HMS Diana by DavidEN - Caldercraft - 1:64

DavidEN · May 31

Gosh! It has been a while since my last post. All work ground to a halt while I did other things and the ship just sat there gathering dust. Once you stop pedalling on a hill it is hard to overcome inertia to get going again. It was such a long time that I even forgot my password to this site and could no longer log on. I decided that I need to pull myself together and make a push for the finish line. I thought that I should start with some gentle tasks to get me back into the swing of things so I took the opportunity to swap out the companion with the new 3D printed one I made a while back. I was not altogether convinced by it but I thought that I would see how it looked in place. The old one was well glued and I had to resort to the heavy pliers to get it out albeit in many pieces. I shoved the new one in to the accompaniment of ominous cracking sounds emanating from the deck planking. Seeing that the old one is now kindling I will have to live with the new one.

I managed to secure some more manly 3D models of seated figures to test out the small boat dimensions. These are not period figures. I think they are some sort of oil rig workers. With their greater bulk and manspreading they really fill up the boat a lot more than the fashionable ladies. I gave them a quick measure and found out that they are over 6ft tall. Google tells us that the average height for an 18th century seaman was around 5'6" so I scaled down a batch and now the boats look less like a clown car.

18 ft Cutter (Jolly Boat)

26 ft Launch

I started up on the final two ship boats namely the 24 foot cutter and the 32 foot pinnace and am in the hull planking phase. I have not progressed very far on these but I am easing myself back into the building routine. It is amazing how much I have forgotten in the last year. Luckily this site is quite a useful tool as an aide-memoire but I am still puzzled as to how I did things the first time around.

The thought of all of those tiny planks was giving me the fear so I thought that I would procrastinate some more. Coincidentally I had just been reading the narrative of the wreck of the Medusa and was astonished to see that they managed to fit 42 persons in a 14 oar boat which is presumably a 30ft cutter or launch. They also had 15 persons in a small boat which is possibly equivalent to a Jolly Boat, though the author does refer it to a pirogue later on in the manuscript so it may be a lot smaller and narrower than a Jolly Boat. I guess snugness is a relative term. I tried 15 folk in the 18ft Jolly Boat and they just about fit and I managed to get 29 people in the 26ft Launch. If I were to remove the windlass and increase the length of the boat to accommodate an extra thwart I imagine you could just about get 42 people in.