Winchelsea Nef 1274 A.D. by Louie da fly - FINISHED - 1:75

[Chuck Seiler]

The lines are like the Pirate Code...more of a suggestion than actual rule.

[Louie da fly]

A-A-A-A-N-D . . . PLANKING IS COMPLETE!

 

Last steps . . .

 

 

 

All planks in place - pushpins removed.

 

 

 

And it came off the plug without damage!

 

There was an initial problem - the clingwrap had got torn in a few places during the planking procedure, and a couple of planks had stuck lightly to the plug. I had to ease a blade between the planking and the plug to free them up. Fortunately it was only the very last layers of planking, so I could free them up. A bit of careful jiggling back and forth, and VOILA! 

 

 

 (I tore the clingwrap to get the ship free - this is the bit left behind between the planking and the plug).

 

And here she is free and clear.

 

 

 

 

Rather a pretty shape, I think  .

 

Now, there's a possibility that the hull might squeeze inward without frames, so the next job is the cut the plug into crosswise slices - one for each frame - and then make frames based on those shapes.

 

All good  .

 

Steven

Edited September 9, 2021 by Louie da fly

[Chuck Seiler]

    Looking good.  Be careful, this is when it is the most delicate and vulnerable.

 

    When do you put all the 'nail dots' in?  Shouldn't be more than 3 or 4 thousand.  Would that be a bandersnach of nef nails?

Edited September 9, 2021 by Chuck Seiler

[Louie da fly]

I don't think I'll be putting "nail dots" in - I doubt that they would be visible at this scale. I think a lot of people add these kinds of details unnecessarily, often far too big. On the other hand, the nails are a different colour from the wood, as in this pic, and so might be visible after all. I'll have to think about it a bit.

 

 

Steven

 

 

Edited September 9, 2021 by Louie da fly

[Thukydides]

It looks really good. Fantastic job!

[woodrat]

3 hours ago, Louie da fly said:

don't think I'll be putting "nail dots" in - I doubt that they would be visible at this scale. I think a lot of people add these kinds of details unnecessarily, often far too big.

I tend to agree, although many wouldn't. I made the same decision for the spurious hulc. The hulls were often blackened by pitch or other resins so nail heads would not show up well. When I was a lad and doing plastic aeroplane kits they often put in every rivet at 1:72 scale and all the dots made the plane look like it had smallpox. Later the kit tended not to have them. Looking grand, Steven.

Dick

[Baker]

Nice work Steven.

 

Somewhere in Norway while on vacation (I don't know where exactly).
2 dark colored replicas (vikings). The nails are only slightly visible on the outside and on the inside.

 

Another one

Have you ever thought of making a small dot with a pencil?

[Chuck Seiler]

   Personally, I have mixed feelings on the nails.  Treenails can be overdone and can 'smallpoxify' a model, but these are nails and are very prominent on a light colored hull.  I didn't like the idea at first, but after looking at Chris Coyle's cog (a cacophony of cogs) a couple of times, it grew on me.

 

Patrick, I have experimented with pencil and it is still an option but the dots tend to be too large for my taste.  I think with that many dots it needs to be subtle.  A REALLY sharp pencil or very fine mechanical pencil might work, but I keep breaking off the tips.  I am currently experimenting with #80 drill bits, pins and the finger-jabby things they use for glucose testing.  Once the holes are in place, I rub a #2 pencil over the holes then wipe it down with a slightly damp cloth.  That has the effect of liquifying the graphite and pushing it into the holes while wiping it off the wood.  I may need to try using alcohol instead of water to avoid raising the wood grain. 

 

Still, that's alot of dots.

[druxey]

Well done in completing the shell and removing it without damage. I always seem to have to repair shells after removal. As for nails, perhaps less is more at this scale?

[BANYAN]

Nicely done on removing the shell without damage Steven, as Druxey attests that is a process fraught with danger.  

 

Looks great!

 

cheers

 

Pat

[AnobiumPunctatum]

Really nice result in this small scale. The hull is looking great.

 

I would use only color to simulate the nails. You can use a nail of pin for painting. With a little bit of practice you can get a nice result.

