A long story! (A VERY long story!)
The DelPrado partworks kit of the Bounty was (I think) first produced back around 1996 – and I only think that because some other contributor mentioned that he was building his back then. Anyway, my younger brother got this kit at the same time that he convinced me to buy a second or third hand Honda Spacy scooter off him. The deal was that I should build the model for him and he, being the mechanical one in the family would service and maintain the scooter for me.
I got on with building the kit (this being my second wooden ship after the Constructo Grimsby and before my own DelPrado Victory). Long story short, the Spacy eventually went off in the back of a skip still waiting for the replacement exhaust which he had at his home but ‘forgot all about’.
At that point in a brotherly dispute I thought “Why should I?” and the poor Bounty was consigned to the attic where she remained all complete except for the second half of the sails to be finished and the corresponding rigging and crew figures.
Present day, twenty six years later, (there were one hundred parts in the collection so lets say it took about two years to build). My brother has been in hospital for some months. Soon after the New Year he began to have trouble swallowing food and drink and eventually was admitted for tests on the growing blockage in his throat, the result unfortunately was the C word. He’s now undergone a first course of radiotherapy which we all hope will be successful but we won’t know for a few weeks yet. He’s actually feeling a little more like his old self now that they have got his feeding regime correct (he’s suffered with Crohn’s disease for decades too) and his usual greeting is “Have you done my boat yet?” so to cheer him up a little more that’s what I’ve been working on these last few months.
The photo below is of my attic (the bit that isn’t my workbench that is), and this shows an approximation of where the Bounty has been for those twenty six years! This is actually a ‘sanitised’ pic – I thought I’d taken one of the actual conditions but can’t find it on the SD card so I couldn’t have. She was actually in a much more precarious balancing act than this and didn’t have any sails on the mainmast either. This was relatively OK until we had solar panels installed back in December when the cables and electrical gubbins were installed in the attic during which the poor Bounty suffered some damage, nothing too major but some broken rigging and missing window frames on one of the quarter-badges together with the stern decoration.
So this short(ish) diary will be a record of how I managed to repair and complete this model for my brother and mainly how I overcame the awfully vague kit instructions with some help from the web. I’m beginning to think this thing has got more rigging on her than the ruddy Victory!
Hopefully some of what I’ve discovered will be of use to others who might still have this same kit hanging around – when it was released it was billed as a beginners kit that anyone could create – yeah right!
See you all soon.

Robin.

Many thanks for those kind words Mark. We are hoping for the best although the treatment so far is not proving as successful as we would have liked. It's an even bigger impetus for me to make this model as special as I can!

