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| Mantua 'Astrolabe' - 1:50 | ||
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| aew |
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aew   Registered Member #1929 Joined: Wed Nov 30 2011, 03:05pmPosts: 2779 | This is a retrospective build log of a retrospective build log!  I actually built this model a few years ago and posted a build log, starting some 9 months later, on DryDockModels forum. As that log no longer exists (other than my copies of it) I thought it might be of interest if I re-posted it here. Please feel free to comment. It was my first POB kit and I know there are mistakes in there, but it's too late to change things now! I'll date these log entries with the actual construction dates. [ Edited Tue Jan 17 2012, 04:02pm ] | ||
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| aew |
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| aew Registered Member #1929 Joined: Wed Nov 30 2011, 03:05pmPosts: 2779 | 28th November 2007 PICT_A_0101  Where to start? Myself, the ship or the kit? Maybe to explain how things developed, I should start with myself. I have an engineering background and have acquired a fair selection of tools over the years for both metalwork and woodwork, but for full size jobs rather than modelling. That’s not to say I haven’t built models in the past. However these were mostly aircraft although there were some cars and an R/C boat in there as well. The engineering background is relative to this log as I retired at the end of last year. Shortly prior to this, I was told there had been a collection and asked what I wanted as a retirement present. The question wasn’t entirely unexpected but I hadn’t thought of anything at that time. However, after a bit more thought, I had an idea for something (other than a clock) that would make a suitable memento. I suspect you know where this is leading! You’re almost right, on my retirement I was presented with a laminated picture of ‘Astrolabe’ on which was printed “It’s in the post!” The reason I picked Astrolabe was that it’s a full rigged ship, which I’ve always liked, and was classed at intermediate skill level. (It was also well within budget). At that time, as far as I was concerned, an astrolabe was a navigational instrument. I’d never heard of a ship of that name. After a little research, I found it rather surprising that, in view of the series of exploratory voyages it had made, it was not more widely known. (Perhaps it is in France?) The kit describes the ship as a sloop (in English) which I think is a miss-translation - all the other languages have some variation of the word ‘corvette’. I believe in English, corvette actually implies a warship. For several years in her early history, she was used to transport men and ammunition so perhaps that’s a reasonable classification - it’s the one I’m using. To be totally correct, in English, Astrolabe is a ‘Fully Rigged Ship’ but that’s too much of a mouthful! The kit also appears to be incorrect in assigning a date of 1812 to Astrolabe. The relevant information seems to be as follows: Built in Toulon shipyard, France. Launched 1811 Originally named Ecurie - I can’t find the origin of this information but as the ship was originally built to transport horses, it seems appropriate. Refitted, during 1813, to transport men and ammunition. Renamed Coquille in 1814 Re-fitted once again for geographic survey work commencing August 1822 Renamed Astrolabe (after a previous exploration ship of that name) prior to its second survey voyage in 1826. The ship made three voyages of exploration in all and further information can be found by searching under ‘Jules Dumont d'Urville’ She was eventually scrapped in 1851. Dimensions: Length 31.57m Beam 18.48m Draught 4.25m Displacement 380 tonnes Now to the model itself. The kit is produced by Mantua and is 1:50 scale. This is a fairly large model, the overall length is 1.1 metres (fortunately my wife couldn't grasp how big that is!) There was some confusion as to the description of this kit between retailers, I found it described as double plank on frame - it’s single planked, including sail canvas – it doesn’t, and having etched brass detailing – the kit has a note on the box saying this has been replaced with laser etched wood detailing in the interests of realism. (At least one website still carries this information). At this point, I should explain that this is a retrospective build log, I actually started construction 9 months ago in January, and at that time had no experience in what to expect in this sort of kit. (I did take plenty of pictures along the way so I should be able to create this log in something approaching the conventional format. Delivery actually took quite a while (I didn’t place the order and had to get one of my work colleagues to chase it up – they’d lost the order and he had to re-order!) I finally received it some 2 months later! PICT_A_0102  First impressions were favourable; the parts were neatly presented in blister packs and looked to be of reasonable quality. I was on more familiar ground with the quality of the plywood parts and the timber provided. Again, these seemed to be of good quality. Three sheets of plans were provided, two of which were double sided. The instruction book was less impressive, it’s one of those that comes in five different languages, and reading a few of the English sections didn’t bode well! One thing I didn’t do – and now realise I should have done – is check the contents against the material list in the instruction book. It’s not been a major issue, but there have been some discrepancies, thankfully not with anything of any significance. Model construction had to take second place to some full scale construction work, so the actual build commenced the following January (2008). | ||