Edited September 10, 2021 by AnobiumPunctatum

[Baker]

21 hours ago, Chuck Seiler said:

  Patrick, I have experimented with pencil and it is still an option but the dots tend to be too large for my taste. 

Indeed,

My dots are for scale 1/45.
The hardness and sharpness of the pencilpoint are indeed very important.
(I used up a lot of pencils...)

[Louie da fly]

I've finally got around to cutting the plug into transverse slices, one for each frame, and traced the outlines onto paper.

 

 

 

A little rough and ready - I had to re-think the lines of the deck beams after I'd already drawn them, so you can see two deck-lines in several of these cross-sections.

 

Now I have to start thinking about making the frames. And I've hit a quandary. Nobody knows what the frames or deck configuration of a nef really were. No help from archaeology - no nefs have been found. The only information is from Viking knarrs, from maybe 250 years earlier and a different part of Europe. 

 

And I discovered the Vikings didn't use full-height frames and futtocks as was used later. They were fairly complex, but basically you had the floor timbers and deck-beams up to deck level, and above that the higher strakes were attached with knees. The following two illustrations are from Björn Landström's book The Ship.

 

 

Landström's nef reconstruction shows the same structure as was found on the Gokstad ship

 

 

- naturally enough; he had nothing else to work with. But it's very likely that there were developments in the following 250 years, and anyway as I mentioned, it was a different part of Europe, with perhaps a different shipbuilding tradition and all kinds of influences - from France and even northern Spain (a seal from San Sebastian shows a nef identical with those from England).

 

 

Seal of San Sebastian 1352

 

Since the book was written, there has been quite a bit more information available. The drawings for the Hedeby/Haithabu 3 and Skuldelev 1 knorrs are now widely available, as below

 

 

No continuous deck; in fact the decks seem to almost be afterthoughts. And a great gaping opening amidships which I assume is where the cargo got put. How the crew got from one end of the ship to another is anybody's guess. There's a very narrow catwalk either side on the Hedeby ship, but it doesn't look very user-friendly. It seems to me sensible that a cargo ship (which is effectively what a nef is, with a fighting capability added) would have developed a continuous deck for ease of access.

 

Landström's nef reconstruction above just has an uninterrupted deck - it doesn't have any cargo hold or hatches at all. I'm assuming he was thinking the cargo would be carried on the deck, but that ignores all that cargo-carrying capacity below decks - and also raises the centre of gravity of the laden ship, which would make it less stable. The pic below shows there's be plenty of room to crawl around below decks and stack cargo.

 

 

 

Another good thing I've got from Landström's book, by the way, is the construction of the mid-13th century Kalmar ship, which was recovered almost completely intact.

 

 

 

 

Note the way the through-beams are fixed - very interesting - straight through the planks with no "step" in the through-beam to hold it against the planks - held instead by knees, and a stringer behind the knees on the top beam. Oh, and something I had previously missed - the through-beams are locked into two planks at once - so they lock the planks themselves together.

 

So, where do I go from here? Do I follow the viking construction methods? I don't think so. I believe other methods would have been developed by then (pure supposition on my part, I know), and I'm thinking of having floor timbers right across the full width of the ship and up past the turn of the bilge, paired with other frames which start at the gunwale and extend downwards past the turn of the bilge, so they overlap and there's no point of weakness where they "join". This was a common construction technique in the Mediterranean at this time (and for several centuries earlier). I don't believe they would have yet developed paired frames made up of a series of futtocks, as we see in much later vessels.

 

[Edit] My current thought is to have a continuous deck with hatches for cargo. If that's the case I won't need to get into the extra complexity of the "doubled-up" frames, because they won't be visible anyway. [/Edit]

 

Any comments or suggestions welcome.

 

Steven

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 12, 2021 by Louie da fly

[mtaylor]

It looks to me that some of the drawings show what might be deck clamps such that a beam or beams could be laid then lay decking on top of them. 

 

From your research, your best guess is probably just as good (maybe better) than those that written books, etc.  as you're looking at all sources equally.  

[BANYAN]

Hi Steven, I am certainly not that knowledgeable on vessels of this period so take the following with a grain of salt WRT to what is shown on your posted images.

