Spray by Tomculb - FINISHED - BlueJacket Shipcrafters - ⅜” to 1’

[BobG]

Those are wonderful sails, Tom, and your sail making tutorial is excellent too. I had no clue as to how to make sails without using a sewing machine which, like you, I know nothing about using a sewing machine. When I decide to make some sails, I'll use your method. Thanks!

[Josh Williamson]

Tom -  fantastic idea on the wire to give the sails some shape.  I think that is a clean-looking method, and certainly easier than my "gluey slurry and shaped plywood" method.  I may have to try this way for the next one.  Good work as always, and Happy Holidays!

[Tomculb]

My first step in attaching the main to its spars was putting together something that looks somewhat like mast hoops.  The kit-supplied brass rings to me just look way too big and heavy, even if they are cut to create a smaller diameter. I used thread instead, tying it around a slightly larger dowel (the 5/16” one that came with the kit) than the ¼” one I used for the mast.  I used heavily diluted white Elmer's School Glue on the hoops (and on the knots of course) to encourage the hoops to  maintain their round shape, and slipped the hoops off the dowel when the glue was mostly dry, but not so dry as to be difficult to get them off the dowel.

 

The forgoing description sounds quite a bit simpler than what really occurred.  I spent at least a couple of hours finding just the right thread.  Too thin and it didn’t maintain the desired round shape; too thick and the knots became enormous and unwieldy.  Once I found the Goldilocks thread -- not too thin, not too thick -- it went pretty smoothly.  Also I found the dowel to be a little larger than I wanted, so I wrapped the thread quite loosely around a spare ¼” dowel, which seemed to be about right. The hoops are a little looser than appears in the photo below, which is what I hoped for.

 

The plans show the mainsail lashed to the boom and gaff with a spiral of line running the length of the spar.  Boats of that era I have seen (or more likely replicas) are tied on with a bunch of separate lines, tied parallel to each other.  Though my experience is limited in that regard, I decided I liked the look of the latter better, and at the risk of being historically inaccurate, that is how I proceeded.

 

Now to do some rigging, namely the main halyard and the peak halyard.  The kit comes with some good looking (i.e. looking like rope) thread, but it’s white and must be dyed.  I have lots of thread of different thicknesses and color, left over from previous builds and pilfered from my wife’s sewing box (she hasn’t sewed anything in decades), and it wasn’t hard to find some I liked.  I also read somewhere in the last few weeks that all the kinks and coils thread seems to have off the spool disappear if you wet the thread and then let it dry.  Maybe I’m the only person on these boards who didn’t know that, but somehow that bit of useful knowledge had escaped me.  It makes a big difference:

 

The kit comes with britannia metal blocks which need to be trimmed and painted, but I have a lot of wooden blocks left over from previous builds, and I prefer the look of natural wood.  The kit also supplies some wire for stropping the blocks. I tried wire some years ago and failed miserably. But I have some thin but very strong fly tying thread that for me works very well. The thread isn’t too large to scale as the wire would be (imho), and with a drop of diluted white glue on the knots, they hold well even after you cut the excess thread off right next to the knot (although I have certainly cut a few too close to the knot). I try to tie the blocks on so they will line up with the course of the rigging running through them, but blocks and knots can be stubborn sometimes, and holding one in the proper alignment while a drop of glue absorbs and dries can be very helpful.

 

I mentioned in a previous post finding the mast bands to be a little smaller than I felt the mast diameter should be at the top.  When I bought some Chartpak black tape to do the water line, I also bought some narrower (1/16”), flat white tape to simulate the mast bands at the top of the mast.

 

Back to the mast hoops, they ended up on the mast at a variety of angles, but with some gentle clamping and more drops of diluted glue, I got them all pretty close to being parallel with the water line.  I see that one appears to need a little more persuasion. 

 

The kit comes with two large cleats, and the only place cleats are shown on the plans is on either side of the boom, one for the outhaul, and one for the toppinglift. It doesn’t seem to me that cleats of that size would ever be put on a boom, and I found some smaller left overs from previous builds to put on the boom, and also at the foot of the mast for the downhaul.  Dampening some black thread helped make it hang slack as the toppinglift (which would never be taught while the main is raised), but unfortunately I ended up with some waviness at the top I will have to work on.

 

The rigging of the downhaul shown below is strictly the product of my imagination.  I don't know whether a typical downhaul of that era would attach to the boom or the sail, but attaching it to the sail would entail getting it around the boom jaws, so I attached it to the boom.

 

Next up -- deck furniture, then jib and headstay.

