Soleil Royal by EricWiberg - Heller - 1/100 - started 45 years ago

[EricWiberg]

I have patiently carved eleven different dolphins, and I think that the one on the copper penny is just about what I want. The two above the penny were iterations #8 and #9... for some reason, I really liked the look of the carved wooden furniture dolphin below, specifically the big lips!

 

The dolphin on the penny needs some clean up work; I was very frustrated at my ability to make nice, thin, sweeping curves of the tail fins - see iterations #8 and #9! However, I discovered that a very small woodworking gouge that has a shallow curve could allow me to do a much better job than with my #11 Xacto blade. I currently have a 4mm wide shallow curve gouge, and I am patiently waiting for the delivery of several smaller gouges: 1.5mm, 2mm, and 3mm. I know that will allow me to finish off the tail with nice, long fins as I visualized in my drawing, and also thin the body.

 

I also want to add texture on the head ala the "mane" on my drawing and where the small pectoral fin is be in the drawing. I experimented with Apoxie Sculpt, and the tiniest ball of maybe 1mm flattens out into an oval, and lets me mark some very fine striations in it - much easier for me than attempting that in plastic. So I just have to be patient until the gouges arrive later this week.

 

 

 

[EricWiberg]

I settled on a dolphin carving that I can live with. The very small curved wood gouges arrived and they did allow me to make very fine curves on the tail fins. However... even in 0.75mm thick styrene sheet, those very fine fins were way too fragile, They broke while unmoulding, they broke while removing the resin casting from the mould, etc.

 

The fins were strong enough at 1.0mm styrene sheet thickness, but that was getting too thick and out of scale for what I wanted. I made the tail section and the fins a little thicker for strength, and now are they strong enough for the moulding and casting process using 0.75mm thick sheet.

 

 

This is the first resin cast, not cleaned up yet. So now to finish the left hand dolphin, and then I can start making 25 or so sets of dolphins for the upper gun deck gun ports.

 

Edited May 22 by EricWiberg

[EricWiberg]

I don't think that I can do any better on the dolphin pair, if only for the reason that the very fine details are lost in the resin casting... and you would need a magnifying glass in hand to get close enough to the master carvings to even see those details. You may notice that the left hand dolphin is getting some dental work (done after I made a test resin casting), as the mouth structure didn't quite match the right hand dolphin. I have a little bit of cleanup work to do, but I won't get carried away.

 

 

I made these resin castings before I started the mouth surgery on the left hand dolphin, just to see if the were close enough to be twins. These are straight from the casting mould with no cleanup or detailing - I simply wanted to see the Big Picture.

 

 

I think they are close enough that I can start making a bunch of castings this weekend, and it will likely take several days to clean up the 20+ pairs of dolphins that will be needed to flank the upper gun deck ports. I also have several dozen fluer de lis resin castings, as I mull over exactly how I want to use them on the bulwarks.

 

I am thinking it may be as straightforward as a mass of fleur de lis as seen on the Royal Duc....

 

 

 

 

Edited May 23 by EricWiberg

[Hubac's Historian]

Hi Eric - it is helpful to double-stick a piece of 150-grit paper to a sanding block, and then use your finger pad to press down lightly while sanding the backs of the castings.  This will accomplish two things.  It will neatly remove any flash, and it will give you a good mechanical bonding surface for the CA.

 

I don’t think your upper bulwark frieze has to be terribly complicated.  You could, however, add a little extra visual interest and a call-out to the name if the vessel, if you made sun castings with the dauphin at center.

 

You can actually pull this detail from the stock quarter galleries, and make really nice moulds - perhaps extracting the sun emblem first, and reducing its perimeter a little, for the sake of scale.  Just a thought.

 

 

[Hubac's Historian]

You can see these sun emblems worked into the frieze of fleurs, along with alternating harps, on the Monarque:

 

[EricWiberg]

As I have said before, sometimes it is 1 step forward for me... and then 2 steps backwards. Take the dolphins that will bracket the uper deck gun ports. I was very happy with the right hand dolphin that I created from my vellum sketch. I drew the sketch, and then shrank it down to 10mm in size for a template. for the left hand dolphin, I just horizontally flipped the sketch.. but I simply couldn't draw a matching left hand dolphin to my satisfaction! I finally realized that my right hand dolphin, drawn first, had some tiny inconsistencies with the original sketch... so even if my left hand dolphin perfectly followed the sketch template, it wouldn't match. So I photocopied the right hand dolphin, flipped it horizontally, and then used that for my left hand dolphin. Go figure - that approach actually worked. I am happy with this pairing; even though there are some tiny differences (hint, for example, the eyebrows), it is next to impossible to see them at a normal viewing distance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And I am just fine with how the first test casting (they haven't been cleaned up) for the pair looks now...

 

 

So, that means I am back to cranking out the various castings...

 

 

I am also experimenting with Marc LaGuardia's suggestion, about having sun castings with the head of the dauphin sprinkled between the fleur de lis on the bulwarks. The kit suns are 10mm in dimater, and as Marc noted, they are just a little too big for scale. a 7-8mm sun seems to be much more appropriate... the sun on the right has the head of the dauphin on it... just a test (also cast from the kit decorations).

 

Edited May 29 by EricWiberg

[EricWiberg]

Before I apply any of the decorations, the gun tackle bolts need to be put in place. I have 600 nails that have 0.6mm flat heads; I figured these would look like the large washers on the hull that secure the through. I was originally going to blacken them and install them after the hull painting, but that isn't going to work; they need to be installed now, and it doesn't make sense to blacken them, as a tiny dollop of black paint after hull painting will do the trick.

