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Excellent work so far Lars!

 

I hope this image is of some use to you:

Sail Plan Comparisons

 

It's a comparison of the size of the rig between Venetian, French and British 74s which I suspect is from this book: Das Erbe der Serenissima from Verlag Militaria. Admittedly it's for ships of the Third Rate, but I would guess that the proportions wouldn't be too dissimilar for the smaller classes.

 

Mike.B)

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Thanks All,

 

...& a big "Thank You", Mike! I'll just be "eyeballing" the rig on Surprise, with casual attention to Marquardt's sail plans & probably more attention to Geoff Hunt's paintings...& this rig looks more contemporary with the kit's design as molded (circa 1760's-70's) than the Napoleonic wars...but it's certainly interesting to see a comparison of this sort, even if it doesn't show "the cut of his jib"!

 

The kit, BTW, doesn't come with royal yards or sails, but they were often taken down so I'm not going to worry about that, either.

 

Cheers, -Lars

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Considering the rigs of the late sailing Frigates were essentially arrived at by the 1790s (except for details), I'd refer you to Gardiner's most-easily (i.e. cheaply) available book "Frigates of the Napoleonic War". It will give you the basic spar dimensions, and a decent commentary of what sort of refinements were happening in the 1800-1810 period.

 

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Hi All, especially Francis,

You wanted to see the bottom painting process mentioned earlier, but that's somewhere ahead, with no schedule. Meanwhile, here's a close-up of my dusty USRMC Morris, from the Lindberg "War of Independence Schooner" (the "War of Independence" there being the one in which Texas became independent of Mexico & a dependent of the U.S. instead). The kit was molded with a beakhead, with crude molded-on head rails, but Chapelle's drawing in "The American Sailing Navy" indicates that, of 7 vessels built to this design, only one, USRMC Hamilton, had that feature, so I carefully removed it. So here's my painted-on "copper plating":

 

Morris_02

 

Cheers!

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Just now, Killingholme said:

Considering the rigs of the late sailing Frigates were essentially arrived at by the 1790s (except for details), I'd refer you to Gardiner's most-easily (i.e. cheaply) available book "Frigates of the Napoleonic War". It will give you the basic spar dimensions, and a decent commentary of what sort of refinements were happening in the 1800-1810 period.

 

Thanks Killingholme,

Sounds potentially useful; how is it for diagrams, contemporary paintings & such? A useful picture is always worth at least a thousand words...

 

Cheers!

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6 hours ago, GMK said:

I’ve always been a bit down on/sceptical of  injection molded plastic tall ships. Having seen your work, it seems a hasty revision of that opinion is in order!

Thank you,

In static modeling, it's pretty-much all about appearances, after all. Plastic is just a medium that, given a good kit, gets you past building the hull & onto the part that stops many potential builders anyway: the rigging. I've made a long road out of even that shortcut here, but Lindberg's old (ex-Pyro/Lifelike, IIRC?) Baltimore clipper revenue cutter has a simpler rig at a slightly larger scale, with all the basic rigging parts of any other square rigger of the early 19th Century (plus running mainstays), to practice model rigging techniques on. This one also demanded more effort from the sail loft, but I only went as far as to cut a suit from pastel lined note paper, tweak the mast rake a bit, add a few after-market deadeyes & some HO crew (not quite right, maybe too small but not horribly so...). The laughable kit sails consisted of 2 vac-formed FURLED square sails & a slab-like injection-molded gaff main sail, fully hoisted. I highly recommend it anyway, should a copy ever cross your path; it's a pretty little thing:

 

USRMC_Morris3

 

Cheers, -Lars

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On 20/02/2018 at 10:22 PM, lars_opland said:

Thanks Killingholme,

Sounds potentially useful; how is it for diagrams, contemporary paintings & such? A useful picture is always worth at least a thousand words...

 

Cheers!

 

Very good. Like all Gardiner's books they are based mainly around contemporary admiralty drawings- reproduced clearly but at quite small size (i.e. for reference purposes rather than taking off dimensions). It begins by chronologically detailing the various classes introduced during the war period (so starting in 1801 with the 18pdrs such as the Tribune class 36's). After that it takes a chapter at a time- thematic studies on construction, design, wartime modifications, armament, performance, and frigates in action. Again, all well illustrated with contemporary drawings. You can very much call it an illustrated history.

