SY Aurora by Glen McGuire - FINISHED - 1/500 - BOTTLE

[Keith Black]

32 minutes ago, Glen McGuire said:

 How sturdy are they?  Unfortunately, I would need 40-50 of them.

 

Glen, the post are .03 mm = .011811 inches. They are tiny, fragile little things that bend quite easily. I use them for various little details, in fact I find them to be indispensable and usually have a hundred or so in my stores but alas, I'm down to 33 but if I had 100 I'd send 50 of em south. 

 

 Micro Mark has some small eye pins......

 

https://www.micromark.com/Brass-Eye-Pins

[Landlubber Mike]

Depending on the bottle opening and placement, I could see maybe creating two pre-formed sets of railings (one for port other for starboard), and then gluing them on after the ship is inserted.  That might take a lot of dexterity to do though!  Inserting after will avoid bending the rail or crushing the stanchions.

 

You could always use a stiffer wire like copper for the rail which will set after being bent and resist bending better than brass wire.  That would make it easier to keep the rail in shape when inserting.

 

What’s hard is securing the stanchions at such small scale, as you can’t really pin them to the hull.  On one I’m currently working on, it didn’t have railings thankfully but I tried using very thin plywood for the bulwarks that I glued to the hull.  Really couldn’t get it to work.  Ended up keeping the bulwarks and hull from a a single piece of wood, and just have to live with the out of scale effect.

[Glen McGuire]

6 hours ago, Keith Black said:

I use them for various little details, in fact I find them to be indispensable

I can definitely understand that and I think I could find many uses for them with these SIBs.  Thanks for the link.  I'm going to keep an eye on them and order some when they are back in stock. 

 

I also like your idea of using gray yarn for the smoke.   I think it will work well and my son will be happy! 

 

5 hours ago, Landlubber Mike said:

That might take a lot of dexterity to do though!

Yes, Mike!  Probably way too much for me.  The bottle opening is only 11/16" which is about 1/8" smaller than the Hannah opening.  Yikes!  And trying to get rails on the stern, yeah, definitely out of my league!  I'm gonna have to make it work before insertion.

 

Y'all have definitely given me some things to consider and some different ideas to play around with for the railings.  Very much appreciated.

[Glen McGuire]

I put the hand rails on hold so I could get some other things done while I figure out what to do there.  However, I did go ahead and drill holes for the hand rail stanchions in the bulwark rail.  42 holes drilled in rail that’s 1mm wide certainly tested my patience and concentration.

After that, I made the 6 sails using off-white muslin for the fabric.  I used silk thread for the panel seams and button thread for the bolt ropes securing them to the muslin with fabric glue.
 

[Glen McGuire]

I’ve got a million little brass nails left over from the Mamoli Alabama kit.  I never used any for that build.  In fact, I'm not sure what they were supposed to be used for.  So if anyone can enlighten me on their real use, please do.  Regardless, I like them for the shroud channels with this ship in bottle application.

 

For the Morgan, I just used them as is.  This time I decided to square off the edges and grind off some of the rounded top for a little bit better look.  They will be painted black later.  The last thing accomplished was attaching the foremast sails and stepping it into the deck.

[Landlubber Mike]

Looking great Glen!  Clever use of the nails for the shrouds!

 

If your nails were like mine, I think they are used to pin the planking to bulkheads.  I use them to help pin the first planking, then remove them when the glue dries.  I don’t use them to pin the second planks though.

[Glen McGuire]

23 minutes ago, Landlubber Mike said:

I use them to help pin the first planking

 

Thanks, Mike.  That makes sense.  And probably explains why there are so many of them! 

[Keith Black]

Glen, she's really looking swell. As the old saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. 

 

 Just a suggestion if I may, if you chuck the nail shank in your drill, you can use a metal file to make the nail heads smaller as the drill spins. Another use for the poor man's lathe.  

 

 

Edited January 16, 2022 by Keith Black

[Joe100]

I’m definitely following this!

 

I’ve been a collector of Shackleton artifacts for years. In my collection I have items used on his sledge during the Nimrod Furthest South expedition, and items relating to the Rowett Expedition. Some of these will be on display at various museums this year to mark the centenary of his death. 
 

Anything to do with Shackleton, I’m on board. Keep up the excellent work. 

[Glen McGuire]

7 hours ago, Joe100 said:

In my collection I have items used on his sledge during the Nimrod Furthest South expedition, and items relating to the Rowett Expedition.

 

Whoa!   That is amazing!  Do you any pictures of your artifacts posted anywhere?  I would LOVE to see some of them.  And can you tell me what museums will be displaying some of your collection?  

[Joe100]

Hey Glen!