[dsmith65]

Lots of helpful tips in there. I didn't know about the thread and water either, I really like your mast hoops.

[Josh Williamson]

Really liking how this is coming together.  Way to go Tom!

[Tomculb]

The stays for the bowsprit are chain.  As supplied the chain is brass, of course, so first thing I did was dip it in Blacken-It to blacken it.  The kit supplies four pad eyes, that are larger than the supplied eyebolts, and I used three of them to attach the chains to the hull. The other ends attach to the ring already affixed to the bowsprit.  The instructions suggest using fine gauge wire to attach the chains.  I’m not sure I have wire that is fine enough to fit through a link in this chain, and I have no confidence in my ability to bend the wire deftly enough to make the attachment look realistic.  Instead I used my fly tying thread, wrapping it twice through the eye and the last link on the chain, tying a tiny square knot, and adding a drop of diluted white glue before cutting off the loose ends of thread. That seemed to work pretty well.

 

 

 

Then onto the cabins and the dinghy.  I built and set them aside about ten months ago; nice to be able to now install them on deck.The first thing that needed to be done was to sand the bottoms of the for and aft walls of each cabin, which are straight as built, to fit the curved camber of the deck.

 

Others have mentioned that there doesn’t seem to be enough room for the cabins, dinghy and the barrels as depicted in the plans.  The reason is that the plans show a slightly smaller dinghy, that is slightly tapered at the stern as one would normally expect.  The supplied parts for the dinghy show no taper at the stern.  As explained in the instructions and described in Slocum’s book, the dinghy was built by cutting a longer dory in half and attaching a new transom, so the stern on this boat (contrary to what is shown in the plans) is wide, being the midships point on the boat it was constructed from.  With a fair amount of dry fitting, and primarily nudging the forward cabin a little farther forward, I got it all to fit.

 

The water barrels come nicely turned (nice because I don’t own a lathe).  I stained them with the same Minwax English Oak I used on the deck.  I then used a black Sharpie pen to paint the bands on them. I test painted on some basswood, and found the pen ink bled badly into the wood creating pretty messy strips.  The barrel wood is denser and probably less susceptible to bleeding, but before using the pen, I gave the barrels a coat of matte polyurethane, then applied the ink, which didn’t bleed at all.  Access to the forward cabin from the starboard side is a little tight, but I think Slocum will manage it.

 

Next was construction of the pinrail attached to the front of the front cabin.  Building the pinrail was straightforward, except that I made the legs a little shorter than the the height of the ledge I glued to the front of the cabin, since the plans show the pinrail parallel to the water line rather than parallel to the deck.  I cut about half an inch off a couple of steel pins, drilled holes for those tips in the legs, poked the deck with the pins, and then drilled holes in the deck to accept the tips of the pins, all to help with alignment when I was ready to glue it in place to to add a little strength. Once the pinrail was in place but not glued, I lined up the forward cabin with it and glued the cabin in place. Note that the pinrail extends a bit forward of the mast, contrary to the plans, but enabling the water barrels to be installed with a little room to get around them.  Incidentally what is shown in the pictures below is not the mast but another quarter inch dowel I had available.

 

Before gluing the pinrial in place, I needed to install the mast. Up to this point the mast and mainsail assembly have spent most of their lives dry fitted in a short piece of 2 by 4.  As mentioned previously, the mast is ¼ inch, as shown on the plans, rather than 5/16” as supplied and described in the inventory. The Britannia mast boot is designed for the larger diameter, and I discovered that the difference in size is noticeable. So I took a short length of the tape I used for the waterline, wrapped it around the mast at the appropriate place, and painted it white.  In the third picture below, you can see that I painted the brass belaying pins flat brown, put a few of them in the pinrail, and tied down the main and peak halyards.  Coiled line will be hung on those belaying pins later.

 

With the mast assembly in place, I then rigged the main sheet. The kit contemplates a 2 to 1 purchase (no double blocks supplied), but that just didn’t seem adequate for poor Mr. Slocum.  I made it 3 to 1, and then added another block and cleat amidships.  Totally the creation of my imagination; I have no idea how it was done on the original Spray, and it’s not evident from the plans.  In the pictures you can see that I tied a ring on the block attached to the traveler, and a slightly smaller one for the block attached to the bale on the boom. To give the impression of wind pulling the sheet taut, I rigged some temporary thread to pull the boom outward, then put several drops of diluted white glue on the sheet, which dried sufficiently stiff to push the boom out and make the sheet taut.

 

Finally, the jib.  As I did with the mast, I used (thinner) thread to create something akin to mast hoops to fit around the headstay.  Instead of a dowel, I used thick (maybe 1mm) wire to wrap the thread around.  You can get an idea of the finished product in the picture. 

