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Showing content with the highest reputation on 11/21/2016 in all areas

  1. Shipbuilder

    Flop!

    Here is one of my many "flops," the British four-masted barque Marion Lightbody. I sent it to a London auction where it sold for £150. After commission, I got £100.35. It cost £25 to send it there, reducing the profit to £75.35, of which income tax took £15.07, reducing it further to £60.28. It took 57 hours to build, giving a result of £1.05 per hour! Bob
    1 point
  2. I had pictured the masting and rigging to be fairly easy but now that I am into it I am realizing its a pain in the butt. The masts are sewing pins and the yards are wire thinner than the pins, all painted with white enamel. I cut a long horizontal ribbon of paper then I cut the sails to width from that. I cut an arc off the bottom of each one then I glue the yard to the top and trim it to length with nippers. I make three sizes of square sails to go onto two types of masts: The Mizzens are shorter and the Fore and the Main are the same height as each other but slightly taller than the Mizzen. The difficult and tedious part is the gluing on of the yards to the masts. I also have to put one naked wire at the bottom to represent the Course yard, I wont have Courses set on the models. The staysails WERE going to be simple triangles than it struck me I could pre-cut the arc that would appear in the foot of each staysail by using a paper punch and cutting the sails in such a way so that the foot of the staysail would corespond with a section of arc of one of the punched holes.
    1 point
  3. Alex Bellinger