 

I have a little museum here in my study, but because of a recent move, quite a bit is still packed up. However I can show you a couple items. Firstly is a piece of rope from Shackleton’s sledge used on his personal sledge for the furthest south trek. I knew of its existence and a friend overseas called me to tell me it was coming up for auction. The auction was held right as the pandemic was getting started, so I didn’t have too much competition. Thankfully. I had pretty much made up my mind I was going to have it anyway, but in the end I only had to sell one kidney! Ha! The sledge itself sold for something like £1m not too long ago, complete with ropes, minus my section. The note attached describes when the rope was removed, and I believe it was a gift to someone. From speaking with other collectors, it seems I’m probably the 3rd owner of you don’t count Shackleton. 

 

The second item is the film rights contract for the Shackleton-Rowett expedition. This is how these expeditions made money: film, book, media, photo rights, appearances, lectures, etc. This document was written by Shackleton himself, but like everything Shackleton did, it was a slap dash mess, and the expedition had started before the contract could be countersigned. Once he died on SouthGeorgia, there was no need to countersign since the primary person named was dead. I’m sure something new was redrawn, but I haven’t seen it. This document is very poignant because it does embody a lot about Shackleton as a person, his poor planning, ambition, and sadly his death. That missing signature is one I’m sure you will recognize.

 

I have some other items too, and once they’re unpacked, I’ll have to photograph them. As for museums, well I’m in talks with 2 currently. Mostly it’s boiling down to transport and insurance. I’m a Shackleton fanatic, so the loss of these objects would be devastating so their transport and care has to be paramount. Once we have a location picked out, I’ll surely let everyone know.

 

 

 

[Glen McGuire]

Hey Joe, thank you so much for the additional info and posting these pictures.  How incredible and fascinating.   I understand that the leaders of those big expeditions spent 1/2 their time trying to secure funding for the enterprise, but this offers some rare insight into some of the actual details that most of us would never come to realize. 

 

Yes, please alert us when you finalize a museum or museums where your artifacts will be on display. 

 

Also, I just put 2 and 2 together.  When I saw the logo on your post, I thought I recognized it from somewhere.  I did some digging around and realized I had stumbled across your website of miniature ship models when I was first looking around trying to find images and information about the SY Aurora.  You do some really incredible work!  In fact, after I saw your model of the Endurance, I decided that I wanted to try and have a similar setting by displaying my Aurora inside the bottle surrounded by broken pack ice.  I'm still not sure how I'm going to pull that off, but I don't have to worry about that for a while!

 

For anyone else following along, I highly recommend checking out https://www.josephlavender.com/.     

[Glen McGuire]

The posts above are yet another example of why MSW is such a great forum.  There are so many fascinating people that frequent this site. 

 

Update on the build - progress is slow but steady.  Since the last post I added all the stays as well as the jib sail and flying jib.  I also added the guy wires for the smokestack.  I used the thin fly-tying thread for the guy wires.  The rearward 2 threads are stays.  The forward 2 will be used as pull-threads for raising the smokestack after the ship is inside the bottle. 

[Glen McGuire]

@Keith Black – By the way, Keith, your suggestion about those tiny beads came in handy when I was trying to figure out how to handle the smokestack  guy wires/pull threads.  I ended up using the beads to anchor the rearward guy wires and to provide routing for the forward pull threads.  From my pictures of the Aurora, I cannot tell how the real guy wires were actually secured to the ship, but when I installed the beads and painted them black, they look kind of like large bollards.  So I think the look is ok.  And they work perfectly!  

Also, MUCH respect to your wife for being able to work with those infuriating little beads.  They are tiny, hard, slick, and just maddening.  My floor is littered with who knows how many of those horrid things that dropped from my tweezers.  And I cannot find any of them.  But I somehow got 4 in place on my ship (3 circled in the pic below), so I ‘m happy!  
 

[Keith Black]

 Glen, I'm glad the beads worked out. She quit beading about 12 years ago, I'll occasionally snatch one up to see if it'll work in a certain application. But you're right, they will fly in a heartbeat. I swear, if NASA could figure out how to load tweezer propellent into their rocket ships, interstellar space travel would be an everyday occurrence. 

[Joe100]

Hey Glen!

 

Your Aurora is coming along brilliantly. It’s going to be awesome when it’s finished.

 

Im glad you like my work! Endurance was one of the first ships I built in small scale and it really does show! A little too simple for my standards these days, and I have plans to build another eventually. I have a copy of the original plans for S/Y Polaris (Endurance) so it can be much more accurate. 
 

If you want to make ice for your diorama, I used Deluxe Materials plastic putty. I was at a trade show and talked with some of the folks who developed their products and their plastic putty is about as stable as one could ask for and so far, many years on, it’s still as white as the day it went on. When I decide to build Endurance Mk2, I’ll probably carve the pack ice from boxwood, paint, and seal. I think it’s probably better for longevity, but I can attest that the putty I used on the model you see is something like 6 years old. Certainly an option. 
 