 

I wanted to seize both ends of the headstay to their respective fittings.  I know how to seize the end of real rope and I have done so many times, but to use it at this scale is for me an exercise in frustration.  Instead I tied some thinner thread around both pieces of headstay, then tied about 10 half hitches around both lines, to simulate seizing.  The result is a little messier than true seizing, but small enough to be a reasonable facsimile of the true thing.

 

I gave a little thought (probably overthought) to how to attach the tack and the halyard block, since on a real boat those two attachments would be just inside the places where the headstay attaches.  I didn’t want the sail to deflect the headstay any more than necessary.  In both cases I tied the sail and the block to the the same fitting the stay is attached to, but wrapped some fine thread around the mast and the bowsprit and the attaching thread, so as to bring the point of attachment down (as to the halyard block) and in (as to the tack) from the point of attachment of the headstay.  I will probably paint white the thread wrapped around the mast, and may try the same with regard to the thread around the bowsprit, but in the latter case I’ll give some thought to the risk of getting paint on one of the stay chains.

 

Finally (for this installment) before installing the jib, I tied a couple of small blocks onto the clew, giving Slocum a 2 to 1 purchase on the jib sheets. Hard to imagine that would be enough without winches. Per the plans, I ran the sheet through a block just inboard of the stanchion to which the forward chainplates are attached, and then back to a pair of cleats either side of the aft cabin.  The latter not per the plans, as they do not provide any guidance on where to lead the sheets.  

 

One of the benefits of having run the cordage for the sheets through some water is that it was easier to give them a somewhat realistic look without regard to how taut they were pulled.  Minimal tautness made the leeward sheet look nice and taut.  The loose windward sheet came out of its clew block a bit too stiff (the two ends of the sheet came out of the block in something of an arc, rather than falling pretty straight to the deck), but I applied a little tension with a clamp, put a drop of diluted white glue on either side of the block, and got the look I wanted.

 

As I write this I'm just getting started on the unusual mizzen assembly.  Next installment . . .

[BobG]

She looks fantastic, Tom! I'm currently reading Joshua Slocum's book, "Sailing Alone Around the World," so your model adds some very good visual perspective for me. It's an amazing story of his love for adventure, the sea and his boat and really captures a sense of time and place near the end of the 19th century.

[dsmith65]

Nicely done Tom, she's coming along.

[Ken_2]

Your attention to detail is inspiring.  Your detail on the cabin trim is setting a higher bar for me.  I've not yet started the rigging, but I am sure your example will increase my skill when I get to that part.  I hope to achieve half of what you have done!  Thanks

Ken

[Josh Williamson]

Looking really great Tom!

[Tomculb]

On to the mizzen assembly.  To my eye it really looks like an odd one.  Spray was originally rigged as a sloop, and Slocum converted it to a yawl in Brazil part way through his famous voyage.  The kit’s plans show how to rig her as a sloop if desired (longer boom and bowsprit and correspondingly larger main and jib), and I have to admit I had a few moments of regret that I didn’t opt to do that.  I think she’s a prettier boat as a sloop, but as a yawl more . . . interesting.

 

First thing I did was to use my jeweler’s saw to cut out the bottom mast bracket, which attaches to the bottom of the transom (the kit doesn’t include a laser cut one).  With practice I think I’m getting better at using this tool, and I’m beginning to wonder how I got along without it.  I added some pins to give it some additional strength attached to the transom.

 

Next I dry fitted the Britannia “yoke” to the sides of the hull at the stern.  It slopes back at maybe a 25° angle.  The top mast bracket is an integral part of this fitting, which presented a couple of issues.  As cast, the bracket sticks out perpendicular to the plane of the yoke, which means it angles down rather than being horizontal when the yoke is installed.  I wasn’t sure I could bend it, but in an exchange of messages, Mr. BlueJacket assured me that Brittania isn’t brittle and bends easily.  He of course was right.  

 

Second issue was that the hole in the upper mast bracket was filled with a big glob of Britannia metal. There was a hole barely large enough to get my jeweler’s saw blade through, and I was able to cut out a hole.  A little filing with a rat tail file and I had a hole large enough to slide the bottom of the mast through.

 

The mizzen spars I tapered with a sanding pad and my electric drill, as I had with the main spars.  Similarly, I stained the mast with Minwax English Oak, painted the ends of the mast white, and painted the boom and gaff, along with the Britannia fittings, entirely white. I then attached to the gaff a wire bale to attach it to the mast and an eyebolt for the halyard.