Photo 1 was again taken ‘after the fact’ so to speak as I didn’t take any specific photos of the actual damage incurred during the Bounty’s long exile to the attic! There were a few broken rigging threads around the masts, more than likely caused not by her movement during the solar panel installation but due to twenty six years of summer heat (the attic gets well over 100F during a heatwave) to almost freezing in the depths of winter – this plays havoc with tight rigging especially when the knots have been super glued to prevent them coming loose! The Mizzen Boom tackle shown by the two arrows top left was hanging over the stern as the ropes up to the boom had broken off, the cast metal stern decoration shown at bottom left was not only missing, including the two metal ‘swirls’ at both corners, but when I eventually found it, it was snapped in half and the Quarter Badge window frames shown here on the starboard side were missing completely from the port. This of course was all discovered after a long and very careful dusting of the decks and masts/spars with a selection of very soft paintbrushes (not quite careful enough for a couple more of the rigging threads!)
After removing the model from her dangerous balancing act and over to the workbench, a meticulous search down through the many boxes she had been sitting on revealed the two bits of the stern decoration and a single window frame from the Badge. The metal decoration was repaired by gluing the two parts back to the wooden stern, not with super glue as before but with a two part epoxy for extra strength. Of the swirls – no sign of them (yet) but I do have a Victory based contingency plan for those!
After repairing what I could I made up two new wooden window frames using the one I’d found as a template and routering the windows out of some scrap plywood which I suspect actually came from either the Bounty or my Victory (being the ‘sprue’ from the parts in the kit). It wasn’t perfect but didn’t look too bad compared to the other side of the ship. I then needed to correct an unfortunate mistake I’d made all those years ago. To try and get some details on the Bounty’s rigging I went looking on the internet and came across a website called Academia.edu. This was an educational resource containing a vast collection of downloadable books in pdf. Among them I found just what I had been looking at on ebay but wasn’t going to pay ridiculous prices for: The Anatomy of the Ship: The Armed Transport Vessel Bounty! I wasn’t actually going to download it as I was asked to register my details and didn’t want to bother with all that so I backed out of the site to look elsewhere. The following day I was very surprised to not only find an email from the site welcoming me, but also the downloaded pdf of the book as well! The entire book was there apart that is for one page that would have been very useful – the index page for all the rigging ropes that appear on the main drawing. Without that index I could at least work out roughly where the various running rigging went to and from where, but not necessarily the exact belaying pin where it was tied off. That said, it was a whole lot more info than I’d had before. The rigging instructions in the DelPrado magazines have three ‘slight’ problems – one, the instructions are more often than not very vague, two, after perusing the anatomy of the ship book they are often actually inaccurate and three, in some cases they are physically impossible to follow! An example is the fore and aft sails between the fore mast and main mast – these are suspended from the standing rigging stays which is fair enough but the bottom corners of the sails are tied directly to the fore mast and main mast. In the case of the fore mast again, fair enough but the ropes going to the rearward main mast would have to pass through the mainsails to get there!
As for that unfortunate mistake from all those years back, Photo 2 is a simplified rendering of part of the rigging instructions. It shows a pair of thin ropes coming from the main sail to the fore mast. I assumed that this was from the centre of the sail so that’s what I did as seen in Photo 3 (although I did wonder why they went to a double block and not a single at the time!) Once I had those drawings from the pdf it was obvious that those ropes actually came from the side edges of the sails and not from the centre at all! In fact, checking out the instruction photos under a magnifier, they did show the correct arrangement – in my defence, those photos are about two and a half inches by two inches in size, show most of the entire ship against a light back ground and I didn’t have reading glasses back then! These ropes are actually called the “Bowlines” (as they run from the sails towards the bows) and are used to keep the forward face of the square sails taut when the ship is sailing into the wind (presumably as opposed to letting the sails billow backwards into the shrouds and knocking some poor sailor overboard?)
Anyway, after some snipping off and some new threads put in, the first of the foresails was corrected as shown in Photos 4 and 5.
In the next instalment, making those bowlines and taking the corrected ropes to their proper destination (along with a lot of their mates!)
Until then Happy Modelling again!

Robin.

Tragically, this diary has now become a memorial to my dear brother Andy. He passed away five days before Christmas in a Hospice here in Plymouth from the throat cancer which, despite the radio therapy, spread quickly to his shoulder and hip. I managed to complete the Bounty before he passed and his son took photos of it to show him. I will always regret that he never had the opportunity to see her completed for himself though. The real heartbreak comes from knowing that his cancer could have been cured – if he had not suffered from Crohn’s Disease since he was fourteen. His tumour could have been removed and replaced with a section of bowel but he’d had so many operations to remove blocked sections of bowel due to the Crohn’s there was none left to be removed. This is for you Andy, we will meet again one day!

