Continental Frigate Hancock

Another tool John is the miniature scroll saws which is the best for making delicate curves like those found in bulkheads and for shaping the keel as well.

Any discussion like this needs to take place under the umbrella of one big general observation:  how a modeler wants to build a model is that modeler's business.  Personally, I'm a big believer in using a variety of materials as they are appropriate for the particular job at hand.  That's why my little Hancock has a couple of dozen materials in it.  Others take other approaches - and they certainly have every right to do so.

I think there's a pretty general consensus among experienced modelers that pine just isn't a good modeling material.  It's soft, it's splintery, and it secretes sap (the yellow stuff - not tar, which has to be extracted deliberately).  Here near the east coast, when we talk about pine we're usually discussing white pine; some dealers sell yellow pine, and a few sell heart pine.  I can't recommend any of those materials for scale modeling purposes.  (White pine used to be a favorite material of manufacturers of machine-carved, solid wood hulls, but those companies switched over to basswood or European whitewood quite a few years ago.)

Mr. Morrison makes an excellent point about wood species.  Experienced modelers almost (not quite) universally reject the idea of using the prototype species in a model - unless it's on a very large scale.  Oak, for instance, is one of the most common woods in wood ship construction, but it's a lousy wood for building models.  (Hard as a rock, and with an extremely conspicuous, open grain.  A 1/96 sailor would trip over the grain in full-sized oak.)

I can't recall having encountered walnut as a shipbuilding wood - except for ornamental carvings. Pine is, indeed, a favorite wood for prototype hull and deck planking.  But I strongly recommend holly (if you can  get it), with basswood as a good second choice.  

Other woods favored by the present generation of serious saiilng ship modelers include cherry, apple, boxwood, and pear - all hard woods with very close grain. 

One caveat about walnut.  Serious American scale modelers rarely use it in actual ship models - though it's a superb wood for baseboards and cases.  In Europe, though, lots of modelers make fittings and other small components out of European walnut, which seems to have a much finer grain than the American stuff.

Anybody who's interested in "taking the plunge" into really serious sailing ship modeling (from scratch or via extensively modified kits) would be well advised to invest in a miniature table saw.  Mine is from MicroMark:  http://www.micromark.com/microlux-mini-tilt-arbor-table-saw-for-benchtop-hobby-use,7500.html , but there are several other good ones on the market.  The initial price is high (especially when you throw in some accessories), but believe me, the ability to cut wood precisely to your own requirements is worth the money.  (Compare this thing to the prices of kits these days, and it doesn't look so bad.) 

On the other hand, I used to have a full-sized table saw - the cheapest one Sears made.  It cost me about a hundred bucks.  With a "hollow-ground satin-finish veneer" blade, a homemade zero-clearance insert, and some patience in setting it up, I could cut really nice strips of holly and basswood as narrow as 1/32". The kerf of the blade, of course, was such that I was turning about half my stock into sawdust, but it was hard to argue with the results.

Being able to cut your own wood really takes the hobby to a different, and highly enjoyable, level.

All very interesting.  One thing about pine as a building material in any scale, is that even in this global economy, it is not really available or used in the west where it's not grown to be harvested. Everything here is Douglas Fir, a great species for building a house but is a wholly unsuitable modeling material.

I've never much favored building models out of any of the "soft" (non-flowering) woods.

And, I'm sure you'd all agree that what works best in 1:1 does not translate to scale, oak and steel being two ready examples.

Per John's recommendation, I've been looking at holly veneers online. First, my initial prejudice was that it would be dark brown. As it turns out, supposedly the whitest of hardwood veneers. Also pretty available and not horribly expensive. It does however need to be stripped, which I would have to pay someone to do. More on that as I look for a local vendor so that I can pick my pieces. I've also read of a number of ways to simulate deck caulking, but since I've only ever used the method of darkening the groove in scribed sheet with a pencil, cannot comment on the others. I am inclined to try the idea of rubbing the edges with a pencil before gluing.