 

I think Mark has identified a 'clamp' of some sort to support the lowest deck.  The beams may also have been supported with nails/bolts through the frame where they penetrate the planking (assuming the beams lined up with the frames?).  The next two decks appear to use the top of the knees as a sort of clamp to support the beam.  So in your sketch of a single deck Nef, I would include a small clamp piece to support the deck with knee above providing additional support (as well as the frames if the beams are nailed to them)

 

cheers

 

Pat

[Chuck Seiler]

    Werner Zimmermaqn, in his NEF DER CINQUE PORTS appears to harken back to the knarr and longship construction as a basis for the nef.  The text is in German, so I am not sure, but the way it is presented it appears he is of the same mind set as Steven.

 

    Here is the framing for his generic nef.  I call attention to BB CC and DD which are where the thru beams on the main deck are located. (Red arrows).  Also aa and bb which are non-thru beams (blue arrows).  We will see cross sections of these later.  Notice that some of the non-thru beam frames have deck beams and some do not.  In ALL cases only the thru beams are seen above the planking.

 

    Here is a closer view.  Note the thru beam frames have a beam lower down in the hull while the others do not. 

 

    Cross sections of the thru beam frames.

 

    Cross section of 2 of the non-thru  beam frames.  It appears knees are only used to support the frames when used over a beam.  The rest of the frame uses angled joints and are probably bolted together.  From my viewing of the Harald Fairhair replica build, the frames are added after the plank shell is in place (added to as it rises).

 

    My interpretation is that the thru beam frames provide increased transverse structural strength due to the thru beam and the secondary beam lower down.  This is the area used to store cargo.  Some or all of the deck planks between AA and BB, BB and CC, CC and DD, and DD to EE were removable.

 

    More detail on frame.

[Chuck Seiler]

Here is a model I have seen with a hatch.

 

I have mixed emotions about the hatch.  (1) I am not wild about loose deck planks and the hatch solves that. but (2) I am not sure how easily cargo passes thru the thru beam frames with the double beam.  Perhaps one of Steven's crew can explore this.

 

[Louie da fly]

OK. A couple of questions -

 

1. Is there any real reason the tops of the through beams should be in line with the top of the decking? The only reason I can think of is that the knees on top of the through beams would otherwise intrude on the decking. Though that shouldn't be all that much of a problem either - surely you could cut the decking around the knees.

 

2. Is there any real structural reason for the second beam below the through-beam?

 

In my view, these and the rest of the proposed internal details are based purely on supposition and the example of Viking ships from 250 years earlier. So, whilst taking them into account,  I'm at liberty to disagree with them.

 

Need to do more thinking. Will I have the through-beams below the decking or in line? And following that argument, will I have continuous decking with hatches or have it removable in sections? And if so, how do you remove them? (Aha! With the windlass, I suppose).

 

Steven 

[Chuck Seiler]

    The thru beams appear to be notched(?) so that a ledge the depth of the deck plank runs end to end on each side.  While the deck planks COULD be secured to the top of the thru beam, they would have to be nailed.  Un-nailed planks would easily move.  By using the ledged thru beam, the deck planks would snugly fit into place without the need for nails...just a finger hole to lift one up.

 

    As for the lower beam?  My thought is that it provided more transverse structural stability required for the increased weight of cargo.

 

    On the other hand, maybe the first person to make a nef model did it that way and everybody else followed along.

 

   ...on the third hand... I want to say that I remember seeing the removable deck planks used with the Viking longships.  I can't remember if I saw it in a video of the SEAHORSE replica or HARALD FAIRHAIR.  The arrangement was similar and you would just pull up the deck planks to get access to gear stored below.

Edited September 12, 2021 by Chuck Seiler

[druxey]

Platforms in some 18th century ships had the same arrangement, with rabbets on the beam edges for the planks to sit in.

[woodrat]

 

 To avoid cluttering Stevens log I have made some speculations on beams and decks in my hulc log

Dick

 

 

Edited September 13, 2021 by woodrat

[Louie da fly]

Thanks, Dick. It would have been totally ok to put your observations into this build log - they would have been very welcome - after all I'm currently at the "feasibility" stage.

