Number of floor timbers

[Don Case]

On my Discovery1789 which has been classed as a Sloop of War (I'm unsure of this) Steel says it should have 34 floor timbers. I'm making an assumption that only square frames have floor timbers. Am I wrong?

[allanyed]

Don,

Floor timbers are on every other full square frame to which the second futtocks will be attached, via a chock in your time frame.   Obviously half frames, including cants, cannot have a floor timber.  On the square full frames, the alternating frames without a floor will usually have a chock to connect the first futtocks.

Allan

[Don Case]

Thanks, that helps but doesn't help😃. Steel says the R+S is 28" so with 34 square frames that's 80'. The plans show 70' of square frames. Is Steel not written in stone? Could there be 30 sq frames? Or maybe the R+S is 24-25"?

[allanyed]

Steel is not written in stone Don.   Steel came out in 1805, and Discovery was launched sixteen years earlier.   The only thing I can find in Steel with 28" R&S is an 18 gun sloop of war which he shows in the scantlings as having a length on the GD of 108 feet.  The Shipbuilder's Repository of 1788 shows the GD for  this size vessel as 98 feet 5 inches, much closer to Discovery  and subsequently a R&S of 2 feet 0 inches.  Just curious, but how did you come up with 28" for the room and space?

Allan

[Don Case]

I've been using a few drawings by John McKay of Discovery1789 and he called it a Sloop of war. The Sloop of war in Steel (1812) was  the closest in size to the Discovery so I just went with that. I've got the earlier Steel but it only shows 3 types of ships. I'll see if I can find the Ship builders Repository online. 

Edited March 7, 2021 by Don Case
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[Don Case]

I bit the bullet and ordered your book.😃 Thanks

[Jaager]

You have some wiggle room on the scantling specifics.  Your ship was built by a private yard on spec.  They were not restricted by Navy Establishments.  They were probably restricted by the rules that Lloyds required.  Anyone buying it would also want the insurance. Also, a sloop built for warship duties would probably have scantlings that were more beefy than a merchant vessel of the same size.  The merchantmen that I have observed had more space.  The timbers may be the same dimensions but the wood part would be a lower percentage of the whole.   For warships from the 1770's thru the 1780's, at least at the level of the floors, the space was 1-3" of the whole R&S.  A model with the frames on view would pretty much show as a wall of wood.  This is most likely the reason that Harold Hahn omitted every other bend with his plans for Revolutionary War era ships.  There is not much point in showing the framing if it would look about the same as a hull built by carving a solid block or carving lifts.   The function of a merchantman was not to withstand cannon fire.  It was not required to spend years on blockade duty.  I am not sure that the additional weight of wood made a difference as far  as cargo, since they all needed ballast to get their swimming body low enough.  It would have made the ship less expensive to build.

 

 

Edited March 7, 2021 by Jaager

[Don Case]

Thanks Jaager, I suspected this from day one. I read in Wikipedia that the Discovery was originally had been designed and built for a voyage of exploration to the Southern whale fisheries  I don't know where that puts her in the ship hierarchy.