Before starting the next set of sails, it’s worth pointing out a little difference between the old and new! When the Bounty went into ‘hibernation’ she had ten out of her full complement of sixteen sails attached. Following the kit instructions I had used fabric glue (in a tube) to glue the folded hems before Mum then added the stitching on her sewing machine. That was then, this is now! Mum is now ninety six years old and registered blind (although she still has a little peripheral sight left, distorted by age related macular degeneration. She hasn’t used the sewing machine for many years and quite frankly, I haven’t got a clue how the thing works! On top of that, over the decades that fabric glue has gone brown with age as you can see on the hems of the two sails on the foremast in Photo 13. The remaining sails therefore were hand stitched in their entirety and instead of the fabric glue of old I used a more modern variety, which comes on a roll and is applied via the heat from an electric iron (I can manage one of those!)
When it came to making up the rest of the sails I hit a ‘small’ problem – I couldn’t find the flaming things! I was sure I knew exactly where they were, and had been for years – but they weren’t! The sails came in two issues of the kit magazine – sheet A and then sheet B. I naturally assumed that the sails already on came from sheet A so the missing ones must be on sheet B. I managed to find an on-line company selling long gone partwork issues from various firms and lo and behold they had a single issue with the sheet B sails in left, so I grabbed it whilst I could. I then re-read the instructions and only then discovered that the sails already fitted were in fact a mix from both A and B! The main ones I needed were actually from sheet A, namely the main mast sails: Mainsail, Main Topsail and Main Topgallant. It wouldn’t have made any difference however as the sheet A issue had been sold out everywhere for some years now. Fortunately the foresails and the mainsails which I'd bought are not that different, the Main Topsail should be an inch or so taller but not so much that it is glaringly apparent. Fortunately the Mizzen Jib comes on B anyway so the only other job was to create a new lower fore and aft sail from one of the spares as you’ll see later.
When the first sails were made all those years ago, I remember cutting the sails out from the sail cloth sheet and then gluing the hems down before Mum did the sewing part. After that there was a section which had to be hand stitched, namely the Bolt Rope. In the real sails this thicker rope was stitched around the sail on its outer edges leaving a loop at each corner and a series of loops around the edge to which the running tackle ropes and blocks were tied on. The actual kit instructions for the sails took a ‘slightly’ more simplified approach to the Bolt Rope and had it laid along the fold line of the hem so that it was enclosed when the hem was glued down, leaving just the loop at each corner sticking out. Couldn’t do that of course so the Bolt Ropes were hand stitched around the pre-glued edges as you can just make out in that photo. This time around I had a different idea. I bought a tapestry frame, the kind with a dowel at top and bottom linked together by a rectangular section with wing nuts to tighten and loosen the dowels. I already had one of these from my cross stitch adventures though I had to make up one of the connector sides as one was missing (of course) . This worked really well but was a little wider than I wanted so I bought a smaller version too. The sailcloth with the sails printed on was cut into convenient strips with multiple sails one above the other and the top and bottom edges fixed onto the dowels by double sided tape, (they’re supposed to be sewn onto the stapled fabric on each dowel really but this was less work!) With the dowels rotated to bring the sail in the centre and stretched taut I then sewed the dark lines running down the sails (where the individual rolls of canvas were joined together ) and also the horizontal bars found on the larger sails where the ropes used to tie the sails up in the furled position (called Reefs) were passed through a reinforced band. These can be seen on the Mainsail in Photo 14. When those were finished and with the sail still held on the frame I then sewed on the Bolt Rope, twisting the rope into a loop at the corners. I started in the centre of the bottom edge and went right round the sail until the rope joined up at the starting point again. One of the corner loops can be clearly seen in close up in Photo 16 along with the hand stitching around the Bolt Rope itself. With the Bolt Ropes attached I then cut out the sail from the sheet, carefully folded the hem over and cut a thin strip of the glue web placing it inside the hem before going over the edge with the hot iron. A couple of passes and the glue melted, fixing the hem in position. I suppose the next thirty years will confirm whether the glue on this one will stay clear or go brown like the tube glue! I then had to hand stitch the edge of the hem to tidy that up and to match the first set of sails. Each of these sails took me approximately a week to complete (about two to three hours a day).
The method of attaching the sails to the yardarms in the kit is by means of a series of brass wire rings of various sizes. I did use these on the fore and aft sails between the masts and also on the Mizzen Jib but for the square sails I went for the more accurate method of tying the sail to the yard with short lengths of rope called Robbands. There should be a lot more of them than I put on, I’ve got three on each side of the yardarm (where the brass rings would have gone) with a fourth attached to the Bolt Rope loop. In actual fact there should be two attached to each of the sailcloth strips making up each sail, that would be twenty four on the mainsail! Anyway, I inserted the short lengths of thicker thread using the darning needle method and tied them off before securing the knots with a drop of super glue and clipping off the ends neatly. You can just make out one of them over the first vertical line on the right of the sail in Photo 15.
Moving up the mast, the Main Topsail came next as seen in Photo 17, it has just been tied off to the yard at both corners and the pre-inserted Robbands can been seen sticking out ready to be tied off over the yardarm. Finally the top most Main Topgallant was made up as illustrated in Photo 18, fortunately this one doesn’t have those horizontal lines to stitch so he came a little quicker! That photo shows the Topgallant already fitted up with its Bowlines, however before those were put in there is another piece of the running rigging which has to go on first – the Buntlines. These are two ropes which are tied to the yard, one on either side and drop down over the front of the sail, pass underneath and then up to a series of blocks on the aft side of the yard before running down to a belaying pin on the deck. I believe they are used when pulling the sail up to the yards for the crewmen to furl and tie it off. The portside one is just visible on the Topgallant running down to where the sail is lifted up at the bottom. The double block for those aforementioned bowlines is tied off on the foremast just above the cross tree as shown arrowed in Photo 19 and the two ropes then come down to the aft most belaying pin on the midships pin rack attached to the ships rail, also arrowed in the final Photo 20. In a later instalment I’ll show how the ends of those ropes in the belaying racks were tidied up with some fake rope-ery!
Until next time Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

Hi Robin,

Great suff with the build, but my sad thoughts go to you and your brother Andy and what he went through all his life.

Regards Trev.