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| aew |
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| aew Registered Member #1929 Joined: Wed Nov 30 2011, 03:05pmPosts: 2779 | 25th January 2008 Now to make a start. The first step in the instructions is important - number the parts before you cut them out of the plywood sheet! The parts are laser cut with just 2 or 3 spots uncut so as to retain them in place. One of the plan sheets is simply a drawing of all the plywood sheets with the parts numbered. If you simply rush ahead and cut all the frames out without first writing the appropriate numbers on them, (no, I didn't make that mistake!), you'll be like a child with one of those wooden jigsaw puzzles, putting the pieces in the correct holes to find out which is which! The plywood is of good quality, and the laser cutting does a very precise job. A little trimming of the parts at the points where they were attached to the sheet is all that is required. The frames and the keel are made from 5mm ply and were dead flat. A dry fit didn't require any adjustments at all and the false deck holds everything at right angles. PICT_A_0201  The instructions tell you to glue these together at this point. It does say check the alignment of the keel with the frames and deck. Whether that means the false deck or the real deck is unclear, but I certainly wanted the real deck in place to make sure things lined up, even if I wasn't gluing it at this time. The deck itself is cut from a sheet of 1.7mm ply. Although this was twisted along its length, it's not an issue at this thickness. The instructions tell you to draw the planking on the deck using a soft pencil. I didn't fancy that for three reasons: 1) I didn't have faith in my artistic skills to make it look right. 2) Even if I managed to do a neat job, I think the lines would have been smudged before I came to the stage of applying some form of sealant. 3) From a distance, the grain of the plywood would predominate, making it obvious that this was a single sheet rather than individual planks. I have some bits of veneer left over from previous jobs so I decided to cut some oak veneer into 5mm strips and use that to plank the deck. PICT_A_0202  Once that was completed, I assembled the pieces for the stern transom (a straight forward job) and glued that, the frames and the keel together, with the deck dry fitted and held down by elastic bands. PICT_A_0203  If you look at the inset picture, it shows a close-up of fore part of the deck with a hole for the bowsprit to pass through. The advantage of writing a retrospective log is that I now know that all was not well at this stage! I think it's pretty obvious (hindsight is a wonderful thing) that the bowsprit rests on the two projections of the keel. That means that that slot needs to extend all the way to the front of the deck. Not only that, it extends much too far to the stern. When I came to fit the bowsprit later, I had to carve out the front of the slot to make the bowsprit fit. The fact that I had planked the deck saved the day at that point as I was able to remove some planks in that area and replace them with ones that extended to the bowsprit. If you are making this model, simply plank over this hole at this stage. (Cutting a bit of plywood the shape of the hole and gluing it in from underneath after planking wouldn't go amiss either.) Although the choice of oak for the deck seemed reasonable, I now think that a lighter wood, possibly sycamore, would have been better as, even unstained, the oak is a little too brown when varnished. Untreated weathered oak would be a grey colour. One final picture, the deck glued in place. PICT_A_0204  Because of the large hole in the forward section of the deck, that section didn't form a smooth curve, it tended to simply bend sharply at its weakest point, i.e. along the centre line. A large clamp and an off-cut of skirting board held it in place whilst the glue dried. | ||
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| Charles |
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  Registered Member #1923 Joined: Mon Nov 28 2011, 06:07pmPosts: 801 | That great Arthur to see your Astrolabe here | ||
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| teleman |
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 Registered Member #1925 Joined: Tue Nov 29 2011, 05:32amPosts: 1254 | Hi Arthur, You just started the Vangard. Now this one and you got your Brieme. Your amazing my friend. I just do not know how you keep all this straight in your head. Just amazing cheers Mario | ||
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| aew |
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| aew Registered Member #1929 Joined: Wed Nov 30 2011, 03:05pmPosts: 2779 | Mario: At the moment I'm baby-sitting my grand daughter so there's no actual building going on. That gives me a chance to post updates to the build logs. Even that's relatively simple. The bireme and Astrolabe logs were actually first written and posted quite a while ago, so all I'm doing is copying the text and sorting the photographs that went with them. Easy! | ||
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| aew |