 

A handy, compact little volume. You certainly couldn't use the small drawings (average size 100mmx50mm) to create scale models, but if you want to see a contemporary sketch of rigging a carronade, or find a comparative table of spar dimensions for different classes of frigate, then whilst not as exhaustive as his other works, it would be a very useful (and comparatively cheap) book to find.

 

Will

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Thank You, Will,

 

I'm sold! As for the sizes of the images, among the guys I correspond with are a few who scratch-build beautiful airplane models from horrible little thumbnail 3-views grabbed off websites, all the time. They just blow them up to a workable size, follow the middles of all the fuzzy lines & break out the detail photos...though that last bit would be problematic in this genre....

 

I should elaborate on a couple of modifications I made to the kit hull while starting "Surprise": Although the keel couldn't be brought level with the waterline as the draft shows (without more major plastic surgery), I was able to remove a millimeter or 2 off the keel under the stern & the bottom of the rudder without getting too close to the garboards amidships & while keeping the keel straight. The stem profile was also revised slightly to better resemble the drawings. The Admiralty draft shows a curved & raking stem from keel to rail while the kit parts are molded with less rake & nearly plumb from waterline to rail.

 

Diorama builders may be interested to note that this current build appears very close to scale with that mid-size simplified Revell Constitution mentioned earlier...& the movie's French privateer "Acheron" is based on a drydock scan of Constitution.

 

Constitution01

 

Cheers, -Lars

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Wasn't the "phantom USS Norfolk" of O'Brien's novel Far Side of the World based on the marauding USS Essex?

It's not easy to think how you could make a decent model of USS Essex from commonly available kits. She was a bit of an oddball design, being a large example of a small frigate!

 

Will

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Hi Will,

I thought so, though that story turned out differently too. Thanks to the British Admiralty, drawings for Essex survive & careful copies were published by Howard Chapelle in "American Sailing Navy". I have a primitive color rendering of the ship in another book here. IIRC, this was another all-carronade frigate?

Cheers, -Lars

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Hi Again, All, & Thank You, Kris.

 

Killingholme, I took another look at Chapelle's drawing of Essex &, in this rare instance, the source is U.S. records & contemporary illustrations, rather than an Admiralty draft of a war prize.

 

Here we are, 8 days down the road & I have 3 more bits of plastic to show. First step of this stage was to locate the head frame that will stand between the gammonings, then measure the width & height there, draw a pattern & transfer it to .030" sheet via double-sticky tape & knife pokes. After connecting the dots with the knife & rubbing in a bit of dirt to better see the line, the jeweler's scroll saw was used to get out the frame & a bit of 320-grit smoothed the edges. Ends were given approximately correct bevels:

 

Surprise_381

 

Test-fitting with tweezers was too "iffy" (mostly a lot of variations on dropping the thing), so the first head frame was glued in place, the liquid cement joins allowed to get a bit stiff & tacky, & the assembly set on the bow. This revealed that the part could stand moving forward a bit on the head rails & was slightly too tall, so it was twisted off, chopped a tad shorter at it's base & re-glued slightly up & forward of the previous location. After tacking up again, the assembly was re-offered to the bow, fit as intended & was allowed to dry overnight:

 

Surprise_382

 

Repeated 2 more times, I had this...

 

Surprise_383

 

All needed to be moved once, all needed trimming for height at least once, & the aftermost head frame was too narrow the first time out so had to be re-patterned & cut out twice. They're spaced a bit farther apart than on the draft, but that's because I knew going in that I didn't really want to do five of these things...

 

Surprise_385

 

It needs another pair of rails, but that's what I've got for now.

 

Surprise_384

 

Cheers, -Lars

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Thank You Stuart,

 

In fact, I've sailed aboard 2 square-riggers & built several small 1:1 sailboats for our use & for friends, so have used much of this jargon "in earnest", where no other words are adequate. A gammon is basically something to hold the bow sprit down, where it passes out of the ship's structure. Some gammons are just iron straps, or a bronze pin passed through 2 timbers standing either side of the sprit, but Surprise has 2 great bundles of rope there. A single gammon made of rope is often referred to as "gammoning", so I went with "gammonings". Spell-check doesn't like ANY of this nautical clap-trap... 

 

Cheers, -Lars

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On 26/02/2018 at 4:36 AM, lars_opland said:

 

Surprise_385

 

 

 

This photo makes me think there is something very odd going on with the kit moulding at the point where the black-wale seems to simply melt away to nothing rather than continuing beneath round to the stem (i.e. running beneath the cheeks). Might be work rectifying?