The following here is just my musings on Shackleton to flesh out some of my opinions. It’s directed to the casual reader and not at you since anyone spending this amount of time with Aurora will undoubtedly already know. 
 

As for old Ernie Shackleton, he didn’t like the planning part or the raising money part, so he did a bad job of it. He essentially sent Aurora out with the order to beg, borrow, or steal whatever provisions they needed. She was criminally underprepared and under-provisioned, and the choice of her leaders was questionable, and that’s being very generous. With the war going on, the UK, NZ, and Australian governments wanted to strangle Shackleton when it became apparent very quickly that tax dollars were now going into this thing, and they didn’t have much choice. The slapdash nature of it all, especially the afterthought that was Aurora, cost lives. It’s often said that Shackleton didn’t lose a man on the ITAE, but this isn’t true. Those deaths can be traced right back to him. 
 

Winston Churchill, who in 1916 didn’t have a leg to stand on either famously wrote to his wife: 

 

“Fancy that ridiculous Shackleton and his South Pole,  in the crash of the world.

“When all the sick and wounded have been tended, when all their impoverished and broken hearted homes have been restored, when every hospital is gorged with money, and every charitable subscription is closed, then and not till then would I concern myself with those penguins. I suppose however something will have to be done.” 

 

Churchill was a lot of things, but he was a good judge of character. I think he saw through Shackleton in a way most of his contemporaries didn’t.

 

I’ll bet you’re thinking I’m not a Shackleton fan, and you couldn’t be farther from the truth! I love everything about his story, but I just don’t feel he was the hero like everyone makes him out to be these days. He was a real person and that’s who I want to know, not the pop-culture hero we have today. He was an ambitious man living on borrowed time. We have to remember Shackleton had a heart condition, and he knew he probably wouldn’t live into his 50s. This of course is what ultimately took him, and I’ve always maintained he died right when he needed to and right where he needed to. It’s almost poetic. The schemes an aging Shackleton would have gotten up to on land is terrifying to think about! He would have wrecked his own legacy, as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow. 
 

I hate when I read folks who say “oh yes, when men were men, they were the toughest, they don’t make men like that anymore”, when the truth was that most of these guys came back from these expeditions, the ITAE being no exception, deeply emotionally traumatized. Not a single person the ITAE, with the exception of Tom Crean perhaps, came back with severe PTSD. (Crean wasn’t a man, he was made of something else entirely!) If you want a sense of the emotional side, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who was with the Scott expedition when Scott died, and was one of the party who found Scott’s remains, wrote a book in 1922 called The Worst Journey in the World. In it he describes just how awful life was. He never really recovered from what happened to him, and it’s an excellent look into the minds of these men. 

I’m sorry if I’ve prattled on a bit, but when I see models of a Shackleton ship, I’m immediately interested. I love sharing my knowledge on this subject and my passion. I love hearing what others have to say too, it’s fascinating. The story of Endurance is always told, being the sexy side of the expedition, however, Aurora is the other half of the story, and a far more sad tale of what can go wrong.
 

So thank you for building this model! it’s inspiring to see it taking shape and May just push me into building Endurance mk2 sometime in 2022!

[Glen McGuire]

Joe - Thank you for the tip on the Deluxe Material plastic putty.  I will explore that.

 

And thank you even more for the additional information on Shackleton, including Churchill's opinion of his endeavors.  That is entertaining!  

 

I'm still a beginner at this ship building hobby but the deeper I get into it, the more I appreciate that it's not just about building a ship.  Each ship has a history.  I'm beginning to understand that this hobby is just as much about learning the history of the ship and maybe feeling like you have become just a small part of that history.

 

 

 

 

   

[Joe100]

It’s exactly that. A good story to motivate us!

 

Churchill certainly had Shackleton’s number, however that letter was written from the trenches after his involvement in the Dardanelles campaign and the disaster at Gallipoli so he didn’t have any room to criticize. 
 

 

 

[Joe100]

I believe this is the stuff I used.

 

https://deluxematerials.co.uk/products/perfect-plastic-putty?_pos=1&_sid=9e19f0c1d&_ss=r

[Glen McGuire]

With @Keith Black and my son conspiring to make this build even harder for me by not only requiring smoke but also making it the right color, I took some time to work on that again while the ratline glue was drying.  😵

Keith – I think your idea of using gray yarn worked out well!  Let me know what you think.

I don’t think the smoke will survive the being smashed down for bottle insertion, so I’m gonna have to figure out how to put it in place after everything else is set up inside the bottle. 
 