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| aew Registered Member #1929 Joined: Wed Nov 30 2011, 03:05pmPosts: 2779 | 28th January 2008 A little bit more work to do before starting planking. There are two more pairs of frames/planking supports to fit at the bow and stern. These fit parallel to the keel rather than at right angles to it and are where the fore and aft ends of the planks will finish. The forward pair doesn’t fit tight up against the keel. each piece is angled out slightly. Somehow, I managed to glue these in at slightly different angles. I’m not sure how this happened as they fit into a slot in the deck. I noticed this in the next stage but decided it wasn’t a problem. It did, however, cause me a slight problem later on when I came to fit the bowsprit, I had to run a drill down as it was fouling on one of these pieces but that took only a few minutes to rectify. Most of the bulkheads require very little bevelling but this extra piece at the stern is the exception, it requires serious attention, especially towards the keel. I found it easier to bevel both of these supports before they were glued in place. (Rather than use one of the planks to establish the amount of bevel required on each frame, I found it easier to use one of the thinner walnut strips which are much more flexible.) At this point, I made my first departure from the instructions and decided to block-out the bow and stern sections. I think the way I did this differs from what other people have done. Rather than carve a solid block, I built up the filler like layers of a cake. I purchased a ¼ inch thick sheet of balsa from the local model shop. I temporarily positioned this with its corner in the angle between first bulkhead and the keel (or rather the additional support piece) as close to the deck as possible – the sheet held parallel to the deck at this time. Because the support piece is set at a slight angle, this corner isn’t a right angle and I had to shave a bit off the edge of the sheet to make it fit into the corner. I then took one of the thin mahogany strips and laid it along the bulkheads and alongside the balsa sheet. I then drew a line on the sheet round the outside of the strip. Next, I cut out the piece I’d marked and used it as a template to cut a second piece for the other side and also to cut out two further pieces for the next layer. The next step was to glue these first two pieces in position. Having done that, a little preliminary shaping could be carried out before the next piece was placed in position. For this piece, I could now draw the outline on the upper side following the piece already fitted and on the lower side using the mahogany strip. This allowed the pieces to be trimmed to something nearer the correct size before gluing them in position (not forgetting to first use them as a template for the next two pieces). I continued working down in this way (well up actually, as the hull was upside down at the time!) and as each layer was added, the shape of the previous blocks could be refined. The stern was done in the same way. Unfortunately, I don’t have any photographs showing the extra support pieces prior to blocking out the bow and stern. The edges of them can just be seen in the following pictures if you look closely. PICT_A_0301  PICT_A_0302  Step 4 is to plank the keel with 0.6 x 5mm walnut strips. Normal practice is to veneer both sides of a board and then veneer the edge; however the keel is 6mm ply so the strip isn’t wide enough to do things that way. The edge of the keel has to be done first. I then laid a 6mm strip along the side of the keel. At this stage there was a small gap between the edge of the strip and the bottom of the bulkheads. I offered up one of the planking strips to see whether I need to plank further down the keel and found it fitted exactly into the gap. This set me thinking. I decided to stop planking the keel and leave it until I had planked the hull, as it looked easier to get a neat joint that way. (Looking back, I’m happy that was the right way to do it.) One final thing remains to be done (or not done) before planking begins: the instructions call for the fitting of the stern transom at this point. I now think that this would be better left off until later. With it fitted, the top planks have to be cut to exactly the right length to fit between it and the bow. Without it, the planks could be cut roughly to length and (with care) trimmed to length later. It also interfered with construction of the handrail at a later stage. Next stop planking. (OK, so there are a couple of planks fitted in the pictures – that’s a trailer for the next episode.) | ||
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| aew |
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| aew Registered Member #1929 Joined: Wed Nov 30 2011, 03:05pmPosts: 2779 | 16th February 2008 Now for the planking. This is my first plank on bulkhead model so there’s no way I’m going to try to tell anyone how to plank a hull. What I can do is to try and give some guidance of how it applies to this particular model. The first thing I did was read a hull planking tutorial (currently available on the modelshipworld forum). I found it extremely helpful. Astrolabe has a single planked hull so, as I intended to varnish the hull, I was thrown in at the deep end - get it right first time! The planking is lime and seemed to be of good quality. When I later came to bend this I found a couple of strips snapped at the slightest touch. I could see nothing different about these strips and they were fine if they were used straight. I simply used a different strip - I later found I had four left over. The instructions tell you to start ‘on top covering the line of the deck’. I wasn’t sure exactly what this meant, but a little experimentation showed that if the top of the plank was level with the top of the deck, there was just enough room to fit 4 planks above this up to the top of the bulkheads. Furthermore, there would be just enough space for three planks between the first plank and the base of the stern galleries. I first needed to bend the front end of the planks to accommodate the curve of the bow. The instructions said to wet the strips to bend them. I found that this was all that was needed to produce quite sharp bends and 20 minutes was more than sufficient time to achieve the full effect. This is my plank bender! PICT_A_0401  This is the Mark II version; it features