 

I agree with your interpretation regarding the decks. Makes a lot of sense. Which would presumably mean the removable parts of the deck, at the very least, wouldn't have any camber - and maybe none of the decks would.

 

In the original Sandwich seal the three through-beams are a bit vague and blobby and it seems to me there may be as many as four, depending how you interpret the seal, though this doesn't alter the validity of the point you made. And there has to be (on the Winchelsea seal) some permanent deck for the windlass to sit on.

 

 

Other seals show four (San Sebastian and Dunwich) and even as many as five (Hythe and Yarmouth) - and some show none at all.

 

The Winchelsea one is even more interesting - it appears to me that it has two extra through-beams, one at each end, slightly higher than the others, which I believe are to support a raised foredeck and afterdeck. The San Sebastian seal is similar in having higher through-beams at the ends.

 

 

Steven

 

 

Edited September 13, 2021 by Louie da fly

[Chuck Seiler]

11 minutes ago, Louie da fly said:

The Winchelsea one is even more interesting - it appears to me that it has two extra through-beams, one at each end, slightly higher than the others, which I believe are to support a raised foredeck and afterdeck. The San Sebastian seal is similar in having higher through-beams at the ends.

I agree.  These are similar to the thru beams in cross sections AA and EE of the Zimmerman plans.

[Louie da fly]

One thing that occurs to me is that a merchant ship is subject to forces that don't apply with a Viking longship, because of the weight of the cargo. I remember reading somewhere that unlike conventional vessels, it was found from practical experience with a replica that a longship is so flexibly built that rather than smashing through waves it flexes to accommodate them. A longship is effectively built like an open boat, with no upper crossbeams to reinforce it sideways. But with a merchant vessel the extra weight of the cargo subjects the ship to forces a longship doesn't have to deal with - forces that push her downwards, and coupled with the pressure of the water outside, tend to squeeze the sides inwards.

 

Looking at the two knarrs and the Karby ship we can see that most of the frames are fairly light in construction but there are three  frames which are structurally very solid indeed (circled in blue on this pic of Hedeby/Haithabu 3 - BTW, the reason for the two names is that Hedeby is the Danish name for the town and Haithabu is the German name - it has variously been part of Germany and Denmark at various times in history) - almost built like a roof truss - one amidships and one each end of the open hold - and these provide the stiffness that keeps the sides apart.

 

 

 

 

A couple of other interesting things about the knarrs is their framing. I seem to have been correct in thinking it was made up very differently from what we would consider conventional framing practice. First, at the bottom are floor timbers made rather like a boomerang - a single piece of wood with two arms angled to follow the line of the hull each side of the keel (green circle). The following photos are of the knarr Skuldelev 1.

 

 

Above these is a horizontal beam, forming a triangle with the floor timbers (white circle)

 

 

Above them again is something called a bite - a sort of cross between a futtock and a knee (red circles), which carries the framing right up to the top of the planking. Between them these three items make up the main frames. Then between them are intermediate frames which seem to run between the top of the planking and the turn of the bilge. This doesn't tie in with Zimmerman's reconstruction, which seems to be based more on the Gokstad ship. But that's ok - there's more than one way to skin a cat (or as my maths teacher in high school used to say "There's more ways of drowning a cat than strangling it, you know!").

 

The Karby ship also shows two stringers within the hull and a wale outside to further reinforce the shape (see post #133 above).

 

It seems to me the through-beams of a nef are a different means of providing structural reinforcement of the same type as the "roof trusses" of the Hedeby ship, in an area where there really isn't anything else to prevent the sides from being forced inwards, but with the advantage that they provide access to the area below the decks. Maybe that's the whole point.

 

So, I've been doing a bit of experimenting - with balsa, which I can afford to waste, because I have a very limited supply of walnut the right thickness. So far I haven't duplicated the knarr construction because I've only just finally figured out how it works. But it looks like a good way to go - unless I come up with something better.