    Schooner Eagle

    Schooner Eagle Schooner Eagle and her sister Arrowsic were built on the Arrowsic River in Maine in 1847 by master builder Samuel Pattee. Eagle went into the “packet” service between Bath and New York while Arrowsic entered the coastal lumber trade. Both were considered good sailors with fast passages to their credit. Arrowsic capsized off Block Island in 1860 from carrying too much sail in a gale. These schooners were examples of the kind of humble working vessels that kept the pulse of the American maritime economy going for most of the 19th century and well into the 20th. Before the expansion of rails and roads, coasting schooners like these were the primary means of transportation and communication between many coastal and Down East communities. Once a very familiar sight all along the seaboard, these coastal schooners were overshadowed by the glamorous clippers, adventurous privateers and racing fisherman and they could slip out of memory altogether. Fortunately, the half hull used for the design of both schooners was donated to the Smithsonian by William Pattee and Howard I Chapelle took off her lines and published them in The National Watercraft Collection. Sometime in the 1970s Model Shipways created a kit reconstructing her rig and adding many details. Tom Matterfis of Clearwater, Florida, kindly sent me a set of these plans along with others, and that got me started. It was clearly a good vessel for the one liter bottles I was using for classes and it was an excellent project for an intermediate ship in bottler looking for a little more challenge in a second model. This little ship has good features with a square sail and the variety of deck details adding interest, while neither rig or hull work is overwhelming. I have used it twice for classes with students who have successfully finished a ship in bottle and hope those reading this now may find something of value in the project. This is the Model Shipways plan, appearing here courtesy of Model Expo. The sketch accompanying the plan was drawn by marine artist John Leavitt, who wrote and illustrated Wake of the Coasters. The plan was reduced for a model about 4 3/8” overall and 3 1/8” high, about 29’ = 1”. I made my first model of her in 1990, not long after Tom sent me her plans. I was still using plumber’s putty at the time, so now the sails are thoroughly “oiled”. While they were changing color it wasn’t very pleasant, but now I do have to admit the soft translucence is nice to look at. I made one or two more over the years but took her up again for a class in 2012. Please bear in mind what follows was not pictures and notes accumulated for this kind of format, so there are gaps. If anything is not clear, I will be glad to try to better explain. The hulls are made up from rough blanks cut out in halves and glued together along the centerline. Rob Napier’s half models inspired this. This way the sheer can be cut a little more accurately on my extremely capricious Dremel jig saw and you never lose the centerline. Starting out with 10 hulls, 5 went to the guys in the class and another was a replacement for one of the guys who wanted to make a fresh start. I wound up working on 4, primarily to show the various stages in the progress for each model. In this picture the hull furthest from the camera is the most basic, still a rough hull blank with only the quarterdeck bulkhead and main deck center planks glued in. Next to it is the one with the deck planked and some general hull shaping begun. The next has the general hull outline, plan view, done and the waterways and first “plank” of the main deck bulwark are in. The closest shows main deck bulwarks complete with timberheads and cavils attached. The cap rails become the waterway for the quarter deck. The next shot is much the same stage but some waterways are started on the second hull, first bulwark plank for the third hull’s main deck are done and the last hull has a short rail around the quarter deck, a splash rail on the bow rails and the outline of the stem and head are attached. In the background is a form used for bending bulwark “planks” and a couple of bent “planks” waiting to be glued in. Here the hull is getting wales attached, made up of two strips of thin stock, each about 0.020” thick and 1/32” wide. All of the hulls, the initial blanks, decking, bulwarks, rails, timberheads, etc, are pine, probably most cut from the same piece of wood. The clips used to hold stock in place are from the advice of Ralph Preston. He bought a package of these, from Radio Shack I think, and we added the extra extensions on the handles from flattened brass tubing. This makes them a little easier to handle, adds a little more weight when one is used to keep tension on a line, but they were mostly added on so Ralph could give me a lesson on using epoxy. These were made up almost 30 years ago and I doubt any project since hasn’t made some use out of these little clips. Here they hold the wales to the stem and a section of the rail over the transom. The little notch is the splash rail is for the cat head. Another shot of the clamps at work. Here the second hull has timberheads in place and is getting the upper “plank” of her bulwarks. A clip is holding a section of the rail alongside the billet on the stem. Another shot of the same step shows the trail boards of the bow rails and a jig on the left for bending the thin stock to make the tight curve necessary for this detail. A similar shot shows getting the bulwark “plank” curve around the form.
    1 point
  4. Thank you for your kind words. What follows here is, I promise, the end of this log as I prepared. Dave raised a very good question I will answer separately below. There are, of course, other methods, and I decided to use one of them for the second model. Here she is rigged, with sails, but please note her foretop stay leads through a hole in the mast head, not the bowsprit. The collapse and removal from the stand are essentially the same. David Kolaga, a fine ship in bottler, once told me vertically mounted ships in bottles must always go in bow first. Any rule demands an exception, but this one has always made sense to me. Here the schooner is making her way down the neck of a 1 liter Florence boiling flask. This is one of a bag of these given to me by the late Jim Moore, an excellent ship modeler who made fine models of the modern cargo ships he spent his life working in. Unlike some such gestures, this one was greatly appreciated. Settled in her new home but a long way from getting sorted out, this Eagle takes a while to get into proper shape. At last she cooperates and rigging resumes its job keeping all in place. One of the great benefits of Jim’s fine lab flasks is not only the high quality of the glass, but the many views we don’t get with a traditional bottle.
    1 point
  5. Alex Bellinger

    Schooner Eagle

    It always seems remarkable when people ask how a traditional ship in bottle gets in there, because to us doing this for a while the story is so well known. I hope the following will not be too much of a repeat of the familiar tale to those reading this. This is the beginning of the usual collapse. Next it must come off the stand. I usually attach the hull to the stand by gluing it to strips of brown paper, as from a grocery store bag, to the stand. It will hold it firmly enough while working on it and gives it up without too much trouble when the time comes. As ever, this is when plenty can go wrong and usually something does. Then it is a matter of what and how bad. The crucial question is whether it’s bad enough to require a return journey through the neck, never a good idea, or whether all can be set right inside. This a good trip and the masts are starting to come back up. Finally all is up and done and this completed lady joins an older completed job. Here is also a close up of the deck with features mentioned above, but rather briefly. For a sense of size, this is a shot of this 1 liter schooner with a 10 liter model of Constitution at the same scale. They may be the same scale but here are years apart. Eagle was launched in 1847 and this is how Constitution would have looked in 1812. However, the fact both are in bottles on my dining room table further challenges any possible relevance in seeing them together.
    1 point
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