Avos by etsinko - FINISHED - Master Korabel - 1:72 - Russian tender

[etsinko]

I started this build some time in May and currently I'm in the process of shaping yards. I'll be posting pictures and comment starting with the very beginning and hopefully I'll catch up to the build's current state.

This is the model of Russian tender named "Avos". As far as I know this word only exists in Russian language and describes a world view when you don't know the outcome but hope for the best, citing Wikipedia:

The Russian avos' (Russian: русское авось) describes a philosophy of behavior, or attitude, of a person who ignores possible problems or hassles and, at the same time, expects or hopes for no negative results or consequences. It is an attitude that treats life as unpredictable and holds that the best one can do is count on luck.

This ship is well know in Russia because of "Juno and Avos" rock opera that was performed for the first time in 1981. It tells the story of a tragic love between Russian explorer Nikolai Rezanov and a daughter of the governor of Spanish California.

"Avos" was a tender built in Novoarkhangelsk (present Sitka, Alaska) in Russian America in 1806. She was manned by a crew of 12 and was a part of an expedition to California headed by explorer Nikolai Rezanov that consisted of two ships, brigantine "Juno" and tender "Avos".

They arrived in California in the same year, to get provisioning for starving Russian settlements in Alaska. During his stay in San Francisco, Rezanov met a 15-year old daughter of a Spanish governor Maria de la Concepcion Arguello. Maria fell in love with Rezanov and they got engaged. Unfortunately they could not get married because she was a Catholic and he belonged to the Eastern Orthodox Church. Rezanov had to obtain the Russian Emperor's permission to marry Maria. Promptly, he sailed back to Alaska and then to Okhotsk. From there he had to cross all of Russia east to west on horseback to get to St Petersburg. During this perilous trip he fell ill and died in Krasnoyarsk in 1807 at the age of 43. Maria did not believe the news of his death until 1842 when Sir George Simpson gave her a detailed account of Rezanov's death. She took a vow of silence and lived in a monastery in Monterey, California until her death in 1857.

 

I was really excited about building a ship with such rich history. The kit is of the same great quality as all Master Korabel kits. Without further ado, here are my steps:

 

1. As always the first step is setting up the "skeleton" framework for planks. This kit is a plank-on-bulkhead type with two layers of planks. The interesting detail in this kit is that the whole frame is split horizontally by an HDF plate into two separate parts - top and bottom.

First all bottom bulkhead and the center keel were installed into the HDF plate (which has asymetric notches so you'd never be able to mix up left and right bulkheads):

 

 

 

2. After all bulkheads were installed, I planked the first layer of the lower portion of the hull:

 

 

3. Next the upper section of the center keel need to be assembled along with the stern:

 

 

4. What I found really interesting about this build was that counter and taffrail were not glued to the stern. They were supposed to be shaped and assembled separately. Overal the counter and taffrail turned out to be the most difficult parts of the whole build. The first layer of counter split when I bent it, so I had to carefully reglue the sheet...
 

 

5. After that I went back to building up the bulkheads for the section of the hull above the HDF plate:

 

 

 

 

 

6. Once all bulkheads were installed (there were a lot of them!) the deck was glued. What I found interesting was that there was no subdeck on this model. The deck is a single sheet of maple veneer that is glued directly to the bulkheads. The inner bulwark installation was a breeze thanks to the guiding pins that were inserted into holes for gun tackles:

 

 

 

 

7. After the deck and the inner bulwarks were installed the hull was faired and planking began. Again, as with other Master Korabel kits it is a lot easier to plank using hot iron technique! (https://craftysailor.com/blogs/articles/planking-with-hot-iron😞

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Ryland Craze]

Really nice build.  I like your planking.  Thanks for sharing your build progress with us.

[etsinko]

Ryland,

thank you! All planks are pre-cut, so the planking looks nice thanks to Master Korabel

[etsinko]

8. The interesting thing about this kit is that once you plank half of the hull you need to stop and do the transom. I would say that the stern area was the most difficult part of this whole build. There were a lot of curves that needed to be aligned symmetrically and nicely. First the planks in the stern needed to be sanded flush with the transom and the transom back piece was glued:

 

 

Next the transom pieces were roughly shaped and installed:

 

Finally the rest of the transom parts were installed and planking continued:

 

Planking was finally done, all that was left was sanding:

 

 

The hull was then carefully sanded and a couple coats of wipe-on-poly was applied:

 

 

 

9. Once the wipe-on-poly covered hull was dry, I proceeded to the final stage of planking. The wales needed to be trimmed to they fit counter perfectly. The first layer of wales was easy to do, because it had already been glued and it would be hidden behind the second final layer:

 

 

The second layer was a lot more difficult. The manual simply said to carefully trim it, but I thought it was too easy to mess something up this way, so I cut a template plank from one of billets first:

 

After all I was pretty happy how this difficult area turned out:

 

[etsinko]

10. Next step was finishing up taffrail details and preparing bulwarks for gunwales:

The tops of the bulwarks needed to be sanded flat:

Finally gunwales could be glued. They consisted of two layers and gluing with hot iron was very useful here:

Here is taffrail finally glued to the hull:

 

[JeffT]

Very nice work!