 

Next I tied the sail (finished months ago) to the gaff and boom, in the same manner as the main.

 

Of course no boat with a transom is complete without its name and home port on the transom, and the kit supplies a decal for that purpose. I decided I better put it on before getting the mast in place. I’m quite certain that the last time I put a decal on anything was close to sixty years ago, so I approached this with some caution. The kit is supplied with two small iterations of “Spray” for the bow and “Spray Boston” in much larger letters for the transom. I sacrificed the smaller ones for some practice runs on a scrap piece of wood, and as advised by a YouTube video I found, I put a coat of satin varnish on before one decal and not the other.  The varnish didn’t do anything positive that I could determine.  More online advice was to put a couple of coats of matte finish (polyurethane in my case) to give the gloss decal a flatter or more matte appearance. I tried it and didn’t notice that it made much difference, although the decal proved to be less glossy in appearance than I feared, with or without the matte finish.  There was also advice to cut the decal as close to the letters as possible, which made a lot of sense and which I did to a slight extreme (note the left side of the “B” in some of the pictures below).  Probably the most important thing I realized in sliding the decals on to the transom is that if it ran a wet finger along the transom before putting the decals on, they slid around easily enough that sliding them into place exactly where I wanted was pretty easy.  To determine exactly where I wanted I fashioned the guide you can see in the pictures below.

 

Now back to the yoke.  I decided that it wouldn’t look good, and wouldn’t have sufficient structural strength (at least on the real thing) unless the ends on either side were flush against the hull.  To do that, I had to cut notches in the cap rail and the rub rail on either side.  I think that took more psychological fortitude than real effort. Then I had to bend and coax the the yoke into a shape and position such that i) the mizzen mast was perfectly vertical port and starboard, ii) the mast had a slight rake aft to match the main mast, iii) the ends were in fact more or less flush against the hull, and iv) the yoke looked somewhat symmetrical when viewed from astern.  This took at least an hour to two of work, with sufficient focus that I forgot to take any pictures along the way.  Here it is glued in place, along with the wishbone, and two belaying pins in place.

 

Backtracking on the wishbone, it is cantilevered way out beyond the transom, so I put a couple of pins in to strengthen its attachment to the taffrail.

 

Next project was the fashioning of two brackets to which the mizzen shrouds and two hand railings will be attached. These were not supplied as laser cut pieces. I laminated some ⅛” stock together and without a great deal of cutting and sanding got pretty much what I wanted. 

 

After attaching the boom, gaff and sail to the mast, I decided to put some effort into making some realistic looking coils for the ends of the halyard and the sheet.  I cut the halyard off at the cleat, then made a few coils out of what I cut off, wrapping the same to secure it. That makes sense for a halyard, which tends to be something you set and forget, but for a sheet, which may need frequent and sometimes sudden adjustment, you just want loose coils.  Here I did not cut it at the cleat, but merely made some coils around the belaying pin, without wrapping them.  In both cases, as can be seen below with regard to the sheet, I hung a small clamp to pull the coils into something more like a skinny oval rather than the almost circle shape the coils wanted to take.  I then applied several drops of diluted white glue to the whole thing, and got the result I was hoping for.

 

Hard to believe, but the light at the tunnel is getting noticeably brighter.  Next, not necessarily in this order, are the handrails, shrouds, more rope coils, hawser and anchor.

 

[BobG]

Well done, Tom! The finish line is getting nearer for you just as the end of his book I'm reading is getting nearer for me as well.

[Josh Williamson]

You're getting really close!  The detail looks great, and it's interesting to see the choices you made with rigging.  Looks really logical and functional!  Makes me wish I would have seen them before rigging my Spray!  

 

Also - the visual quality on your lines look really nice.  Did you use the provided threads, or did you substitute some different rigging?

 

-Josh 

[Tomculb]

Hi Josh, I didn't use any of the kit-supplied threads/ropes because they were white and needed to be dyed.  I have saved leftovers from every kit I have built, and was able to do the lines from that supply, although I'm not entirely happy with what I used for the hawser.  More on that in my next installment, coming up within the hour.

 

Tom

[Tomculb]

Pardon a little off topic personal chatter, but last week was a celebratory one for me.  My wife and I got Covid shots, our daughter celebrated her 30th birthday, I got out on my first early morning group bike ride of the year, and . . . Sunday I finished my Spray build!!

 

This has been a very fun build, made more so by the comments and input left by those of you who were kind enough to chime in.  And I really liked the BlueJacket kit, even though I chose to do things a little bit differently every now and then.  I don’t think it’s an appropriate kit for beginners -- mostly due to difficult hull planking and skimpy instructions -- but it should be a fun build for anyone with some experience and an interest in its history.