 

Will

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Hi Will,

At least that error is symmetrical; the port side is the same. There are a few oddities like that in the kit; all the raised wales wander a bit, but the trouble midships on the port side was the only one that bothered me enough to go after it.

 

There is a large insert in the waist of the kit's gun deck, including but not limited to the main hatch, which looks like a battery-powered version was planned at one point, but there's no sign a prop shaft tube was ever tooled into the hulls (thank goodness), nor any locating features for motor & battery box, but the ill-fitting seam across several inches of "planked" deck remains one of the kit's charming little bugs. There is also a companionway with hinged doors just forward of the mizzen, & 2 supposedly functional doors in the kit's beakhead bulkhead, none of which would be reachable (never mind operable)with 1:1 fingers on a rigged model...& none of that goes into this build.

 

Even with all that, it remains my favorite plastic frigate kit, only in part because it ISN'T USS Constitution.

 

Cheers, -Lars

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17 hours ago, lars_opland said:

Hi Will,

At least that error is symmetrical; the port side is the same. There are a few oddities like that in the kit; all the raised wales wander a bit, but the trouble midships on the port side was the only one that bothered me enough to go after it.

 

There is a large insert in the waist of the kit's gun deck, including but not limited to the main hatch, which looks like a battery-powered version was planned at one point, but there's no sign a prop shaft tube was ever tooled into the hulls (thank goodness), nor any locating features for motor & battery box, but the ill-fitting seam across several inches of "planked" deck remains one of the kit's charming little bugs. There is also a companionway with hinged doors just forward of the mizzen, & 2 supposedly functional doors in the kit's beakhead bulkhead, none of which would be reachable (never mind operable)with 1:1 fingers on a rigged model...& none of that goes into this build.

 

Even with all that, it remains my favorite plastic frigate kit, only in part because it ISN'T USS Constitution.

 

Cheers, -Lars

You're right, after careful painting this moulding quirk probably won't be all that obvious- and if you took time to fix all of these errors, there really wouldn't be much Lindberg plastic left!  In my view it remains a really glaring error that betrays that the person who designed the kit didn't understand how a real ship's hull was constructed. I do wonder whether a spot of filler to smoothly transition the wales and make them look like they continue underneath the cheek timbers could be an 'easy win'. You can see what I'm getting at (in an albeit blurry vision) here:

 

f9203-005.jpg

 

(please also note also the authentic, poseable, beakhead doors.....:P!(sorry!)

 

I comment in full knowledge that I could never confidently modify a kit to the standards seen here. I am in awe of the work, and sure the finished model will look absolutely stunning!

 

cheers,

Will

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Thank You for the vote of confidence, Will.

 

I've thought often about different ways to do different things during this build, & the whole cheek timber area was something I considered changing early on, but decided to leave "well enough alone" after considering that correcting the area to conform with the draft would run into the hollow inside the kit's cheek timbers. Just filling the forward end of the main wales would have run me into dealing with the transition to the molded trim there, so the easiest win won...

 

Thank You, Tom; I still have mine here & wouldn't want to "part out" such a classic series!

 

Cheers, -Lars

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Hi All,

A little more progress & 2 more whole pieces added. After the assortment of styrene strip on hand was examined, I settled for .030" quarter round, one flat side to the head frames & rounded side out, flattened an edge at one end of a short piece, gave that end a sharp bend, followed by a shallower opposite bend, & cemented this under the fore end of the head rail & halfway down the first head frame. Once that was tacky enough to sit this way & stay, the assembly was laid on it's side, stabilized with a clothes pin resting on the other end of the head rail & left to dry for the night:

 

Surprise_387

 

The next evening, I found myself in need of a tiny clamp with a light touch, to hold the rail in place on the last head frame. 2 flat toothpicks, a round toothpick & a small rubber band:

 

Surprise_389

 

2 evenings later, same step with the other rail:

 

Surprise_392

 

After some careful eyeballing, including some study of a previous photo of the headrails in position, locations were marked & holes drilled, all so I wouldn't need to cut the after ends of the rails to exact length:

 

 

Surprise_393

 

 

There's a steel rod resting on top of the head rails there because the lower rails are being bowed upwards a bit by those holes, as intended.

 

Let's see, channels for the shrouds ought to be next...

 

Cheers, -Lars

 

"A sailor's work is never done." (trad.)

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