[etsinko]

11. Before starting work on hatches I finished up some details on the keel.

 

In the stern:

 

And the horseshoe in the bow:

 

 

12. Once the hull was all done I switched to making all hatches, gratings and the companionway. I used an aftermarket lasercut grating instead of the kit provided one. I think they look much better at this scale:

 

 

Once all these little parts were built I added hinges, handles and eyebolts:

 

 

 

After that I attached all the cleats and the eyebolts to the hull (It is very important to secure all necessary blocks to the eyebolts before gluing them to the hull!) and added the binnacle:

 

[Papa]

The kit seems to be of excellent quality, and your work is exemplary .  Beautiful model. 

[Keithbrad80]

Wow your planking was perfect. I might have to look into this kit for my self!

[KentM]

I agree so I did buy a kit.

[etsinko]

On 10/9/2020 at 4:07 PM, PAPA said:

The kit seems to be of excellent quality, and your work is exemplary .  Beautiful model. 

Thank you! This kit is really of excellent quality and because of that a lot of usual planking issues are avoided.

[etsinko]

On 10/9/2020 at 7:17 PM, Keithbrad80 said:

Wow your planking was perfect. I might have to look into this kit for my self!

Thank you! This kit is great, I'm enjoying building it

[etsinko]

13. The work continued with the rest of the deck fittings. Pin rails, cleats and the sail traveller:

 

 

Tiller and its tackle:

 

 

Windlass, anchors and anchor ropes:

 

 

After most of the fitting were installed, I proceeded to assemble cannon carriages and cannon breech ropes. I used a very simple jig to prepare breach ropes. It is a small board with a few holes drilled into it and a rubber band on top. To make breech ropes I first attach a longer piece of rope to the cannon and then insert it under the rubber band:

 

 

Then I loosely tie eyebolts to the protruding ropes:

 

Finally I insert the eyebolts into pre-drilled holes and adjust the length of the breech ropes:

 

After the knots are tied and a tiny drop of CA glue applied to them the cannon is removed from the jig, all that is left to do is to trim the ropes:

 

Finally, after a lot of tedious work, all the fittings and cannons were installed:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now I can proceed to making the mast and the rest of the yards...

 

 

 

 

 

 

[BenD]

This looks amazing!  I need to get my hands on a Master Korabel kit. 

[etsinko]

9 hours ago, BenD said:

This looks amazing!  I need to get my hands on a Master Korabel kit. 

We've got all of them  If you never built one, let me know and I'll help you choose.

[BenD]

Yeah I was on your store and I just impulse bought the 9th century Slavic longship 1:72.  It was too cool looking to pass up.

 

The Avos, Phoenix, and the Polotsk are all equally enticing...

[etsinko]

43 minutes ago, BenD said:

Yeah I was on your store and I just impulse bought the 9th century Slavic longship 1:72.  It was too cool looking to pass up.

 

The Avos, Phoenix, and the Polotsk are all equally enticing...

Slavic longship is a good model too! It is on my next builds list.

[jwvolz]

Very nice work. That looks like a great kit. 

[etsinko]

So, the work continues... Once the hull was done I switched my attention to making the remaining yards and the mast. This is a small model, so there is only a handful of spars: boom, gaff, bowsprit, spreadsail yard, topsail yard, mast and topmast. I have already made the bowsprit earlier, so only 6 spars were left to do. The workflow I follow for making them is always the same:

 

1. I narrow down the part (by sanding the part so It has square cross section everywhere):

 

 

 

2. Then I use a mini-plane and cut off the edges of the part to make it more or less hexagonal:

 

 

 

And after that I wrap it into a small sheet of 180 grip sandpaper and rotate it with my left hand while holding the sandpaper with the right hand. In the end I get something like this:

 

 

The mast is something different. Instead of making a square round, I make a circle square by removing material. I first try to identify the order (or stages) in which material needs to be removed and then start cutting, the first cuts are always perpendicular to the mast and they establish the depth of the rest of the cuts:

 

In the end after the first stage, the mast looked like this:

 

 

Once the mast was complete I attached all the stays and the shrouds to the mast top:

 

 

 

 

And then established the angles for the chainplates using the actual shrouds (I usually take a lot of time at this stage, because I love perfect symmetry :):

 

 

 

 

 

Once this was done, all the tedious work was over! Now the fun part could begin. I could finally start some of the standing rigging. Bobstay:

 

 

 

And the bowsprit shrouds... This is what it looks like right now:

 

 

 

 

Next I'm going to continue rigging all the spars (I try to install as much rigging with them off the ship as possible)...