 

So coming around the bend for the final stretch  . . . 

 

I was somewhat apprehensive about the mahogany hand railing, with its compound bends and spindly stanchions, but all went very well.  I glued pins into the stanchions, and that made them rigid and strong enough to accept the rail on top without faltering.  The plans show the stanchions getting slightly taller as you move forward, and I cut them accordingly, with some light sanding once installed to make the curve of the rail look good.  Once installed, I put a coat of satin varnish on the mahogany.

 

 

For the mizzen shrouds, I put eyebolts through the hand rail, the tie brace and into the brace bracket (terms used in the plans) to anchor the lower ends, and eyebolts installed previously at the top of the mast for the upper ends.  The main mast shrouds were quite a bit more work, what with lashing one end to a dead eye, threading them through spreaders previously cut and painted and through eyebolts at the top of the mast, lashing the other end to a deadeye, and then lashing those deadeyes to the deadeyes secured to the hull.  Fortunately all of it went well and was pretty straightforward.

 

I painted the anchor dark gray, and assuming its stock to be wood, painted that flat brown.  I darkened the supplied brass anchor chain, then ran it from the anchor over the rail, through the hole in the topsides, aft a bit to the winch, then forward to the hawse hole which presumably drops into a chain locker.  I did not lash the anchor in place as I may replace it some day with one that's a little smaller; at 1½” long it looks too big to me.  Given the model’s scale, that would be a 4 foot long anchor on the real boat (stock would be the same length), and that seems like an awful lot for a solo sailor to pull up over the side.

 

I had similar issues with the cord supplied for the hawser.  Other than being white, it looked quite good, but was too large. A little over 1/16” in diameter, that would translate to over 2” in diameter in real life, which strikes me as overkill on a 35 foot boat.  The only cord I could find of a size that seemed appropriate to me was some white string, which I tried dying in coffee.  I wasn’t able to get it as dark as I wanted, but its overall appearance wasn’t wasn’t all that bad so I’ll probably leave it as is.

 

Finally I added some rope coils -- halyards on the pin rail, an extra one there because you can never have too much line on a sailboat, the jib sheets and the main sheet.  I used a piece of heavy wire, weighted down with a miniclamp, to get the to take the shapes I wanted, then used several drops of diluted white glue to get them to hold their shape and stay in place.

 

And that does it.  It took Slocum a few days short of three years to circumnavigate the globe on his historic voyage (or three years and three months, depending upon what port you designate his place of departure).  By contrast, the first to finish the Vondee Globe race the end of January did it non-stop in 80 days!  I was somewhere in between -- a year and four months to complete my build.  It was a great journey, and I got to sleep in a warm bed each night!  😀 ⛵ 🛌 💤

 

[ERS Rich]

Hello, a really nice ship model.  I like the look and feel overall and the deck in particular.  Enjoy your rides, still a little early, but today is a warm day in Massachusetts.  We’ll be riding soon.

 

Have this kit on the shelf and will use your work for guidance.  Thanks for posting.

[Moab]

That sounds like one totally awesome week!!!! The Spray looks great.. congrats....Moab

[Tomculb]

I just realized I forgot to add a few "finished" photos I took.

 

Thanks for the kind words Moab and Rich.  Rich, I have always felt that it is worth the effort to actually plank a deck rather than use some facsimile of a planked deck.  And good to know there is another cyclist on board.

 

Tom

 

 

[BobG]

Well done, Tom, she's a beauty!

 

5 hours ago, Tomculb said:

Pardon a little off topic personal chatter, but last week was a celebratory one for me.  My wife and I got Covid shots, our daughter celebrated her 30th birthday, I got out on my first early morning group bike ride of the year, and . . . Sunday I finished my Spray build!!

Now I'd say that was a week to remember!

[MrBlueJacket]

Congrats! Your customer file now has a note that you will get 10% off the next kit you buy from us.

 

Nic

[Ken_2]

What an awesome looking boat, Tom.  It is an absolutely great build.  The details of the deck and especially the sails show the great workmanship.  Congratulations.

Ken

[Josh Williamson]

Looks fantastic Tom!  Good job and congratulations!  Really clean build from start to finish 👍

[Tomculb]

A couple of postscripts . . . 

 

First, I mentioned that I felt the kit-supplied anchor was too large.  I found a smaller one supplied by Amati, and it satisfies my sense of scale better than the other one.

 

Second, I’m on to my next build and log, found at Model Shipways cross section of the USS Constitution.