 

So here are some ideas for the frames for the open hold (top) and the decked area (bottom - at the point where the through-beam is situated)

 

 

And here's a bite made of walnut, to see if I can make one without breaking it because of the problems with the grain (I couldn't - it broke and I had to glue it back together). Also rather wasteful of wood. Of course in the real world, timbers would have been carefully selected from forks in trees with grain which parallelled the shape of the floor timber.

 

 

So I decided to experiment with heat-bending a straight strip of walnut to form a futtock/frame piece. I used a little soldering iron clamped in a modelling vise. A bit clumsy, but it worked.

 

 

And here's the result.

 

 

Seems to work pretty well.

 

Still thinking it through . . . .

 

Steven 

Edited September 15, 2021 by Louie da fly

[Tony Hunt]

Steven, your model building efforts provide such a fascinating and practical guided tour through the maritime archaeology of this period. I love it.

[Louie da fly]

Yep, just a shame that no nefs have been found, so we have to extrapolate from Viking finds. Ah well. If they'd found a nef I probably wouldn't want to make one. I like the speculation.

 

Steven

[Tony Hunt]

3 hours ago, Louie da fly said:

 I like the speculation.

 

Steven

 You're good at it, too.  ☺️

[BANYAN]

You're a sucker for punishment' - is that what your are saying Steven?  

 

That bending seems to have worked OK, you could also soak and bend on a form with a heat gun/hair dryer if you riun into problems.

 

Coming along very nicely, and I too like to see the results of your research and speculation.

 

cheers

 

Pat

[Louie da fly]

Well, after a lot of experimentation and a certain amount of waffle and head-scratching, I've ended up with a framing structure that will be fairly easy to mass produce.

 

Funnily enough it turns out to be the framing structure used in the Hedeby knarr - but before you say I didn't need to do all that work after all, there are a few points I should make.

 

Firstly, I didn't want to just assume nefs would have the same framing as a ship type from a different part of Europe 250 years earlier, and in fact I still don't think they necessarily would have.

 

Secondly, and following from the first point, I wanted to do some experimenting with other methods to see if anything came up that would work. I seriously considered the framing technique used by Byzantine ships - but of course they were even further away and just as separated in time.

 

Thirdly, though the bent-wood technique looked very promising, I found the bent wood kept on straightening out again after a while - not a lot, but enough to change the shape. And repeating the bending still didn't seem to overcome the problem. This may have been a fault in my technique - I did it without wetting the timber - but it was very fiddly, and more important I didn't want to take the chance of the frames straightening out again once the frames were glued in place and deforming all my nice planking.

 

So, back to the knarr method. I had to carve single V-shaped floor timbers with a slot for the keel (there's no slot in the knarr's floor timbers, but I needed one because I'd already committed myself by having the keel sticking up above the bottom of the planking - as an interesting side note, knarrs didn't seem to have keelsons).

 

I tried an earlier version of the frame with two individual floor timbers joined at the keel. Didn't work well - too flexible - so I discarded this method. But here it is dry fitted to see if it would work. The final versions of the frames will fit the same way.

 

 

The "bites" (a combination of knee and futtock) also had to be carved. A bit of a problem here, as I didn't have any wood made from a forked tree-branch, so the grain didn't follow the line of the knee, and I had to be careful of splitting the wood. I'm getting better at it, but it still splits now and then and has to be glued back together. 

 

And a cross-beam between the floor timbers and the "bites". Yes, the slot is off-centre - this is because in carving the wooden plug for the planking I didn't manage to get it perfectly symmetrical. But (a) I was already committed and (b) I'm sure they were fairly rough and ready back in the day (possibly not that rough and ready, but what the hey.)

 

 

I had a cunning plan to get the floor timbers and the bites perfectly in line with the shape of the hull, . Having cut the plug into transverse slices, I used each slice as a template to carve, shape and assemble the pieces of the frame.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The frames with the through-beams will be the same construction, but altered somewhat to incorporate the through-beam.

 

Only 26 frames to go!

 

Steven

 

 

[Chuck Seiler]

39 minutes ago, Louie da fly said:

Firstly, I didn't want to just assume nefs would have the same framing as a ship type from a different part of Europe 250 years earlier

Normans were Vikings and 13th century English aristocracy were Normans.