 

[Peta_V]

What a Fast and beautyful progress! Very nice. 

Edited October 30, 2020 by Peta_V

[etsinko]

5 hours ago, Peta_V said:

What a Fast and beautyful progress! Very nice. 

Thank you Peta! I was really inspired by your build.

[captain_hook]

Wow. Very nice and clean!

[Jeffb]

This looks great!  I'm looking forward to starting on this kit.

[etsinko]

The work continued. Here came the most dreaded part for me - sails... Previously when building MK kits I always used the sails they provided. Their sails are pretty good quality, the only thing that always bothered me was that the boltrope was always too thick for the scale and it looked fluffy and not too neat.

I heard that some builders use this material called Silkspan and decided to give it a try. I was really surprised by its looks when I finally bought it. It really looked like 1-ply toilet paper to me, very thin and transparent. And on top of that I had no idea how to make it look like a cloth sail. I believe I tried everything - painting it using several coats acrylic paint, laminating two sheets into one, printing on it, laminating a piece of paper between two silkspan sheets. In the end I was never happy with the results - it always looked like paper to me. It didn't feel that seams were real - I could always see that they were printed or drawn with pencil. There was no cloth texture, it really was just paper..

In the end I gave up and decided to use Master Korabel sails with one modification - I cut off the original boltrope and instead of sewing a new one on I decided to glue it on using PVA glue:

 

To my surprise the glue held and after a few hours I had sails with cleanly attached boltropes:

 

 

 

 

In the end I really like the result - the fabric is thin enough but it has this nice texture and real seams and the boltrope is finally to scale. Here is all five sails with main sail attached to the boom, gaff and the mast:

 

 

 

Now I can finally install the mast and start working on the standing rigging!

[etsinko]

It has been a long time since I posted here... The life has been pretty busy and I forgot to regularly post any updates here. The Avos is finished now and I'd like to share some of the photos of the final steps.

Once the mast was installed on the hull I attached the stays and the shrouds. I prefer to use individual jig for each of the deadeyes because of the andles their lengths are all slightly different:

 

To make the ratlines I printed a template on a laser printer and then simply cut it out and affixed behind the shrouds. This way it is possible to consistently tie the ratlines parallel to the channels:

 

 

 

 

Once the standing rigging was done it was a matter of connecting all the pieces of the running rigging, I used the help of the third hand and the clamps extensively:

 

 

 

For the flag I decided to ditch the one that came with the kit and simply printed the flag on a inkjet printer. I attached a piece of silkspan to normal letter size paper with some masking tape and loaded it into my printer:

 

I think the end result is not so bad:

 

In the next post I'll share some of the pictures of the complete model.

[BenD]

16 hours ago, etsinko said:

I think the end result is not so bad:

The flag looks incredible compared to the kit one. You could sell that on your site. I would buy one for my Avos 100%. 

[etsinko]

Here are the final shots as promised.

 

 

[etsinko]

2 hours ago, BenD said:

The flag looks incredible compared to the kit one. You could sell that on your site. I would buy one for my Avos 100%. 

Hi Ben,

The problem is that I'm not sure I can make the quality consistently good.

 

If you haven't put your model's flag on, I can try printing one for you and sending it to you for free so you can check it out. If you like it you can put it on your model too. 

 

My wife is an artist and has a professional inkjet printer which she uses once every few months (she does that because this printer wastes a lot of ink in standby mode), I'll add the flag to the next batch of the stuff she will be printing (probably sometime in the end of November).

[hollowneck]

Igor,

A very nice build, indeed. You are a champion of Master Korabel's models. You also had fun taking these photos! Kool closeups and angles. They are excellent and display your skills nicely.

 

Do you know if the silkspan you used for your flag is the lightest weight material? Sig make three weights if I recall correctly.

The tape on the edges of the A4 didn't jam the printer?

 

Ron

 

 

[etsinko]

@hollowneck Sorry, missed your post last year. Basically I used SIGST001 which is the "light" silkspan by Sig. And the regular masking tape that I used didn't jam the printer at all, however your milage may vary as it depends on the printer.