[Snug Harbor Johnny]

  I recall reading that Scott pressured Schakleton to promise not to use Scotts abandoned shelter prior to Schakleton's attempt to be the first to the Southern Pole.  The time spent unsuccessfully looking for a landing meant that Scotts works were used anyway, but not enough depots could be laid before winter set in (if I recall correctly).  The promise should have been 'qualified' (safety of the crew first, you know), and if Shackleton had occupied the abandoned works sooner, he may well have laid the depots needed to be first to the pole.  Hmmmm, dogs would have helped a lot regardless, but one may recall the 'mindset' of dong it by human effort alone.  Amundson was a better planner and a more practical man.

[Keith Black]

 Glen, I think the 'smoke' turned out much more realistic, I like it. Won't you be able to push the smoke plume up once the lot is inside the bottle? You've got this this, quit foolin' with Mr Keith. 

 

 

Edited January 22, 2022 by Keith Black

[KeithAug]

On 1/6/2022 at 8:24 PM, Glen McGuire said:

That's actually a pretty good description of my kitchen table when I'm working on one of these ships.

I am also guilty.

[Glen McGuire]

8 hours ago, Keith Black said:

Glen, I think the 'smoke' turned out much more realistic, I like it. Won't you be able to push the smoke plume up once the lot is inside the bottle?

Thanks, Keith.  I will definitely do a test smash with the smoke in place to see if I if it looks like it will survive.  That would certainly be my preference but I don't have high confidence in it working.  We will see!  Thanks again for the gray yarn suggestion.  Definitely more realistic and pretty easy to work with.

 

Unfortunately, I've got other problems to deal with too.  I cut one of the guy wires while clipping the ends of the ratlines so I gotta redo that.  Ugh.  When I lay down the foremast, the mast top hits the whale boats instead of fitting between them.  So I gotta remove the whale boats and narrow them quite a bit.  Ugh.  The mizzen mast pull thread is hitting the bottom of the fore sail so I gotta pull that sail off and shorten it.  Ugh.

 

It's rework time in the central Texas shipyard.   

Edited January 23, 2022 by Glen McGuire

[gjdale]

Glen,

 

I hit the “like” button not because you found some problems, but because you have a plan to fix them. I know you’ll do an excellent job on them too.

[Glen McGuire]

2 hours ago, gjdale said:

I hit the “like” button not because you found some problems, but because you have a plan to fix them. I know you’ll do an excellent job on them too.

Thanks, Grant.  They are pretty minor problems compared to the last build when I snapped the foremast inside the  bottle!  It's always something, isn't it!

 

You starting on that Amati Hannah sometime soon?

[gjdale]

5 hours ago, Glen McGuire said:

You starting on that Amati Hannah sometime soon?

Yes Glen, soon…..maybe another week or so while I finish up some other non-modelling projects.

[Glen McGuire]

The rework on the guy wire, whale boats, and fore sail was successful and not too time consuming.  Two steps forward and one back.  Next up was putting the little anchors in place. They are probably a bit oversized but I don’t think they are too egregious.  After that, it was making the dolphin striker and fitting it with its chains and cables (black thread/fly tying thread in this case).  

Edited January 27, 2022 by Glen McGuire

[Glen McGuire]

Now, the only thing left for the ship build is the handrails.  But before I launched into that, I decided it was time for a test smash and see if I had any chance of fitting all of this inside the 11/16” neck of my chosen bottle.  And….

Nope.  Not even close.  Crapola!  So I shaved the bottom of the hull to just a hair below the waterline.  That helped some but not enough. 

 

The only other thing to look at was the masts since they are the highest points when everything is smashed down.  I had made the wire part of the mast hinges the width of the deck.  This allowed me to stagger the masts so they would lay side by side when laid over instead of being on top of each other.  I also had “lanes” cleared so the masts would lay as flat as possible.  After looking at all that from bow to stern, I could not come up with anything to give me more room other than removing all the deck structures and lowering them.  

Time for a big decision.  Do I take a ton of time to rework the whole deck structure or do I jump in the truck and make a quick trip to Total Wine and find a different bottle?  That decision was even easier than the kid in the commercial who picks Charles Barkley for the pickup basketball game!  

I found a bottle of $8 brandy that looked like it had a bigger neck.  When I got the bottle home and emptied it, the opening wasn’t as large as I was hoping. It was only 1/16” larger in diameter than my other bottle.  Uh oh.

However, turns out that was all the room I needed!!  I did another test smash and the ship was a snug fit, but a fit nonetheless.  They say football is a game of inches, I guess SIBs are a game of tiny fractions of an inch.
 

[Keith Black]

 Glen, great save! Everything looks spiffy.

 

 You stuffing the Aurora into the neck of that brandy bottle (by the by, what happened to the brandy? ) reminds me of when I restored a triumph TR3A and had to pull the differential. Typical British engineering, to remove and replace the differential you need a differential housing spreader, much akin to SIBs.