Many thanks again to Foz, the Alans, Andy and Peter, much appreciated as always.!
I managed to get a bit done to the Ol' Vic this week, not the bits I had planned on but nontheless a part that I had been looking forward to doing for some time.
This post is a little 'wordy' and long but there was so much going in to this part I couldn't get away with it so apologies if it's difficult to scan between the text and the following photos!
A slight departure from my
planned work plan! Instead of carrying on with the anchor palms as mentioned before, I’ve skipped that little chore together with the waist area hammock frames and gone straight to the stern to work on a little extra project on the Poop Deck.
For those of you building the DeAg or for that matter any other manufacturer’s Victory except the Jotika masterpiece, this part of the ship will probably come as a surprise as it is completely different to the ‘standard’ Portsmouth version, but just as the foc’sl area is built up with raised bulwarks instead of the ‘Portsmouth Fence’, so is the stern along the sides of the Poop deck. At the time of Trafalgar, Victory looked more like the Santissima Trinidad than the ship currently in dry dock.
The difference is though, the stern additions were
not a permanent part of the ships structure as in the foc’sl but a removable hull section designed to protect the six extra guns carried on the Poop deck before, but not
during Trafalgar. What we have is, in effect a removable wooden wall, which was attached to the permanent hammock frames along the sides of the Poop by a series of iron brackets. This was removed after the battle during her refit and repair and was never seen again. Presumably, if the Victory is supposed to be rebuilt to her Trafalgar appearance in the future, we might see them back again one day, I hope so, with them in place she is actually a five decker!
The first step was to build the actual wooden barricades. In the Jotika kit I think they are made from five strips of wood but I used three strips of spare hull planking from the DelPrado kit. By a lucky coincidence, the planks were just over twice as long as the finished barricades so I created the panels by laying a couple lengths of masking tape down onto a nice flat piece of plywood and then gluing the three strakes together with a brass pin through each end and the centre of the outer ones to hold them tight against the inner plank whilst the glue dried. Next day I carefully removed the panel from the masking tape underneath and cut the two barricades out, losing the pin holes from the ends and centre in doing so. The two basic panels can be seen in
Photo 1 below.
By
Photo 2, the panels have been trimmed to the chamfered shape required to follow the Poop deck sides whilst keeping the tops more or less parallel to the deck. The three gun ports have been pencilled in and the two ‘enclosed’ ports have been drilled at their corners, the third gun port is lower than the others and is actually cut into the Poop sides so no drilling was required on that one.
Photo 3 shows the gun ports with their centres removed by simply using a safety razor blade and ‘joining up’ the drill holes. The third port is again not yet cut out as I didn’t want to weaken the panel until the other two had been filed to shape and the whole panel lightly sanded to remove any burrs.
Finally,
Photo 4 shows the two finished barricade panels with all three gun ports and a little cut out at the stern which fits over the fixed horizontal pulley which is set on the extreme ends of the Poop sides (and
yes, I finally had to make
them up as well, a carved wooden block with a sliver of cocktail stick for the pulley inside!). The top panel is the port side interior in three coats of yellow ochre and the bottom one is the starboard exterior in two coats of Admiralty Dull Black. Unlike the main gun ports, the sides of the openings are painted black, not red ochre.
Photos 5 to
8 illustrate the construction of the tiny support brackets for the barricades. These are essentially the same as the trunion caps made for the cannon way back in the diary.
Photo 5 shows a thin strip of DecraLed having been cut from the wider roll and the semicircular shape formed by simply pressing the lead down over a piece of 0.5mm brass rod (the same diameter as the hammock frames) with the two tips of a pair of tweezers. Once the shape is formed the strip is then cut to size using a safety razor blade as in
Photo 6. The next photo shows the bent brass wire hammock frame with a bracket superglued into position and
Photo 8 shows two of the frames with bracket being painted with the Admiralty Metal Black whilst held in spring grip tweezers.
Those of you who have built the Jotika kit might at this point notice a little non deliberate mistake which I didn’t realise until I had happily and proudly glued the first two frames into position at the forward end of the barricade but I’ll come to that a little later.
In real life, the hammock frames were securely fastened to the Poop deck sides and the barricade was lifted into position and dropped over the outer bars (God knows how but it probably involved lots of men and a whole lot of blocks and tackle!) I had been trying to decide how to best fix this set up in miniature for some time, did I fit up the frames first and then get the barricade to marry up to the frames or glue the frames to the barricade first and hope that they were all at the exact right height to meet the hull sides when the whole assembly was fitted to the hull? In the end I decided on a third method – I cheated!
