Model Ship Builder

January 16th 2010 

Time to see what’s in the box.

The first picture shows the open box almost completely lost amongst the plans. I said that the first two sheets were A0 size. In fact, the first sheet is a little smaller (A0.5?). It’s an odd size, 75% of the height of an A0 sheet.

I haven’t checked yet but I’m pretty sure the diagrams on these two sheets are full size.

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This is what’s in the box. If you’re not familiar with metric paper sizes, an A0 sheet is 1 sq. metre. It’s near enough 4 foot wide, so that will give you an idea of the size of the parts.

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Lots of wood, and it all looks to be very good quality. As you can see, there are 4 plywood sheets rather than the 5 that I originally thought. The bag of what I believe are filler blocks, at the bottom right corner, are shown as a sheet of parts in the instructions.

The keel and all of the bulkheads are pre-cut.

The final picture shows the contents of the white box of goodies you can see in the first picture.

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All the parts are separately packaged, which unfortunately makes them difficult to see in this picture, but again they look to be of good quality. The blocks and grating parts look particularly fine.

I think there’s more rigging cord here than I got with Astrolabe, a fully rigged ship.

For the moment, it’s all back in its box. I’ll resist temptation and await some instructions I can understand.

30^th January 2010

Well, I received a set of English instructions within a couple of days of asking and I’ve now worked my way through the parts list and also through the instructions as far as the start of the rigging.

I started by ticking off the items on the list but almost immediately found myself scribbling notes as to which bundle of wood the items related to. That rapidly got out of hand. There’s a lot of wood in this kit in a variety of types and sizes. I’ve got 27 different  tags on them and that’s not counting the masts and spars.

At this point, I scanned the parts list and copied it into Excel. It took a while to tidy it up, but it was well worth it. I can now select an item name or a particular size of wood and see all the places it’s used.

The instructions are quite reasonable, which is a first as far as I’m concerned. Each part is numbered and the instructions give the plan & figure number(s) showing how it fits. As I identified each part, I entered the diagram numbers alongside it. I’m pretty sure I now know what’s what and what goes where.

I haven’t counted the number of blocks, deadeyes, rings eyes etc, but other than that I’ve only found a couple of items to be missing, nothing worth arguing about.

There should be a wooden rope drum for the ships wheel. A bit of dowel with the middle turned down will sort that.

There should be 8 hearts according to the parts list and I only have 6. However, as these are for the forestay and the two mainstays (one each side of the funnel) I think that’s a mistake and I only actually need 6.

The only other things missing are 5 ‘Old maid blocks’. What these look like is a mystery! They do the same job as the hearts and go in the fore topmast stay and the jib stay, so how that equates to 5 rather than 4 is another mystery! With a little help in the way of research from Colin Lloyd, I think something suitable should be easy enough to produce.

I’ve actually also got some additional items I haven’t identified. They look like brass bushes 10mm long with a shoulder at one end. There are 4 in the bag with the davits and I wondered if they were for the base of the davits to fit in, but not required on this model. What makes that unlikely is that there is another one, very slightly different, packed individually.

So, finally, we’re off!

I didn’t even have to separate the keel and bulkheads from plywood sheets, they were already detached. As with almost all the other parts, they appear to have been cut with a CNC router. Looking at the sheets of parts, the cuts are 1.5mm wide and very neat.

The bulkheads would possibly have fitted into the keel without sanding but they would have been very tight. A light sanding of the slots was all that was required. For some reason the keel slots were the ones that needed sanding on the forward half whereas the bulkhead slots need sanding on the aft section.

Each bulkhead has to fit with its top level with the top of the keel. Very slight filling of the bottom of the slots was required in one or two cases.

Before I even get past step 1, I’m already modifying things! The plans show the masts at 90 degrees to the deck but the photograph of the ship I posted earlier shows them to be raked back quite substantially.

There are two slots in the keel to locate the masts, both at 90 degrees to the keel. When I test-fitted the foredeck, the hole for the foremast didn’t line up with its slot.

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I checked the deck with the plan and the holes matched perfectly, but when I tried the keel I found it was fractionally longer than shown on the plan.

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Whatever the reason, it’s not a problem as the slots in the deck for the bulkheads all fitted perfectly. What would have been a problem if I hadn’t been modifying things and hadn’t spotted it either, is that the slot for the foremast is only 5mm wide and the mast is 8mm diameter. It should have been cut 3mm wider and had that been done on the stern side, it would also have lined up correctly with the hole in the deck. As long as you spot it at this point, it’s easily rectified. In my case, because I was modifying it anyway, it wasn’t an issue.

I cut two pieces of wood to fit in the two mast slots and glued them in place. When the glue had dried, I glued small pieces of ply wood on either side of the keel at these locations. I also glued similar pieces either side of where I propose to insert some mounting screws. (Any similarities in the shapes of the reinforcing pieces to the openings in the bulkheads of a Greek bireme are purely coincidental).

At this point I did a little photo editing. I took the picture of the Gulnara I posted earlier and cropped it to just show the main mast and the deck forward of the mast. I printed off the resulting image on an A4 sheet and then trimmed off the edge of the sheet along the line of the mast with the guillotine to make myself the equivalent of a bevel gauge. Using that it was a simple matter to tilt the table on my pillar drill to the correct angle and re-drill the two mast holes.

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And here’s the result:

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Note: The keel is screwed down to the piece of chipboard in these last two pictures.

Having completed my modifications I could now get back on track.

Here’s the first major (though very easy) step completed - the bulkheads glued into the keel.

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The decks are dry fitted just to square things up. Actually, there’s no way this was going out of square, everything fitted very well.

6th February 2010

The next step was to block out the bow and stern.

Krick actually include some pre-cut abaci blocks to do this. I’ve never heard of abaci and a browse around wasn’t at first successful, abaci is apparently the plural of abacus but wood and trees don’t get a mention. After a bit of searching I found it’s actually abachi, not abaci. For some reason, it seems to be the timber of choice for saunas.

It’s described as a hard version of balsa and carves very well. It does seem to blunt tools very quickly though and I found myself continually having to re-sharpen them.

Shaping the bow was straightforward, as can be seen in the following picture:

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Things weren’t so straightforward at the stern; here I had my first problem with the instructions. These are the two diagrams showing the fitting and shaping of the stern.

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These in themselves don’t seem to be a problem but what happens later has me puzzled. The hull is double planked. After completing the first planking, the second planking material is used to single plank the transom and then the hull receives its second planking.

Fine and logical so far.

The puzzling bit is that there is a plywood transom supplied that is fitted later. The bit I don’t understand is that it’s much deeper than the planked area but is clearly shown not to extend above the planked section of the transom. That would leave a massive overhang at the bottom, but again, this doesn’t seem to be the case either.

I opted to carve the stern as per the diagrams as that’s what the natural lie of the planks indicates. This is the result:

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The plywood transom is shown alongside the stern. As you can see, it’s significantly larger than seems to be appropriate.

This is the diagram showing what the transom is supposed to look like when planked:

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It appears to be 5 planks deep at the side which at 5mm/plank is 25mm. That looks about right. If you count the planks on the stern there are 8 which equates to 40mm. I estimate the actual depth will end up just over 30mm whereas the plywood piece is half as deep again at 45mm.

There are two castings supplied for the quarter galleries. These are to be glued on after planking and then the plywood transom is glued across behind them. The instructions do call for the transom to be cut to overlap 1mm beyond these. I can only assume that Krick have been overgenerous with the size of this piece.

As it is, I’m not particularly impressed with these castings and I think they’ll end up being left in the box. If I’m going to make my own galleries anyway, that will solve the problem of making things fit.