the addition of a wet cloth at the top end as later planks require bends at both ends. In order to hold the plank in place at each bulkhead, I used hooks bent from paperclips and attached to elastic bands. I found these quicker and easier to apply and remove than map pins. I used polyurethane wood glue to attach the planks and as this sets in around 5 minutes, the ability to quickly clip the planks in place made the job much easier. PICT_A_0402  The photos in the previous post show the first planks in place. The polyurethane adhesive sets by absorbing water and foams up in the process. You can see this along the joint between the two planks. This is best trimmed off when it becomes firm but before if fully hardens (there’s plenty of time to do this). The last picture shows how the stern transom requires that the planks be cut exactly to length. Judging the correct length is quite difficult with the transom in place. I positioned the plank correctly working from the bow and put a pencil mark on it where it crossed the last full bulkhead. I then cut the plank off to roughly the correct length and repositioned it, but against the stern this time. I could then see how much still needed to be cut off by measuring how much my pencil line had been displaced. In order to hold the front ends of the planks down, I clamped two pieces of wood to the front of the keel. (After I’d done this, I realised that this was what the Pidgin English translation of Step 5 was trying to tell me!) I then found I had to remove these again to allow me to cut the front end of the plank at the correct angle to meet the front of the keel. I found (the hard way) that when I came to apply the glue with these blocks in place, it was difficult to tell whether I had pushed the front of the plank all the way in to the keel. I resolved this by putting a pencil line across the new and existing planks during the test fitting process. It was simply a case of making sure the pencil lines were aligned during the gluing process. (I only had one little gap to fill!) PICT_A_0403  The instructions tell you to start tapering planks after the first eight planks each side. If that includes the four planks above the deck level, it’s not far wrong. The following photo shows the first ten planks in place with the bottom two having a slight taper. PICT_A_0404  The bottom two planks in the photo above fit against the base of the stern gallery. The first to be fitted butts up to the front edge of the base and the next runs below the base of the stern gallery and has a fairly severe twist as it passes the start of the base. I didn’t actually have too much trouble making these fit but it helps to have some strong rubber bands and blocks to hold them down at this corner. I later discovered that you can’t really see this bit anyway as it’s under the stern gallery! PICT_A_0405  From this point down, it’s relatively straightforward for a while. The planks need tapering at the bow but run more or less in line with the keel. I dropped one plank at the next to last bulkhead after six more planks but was still managing to get away with tapering them at the bow. From this point onwards however, things get a little crowded at the bow and it was necessary to drop a couple of planks at the 3rd bulkhead and three at the 1st bulkhead. At this point, I decided to start from the keel so that I had time to adjust the alignment of the planks to match those already in place. It was also at this point that things went wrong! The first plank is the same width as all the rest on this model and only required a bit of careful bevelling to make it slot into the gap under the keel planking. In view of the words of caution in the planking guide, I soaked it well at the bow and applied as much sideways bend as I could manage towards the bottom of the keel. The mistake I made was to cut the rear of the plank to match the line on the plan side elevation. It was not till much later that I realised that the plank should have extended further along the stern post and that the line on the plan represents the filler piece. The most annoying thing is that I actually fitted the plank in this way and cut off the ‘excess’ later! It’s no consolation to note that, looking at other models of Astrolabe, I’m not the first to make this mistake. The next five planks require only slight adjustment at the bow but diverge significantly at the stern. I fitted two stealers to accommodate this. The gap wasn’t looking too bad at this point and I added some more planks on the deck side including one short one running from about ¼ to ¾ of the length to make sure I required something just less than a whole number of planks to fill the remaining space. I found it useful to tape a few off-cuts of planking together to use as a gauge at this point. PICT_A_0406  What I was left with was an almost constant gap all along the mid-section but which diverged at the stern and converged at the bow. I was able to complete the planking without dropping any further planks at the bow and with the addition of only one more stealer at the stern. This is what it looked like after cleaning things up. PICT_A_0407  PICT_A_0408  | ||
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| Gene Bodnar |
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 Registered Member #126 Joined: Tue Jul 21 2009, 11:20amPosts: 1782 | Arthur, Very nice planking job. Gene | ||
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| Scoot |
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  Registered Member #1728 Joined: Fri Aug 19 2011, 12:25amPosts: 25 | Nice planking job Arthur. I will be starting MS C.W.Morgan soon which is single plank. Important to get it right the first time. Show me the way. Great idea for the paperclip clamps. Scoot | ||
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