 

I made several jigs so I could have a precise, repeatable pattern despite the gun port holes being of varying sizes.

 

 

 

Using the jigs, I simply drill a hole through the hull, insert the nail, and secure it with a bit of glue. You will note that I plugged my first attempt at a hole pattern (which I did many months ago in an amateurish way). It is going to take some time to make 400 holes or so - and when I get up to the gun ports that are visible on the inside of the ship, I obviously can't drill all of the way through the hull. I will make a shallower hole and snip of most of the length of the nail. The two dolphins haven't been cleaned, and I just laid them in place to get an idea of what they will look like.

 

 

Edited May 30 by EricWiberg

[EricWiberg]

Sigh...on vacation for the last week, so no manual work on the ship. However, that early AM time with a cup or two of coffee AND before others are awake is a great time to think and ponder.

 

And one of those ideas for me is ..."before 1688, ship windows consisted of small, diamond shaped pieces, and not larger rectangular or square windows". As seen below in a 1668 drawing of Royal Louis...

 

 

As I am trying to construct a plausible 1671 Soleil Royal, this idea is important for me. Some alternative design choices I have made, for example 1) a long, low Dutchy head, or 2) the lack of gangways are due to what I believe is the Dutch training and/or school of thought that Laurent Hubac emerged from. But the idea that windows were small, diamond shaped pieces of glass... that is resource driven and NOT a design choice.

 

If I were Marc LaGuardia, or John Ott, for example, I would launch into a doctoral worthy dissertation  that is both entertaining and informative...

 

"Window glass making has been around since the Roman Empire, but the glass pieces were thick, small, amd discolored. But they allowed some modicum of light in, whilst keeping the bugs out. And that was the extent of it for a millenia or two!

 

And then, the mouth-blown cylinder technique for making (somewhat) flat glass was developed in Germany sometime in the 11th century. This glass was called Broad Glass. The glass was blown into a balloon, but elongated enough that it resembled a cylinder (note that true Cylinder Glass developed centuries later). This cylinder was cut by shears while still hot and then flattened on an iron table. Finally! Relatively flat glass could be produced,  but... the but was the quality was poor and had many imperfections and was fairly opaque... but, it was getting flatter.

 

And then another mouth-blown technique was developed that the French perfected in the 14th century.. and they enjoyed a monopoly on this product for a century or two! The technique was called  Crown Glass. A blob of glass was blown into and then spun, with centrifugal force making a disc perhaps 3 feet in diameter. 

 

 

However, the best glass was in the thin areas on the outside of the disc. The pictire below demonstrates the odd cuts that had to be made in order to get the best, thinnest glass on the edges.

 

 

 

So if a large quantity of quality glass was required, small shapes from the edges of multiple discs had to be painstakingly assembled... the small, regular diamond shape was born. Not because of a design choice, but because of nessecity.

 

In 1688, the first technique was perfected - by the French again! - that was NOT mouth-blown and also produced flat, translucent glass. This was called Plate Glass and involved pouring molten glass on a special table. This made a flat sheet, but required much labor intensive polishing on both sides.

 

This glass technique made quality glass but at a price.. so it was relegated to the rich. Or.... the REALLY rich like a king... amd his ships? I find the year 1688 very convenient, as this starts to tie in with the Second Marine ships, and the rebuild of SR 1671...."

 

So there it is. I believe that all those early, magnificent ships... Soleil Royal, Royal Louis, Monarque and so on... they all had windows consisting of small, diamond-shaped pieces of glass. Not by choice, but because that is what they had.

 

So that is what I will do with my interpretation of SR 1671... ohh.. did I say I now just have to figure out a way to create windows from these tiny, 💎 shaped pieces?

 

By the way, the spot where the blowers tube left a mark like a belly button was considered junk fit for peasants. Can you imagine the value of a window like this now?!

 

 

 

Edited June 6 by EricWiberg

[EricWiberg]

I am starting to carve my trophies of war that will be displayed between the middle gun deck ports. There are twelve "trophies" on the St. Philippe monograph, and conveniently, I have twelve spots that need filling... twelve trophies, two copies of each (and since they will be displayed on different sides of the ship, I don't have to agonize over making them identical as I had to do with the dolphin carvings.

 

Here is the end result of my first trophy of war pattern (there are some tiny corrections to make, but honestly they will be very difficult to observe at a normal viewing distance). Conveniently, the ship kit has six trophies of war featured on the quarter, but as shown below, they are just too big for me to use...

 

 

It required about two hours of time to make the first two copies; I chose the easiest pattern to start! First, I had to settle on the appropriate size of the St. Philippe trophies so the tiny photocopies could be glued to styrene sheet.

 

 

Conveniently, five of the twelve trophies use an identical shield, so my first step was to make ten shields (five face right, and the other five face left).

 

 

The next step was to carve out a tiny helmet - my small wood gouges really helped with the curves here.

 

 

And this is what the first trophy looks like overlaid on the 1:24 size copy. There is a tiny bit of cleanup work, but it will be very hard to see at normal viewing distance; I exaggerated the size of the crest on the helmet so that it could be seen. I even tried to make the protective cheek and ear flaps for the helmet, but they were so small and hard to see, I decided that step wasn't worth it. 

 

Now on to the second set of trophies; this will probably take 10-14 days to finish, but it will be worth it.

 

 

Edited Tuesday at 01:24 PM by EricWiberg