things we struggle with!

 

[SJSoane]

Oops, sorry, I forgot to thank JD and Mike for their encouraging comments. JD, I am getting closer to cutting into that boxwood for the sculptures on the stern. Just want to get past the decorations on the quarter galleries and the balcony....

[jdbondy]

Oh good! I have been wondering if the boxwood had been incorporated at all yet.

[SJSoane]

Time for an update, even though things are in flux. I have finally tackled the balcony and the fretwork on the quarter galleries that correspond to the fretwork in the balcony. First a bit of a re-visit on this detail that I knew was going to be the most challenging part of this build so far.

 

In the images below I am showing the first Bellona model built ca. 1760 followed by the second Bellona model representing the ship after its major refit 20 years later. My project is reconstructing the Bellona as she was originally designed, as shown in the original admiralty drawings and in this first model.

 

However, the first model did not show the quarter galleries, and so I have had to interpolate what the original quarter galleries might have looked like, related to the original balcony and then to the quarter galleries shown on the second model.

So let's look at these more carefully to see what is the same and what is not.

 

The original model shows a very distinctive fretwork on the face of the balcony, which we can assume was meant to be open as seen on the second model. The vertical stanchions in the original model are painted red, with a covering filigree subtly projected out forward of the fretwork within the rectangular panels.

 

Note also that the first model balcony sweeps in a gorgeous serpentine curve from one side to the other. the second model, on the other hand, curves the balcony into a sharp corner one panel in from each side. It took me a long time also to realize that the first model is wider outboard of the outermost rectangular panels, with a more substantial bracket between the panel and the carved female figures.

 

I saw the necessity of this extra width when I tried to reconcile the stern design with the original admiralty plans. The extra width was needed to make the quarter galleries big enough at their after ends. This then had a knock-on effect for the windows below. which also needed the extra width. You can see my interpretation of how this might have worked in the line drawing below, a little bust on a pedestal.

 

Final thing to note before leaving the balcony. The original model has this beautiful filigree detail over the red stanchions. The second model did not even attempt to recreate this, choosing instead to drill crudely arranged holes in white panels. I had sympathy for their plight, attempting to cut these exceptionally fine filigrees. My own efforts at this failed spectacularly. Then I thought, I'll bet Chuck and his laser cutter can accomplish what the 18th century model builders had failed to do. Before looking at this in more detail, I'll turn to an overview of the quarter galleries themselves.

 

 

 

Following are the quarter galleries on the second model. The model builder continued his scheme from the balcony, with stanchions represented as crude drilled holes in white panels.

 

I decided in contrast that I would continue the first model scheme of fine filigree over red stanchions, keeping the dark blue paint behind the rectangular patterns. I drew up the quarter gallery pattern with this idea, and it is shown here as a colored pencil paper pattern:

 

While working on this, I began to realize that this entire panel was a different shape compared to the one on the second model. You can see that the second model panels are much more rectangular with more upright sides, mine were turning out with more extreme sloping sides. And mine had a much stronger sweeping backward curve at the fore edge. What was going on?

 

It took me some time finally to realize that the first Bellona model and admiralty drawings show a much smaller upper quarter gallery off the quarterdeck. Here is the original admiralty drawing immediately below. Note the more extremely curved forward edge of the panel between the lower and upper windows, needed to reconcile the larger windows below with the much smaller windows above. Compare this to the quarter galleries in the second model shown above; the windows above and below in the second model are almost the same size, needing a less extreme slope from the one to the other in the fretwork panel between them.

 

I think we can assume that when the first captain saw that the quarter gallery of his brand new ship was substantially smaller than the one below shared by his officers, he strongly suggested that this would need to be rectified in any subsequent re-build!

 

Pressing on, I worked up the drawings of the panels and sent them to Chuck, who returned the most beautiful fretwork panels and delicate filigree stanchion covers. I am showing them here loosely located; they still need to be glued down to the concave surface to pull them in more tightly. And I still need to paint the blue backgrounds behind the fretwork panels:

 

These needed sanding down in thickness from the thinnest plastic Chuck could provide. I did this by trapping the plastic in a frame as thick as the final desired thickness, giving me a gauge for sanding down to the frame:

 

Meanwhile, I started work on the balcony itself, so I can draw these final panels and stanchions for Chuck's laser magic.

 

It frankly took a great deal of trial and error to craft the geometry of the serpentine curve. It needs to fair into the curved side panels and then reverse its curve twice. Also, the upper balcony railing is narrower in athwartship width but still needs to slope back enough in its narrower space to maintain at the center of the balcony the backward slope of the side panels.

 

I could not visualize how this would work. I tried carving a blank out of basswood, which helped, and then built a card blank multiple times to keep refining the curves until they seemed right.

 

Then I worked out the actual geometry in plan:

 

This gave me the patterns for roughing out the  lower and upper moldings, shown here. the blocks are spacers to keep the two moldings parallel to each other while I refine their fit against the side panels. These are still much oversized, until I get all of the parts to talk to each other handsomely.

 

I intend to trap the laser cut fretwork in rabbets as shown here:

 

I now need to create an accurate pattern of the shape between the two railings, to draw the fretwork and filigrees for Chuck. The saga continues!

 

Mark

 

 

[CiscoH]

Amazing!  Thank you for the detailed explanation.  i had to read it several times and go back and forth between pictures.  it makes a lot of sense.

[druxey]

Nice analysis of the problems involved, Mark. Years ago, before the wonders of laser cutting, I had the same issues with the balcony on Polyphemus. I had to resort to using polystyrene sheet, drilled and scalpel blade cut. At least the rail was solid behind the fretwork! However, the ribbonwork was dimensional as well. I remember a lot of card and paper pattern cutting!

 

Your work on this area so far is exemplary.