Rather than have the barricade supported by the frames I decided to allow a mm extra which I then superglued directly to the last mm of the hull sides. This was done very carefully by cocktail sticking a thin bead of super along the extreme bottom of the barricade and then offering it up to the hull trying to keep the top as parallel to the deck as I could. Once it was fixed in place, I then keeled the hull over to the side as far as I dared by placing blocks of wood under one side of the kit stand and then ‘dribbled’ a little more super on the end of the cocktail stick along the joint underneath the barricade. Once done, that gave me a fairy strong permanent joint although I did get a very nasty single loud ‘crack’ when I inadvertently rested my wrist on one side when I was re-touching up the other!
With the barricades in place it was time to glue in the first of the frames, this was accomplished by placing a drop of superglue on the flat base of the frame and on all the backs of the brackets before carefully placing the frame into position with tweezers. The first pair went in fine and looked really good and at this point I went back to check the photo from the Jotika site for comparison. And that’s when I found the little mistake! It should have been obvious but I’ve often found that when concentrating on tiny little details, sometimes the larger picture is completely overlooked,
(as in the case of the missing skid beams!). The barricades were hung from the brackets, and if all they had was a single bracket at the top of the frame the damned things would be rocking in and out whenever the ship rolled! And there, clear as day in the Jotika photo was the second bracket just up from the Poop deck sides! Adding the missing lower bracket didn’t seem like too big a job but boy was it a pig to do, trying to hold a tiny piece of lead about 2mm across with a spot of superglue to go where it was wanted was a nightmare, I tried using a small paintbrush with enough water on it to hold the thing and it kept dropping off or twisting out of line! In the end I used a long blunt needle with a tiny bit of sticky PVA to transfer the pre-glued bracket into position. Needless to say, all the remaining frames went in with two brackets apiece!
They were all painted as in
Photo 8, the side which rests against the barricade with its TWO brackets, the flat base and about half of the opposite upright were painted and allowed to dry and then, using a different technique to the first examples, only the base was dipped into a drop of super and, held by the unpainted section of the frame it was tweezered into position against the barricade, a little above the hull and then gently lowered down into position following the pencil marked card guide. This method removed the tendency of the pre-glued brackets to mar the paintwork of the barricade and once the frame was stiff enough and upright, the brackets were fixed with a drop of super, allowing capillary action to suck the glue into place.
Photo 9 gives some idea of the actual size of these items, that’s my index finger next to one of the frames with a formed support bracket beside it, you might have some idea now of how fiddly it was trying to glue a single bracket to the barricade and frame in-situ reaching across from the opposite side of the deck!
In
Photo 10 you can see the simple measuring gauge used to position the frames up against the barricades, it’s just a piece of white card pencilled in with the location marks for each frame member. I didn’t try to measure them from the Jotika photos, there were ten frames on each side, doing them at regular intervals would mean some of them would be stuck over the gun port cut outs so with the card in place I just marked it with one at each end, one either side of the cut outs and the remainder spaced evenly between the first and last. This is the starboard side in the photo, the card was simply turned through 180 degrees to become the port side guide. Although not visible in this picture, I did then add an arrow at the forward end of the card to remind myself which end was which!
Photos 11 and
12 are the finished result, which, I have to admit looks as good as I had hoped for! This addition really changes the whole appearance of the Poop deck and gives it a much more ‘belligerent’ look, even without the guns stationed there which were 18lb Carronades. The ‘3D’ effect of the hammock frames and brackets against the side walls even looks quite ‘delicate’ up against the rest of the Poop deck fittings which is a nice contrast (that reminds me, I have to sort out how to make some scale cleats fairly soon!) It’s a pity she didn’t carry the 18lbs in 1805, I wouldn’t mind scratch building half a dozen baby ‘smashers’ to go up there!
Next time (hopefully) the anchor palms will
finally get done!
Happy building to all.
Robin
Plymouth57 attached the following image(s):
First wooden ship:
The Grimsby 12 Gun 'Frigate' by Constructo Second:
Bounty DelPrado Part Works Third:
HMS Victory DelPrado Part Works 1/100 scale
Diorama of the Battle of the Brandywine from the American Revolutionary War Diorama of the Battle of New Falkland (unfinished sci-fi), Great War Centenary Diorama of the Messines Ridge Assault
Index for the Victory diary is on page 1
US