Well you are talking about Pine Tar John so it would be sticky. But I was actually talking about the Pine veneer that is sold in sheets like the Holly. But if I remember shipbuilding the structural members like the Keel and Bulkheads would have been made with hardwoods like Oak or Walnut and the hull planking was Pine as was the rest of the exterior and interior of the ship. I believe the decking was either Pine or some other soft wood.

jtilley

I can't recall ever having made a deck by gluing wood strips to a plastic kit part, but I suspect the same adhesive I used to glue the plastic hull planks to the wood hull of the Hancock would work.  I used good old Revell "Type S" tube cement.  It's not available any more, but I imagine Testor's would work.

I didn't worry about caulking between the hull planks, because the joints were going to be hidden under the paint.  For the deck planks I recommend a trick that's old as the hills:  run a fairly hard pencil around all four edges of the plank before fastening it down. 

I don't recommend pine for any modeling purpose - except maybe baseboards.  It has a coarse, out-of-scale grain and a nasty habit of emitting icky "pine juices" for years.  Holly, in  thin strips, actually is remarkably flexible stuff - though not as flexible as styrene.  Holly's big, huge advantage is its grain.  On the raw wood the grain is scarcely visible, but with a little bit of stain it really pops out - and actually looks like miniaturized wood. Wonderful stuff, if you can find it.

It's been a long time since I made a deck by gluing wood strips to a plastic kit part, but I did do it on a Revell 1/96 Constitution. I used good old Revell "Type S" tube cement.  It's not available any more, but I imagine Testor's would work. The idea was to soften the upper surface of the plastic so it could soak into the surface of the wood. It worked fine.

I didn't worry about caulking between the hull planks, because the joints were going to be hidden under the paint.  For the deck planks I recommend a trick that's old as the hills:  run a fairly hard pencil around all four edges of the plank before fastening it down. 

I don't recommend pine for any modeling purpose - except maybe baseboards.  It has a coarse, out-of-scale grain and a nasty habit of emitting icky "pine juices" for years.  Holly, in  thin strips, actually is remarkably flexible stuff - though not as flexible as styrene.  Holly's big, huge advantage is its grain.  On the raw wood the grain is scarcely visible, but with a little bit of stain it really pops out - and actually looks like miniaturized wood. Wonderful stuff, if you can find it.

Mikeym_us

BTW what material would you recommend for caulking between the joints on the hull and deck?

jtilley

Mikey, I'm afraid I don't understand your first comment.  My model of the Hancock certainly isn't plank-on bulkhead.  It is, as I said in the first post of this thread, plank-on-solid.  I'm unaware of any Hancock kit, in any format.  Where was it "represented as plank on bulkhead"?

Model Shipways offers a very nice plank-on-bulkhead Niagara:  http://www.modelexpo-online.com/product.asp?ITEMNO=MS2240 .

Whether styrene is a better material than wood for planking is questionable.  Basswood strips are a good deal cheaper than styrene ones - generally speaking.  In my opinion the best planking material of all is holly.  If you have a miniature table saw (which I didn't when I built the Hancock) you can rip your own planks from a sheet of holly veneer, which costs about $1.50 a square foot. 

John wouldn't Holly be best used for the decking while Pine could be used for general planking. But you would need to construct a steaming rig to soften the wood for bending. But I meantioned plastic because the sheets of plastic can be cut to any length and width and you don't need to steam them to bend them.

BTW what material would you recommend for caulking between the joints on the hull and deck?

Heller did on the lower decks, but they famously were mis-numbered in the directions and gave many modelers terminal anxiety. I happened to have the Imai version with the vastly superior instructions, but in the event I replaced them with square brass tube. The originals just weren't rigid enough, as they were channels and had a notch in the middle for the batten that was cast in one deck half underside for the other to mate with. I solved that issue by shaving off an inch of the batten at each beam. I ignored the camber issue on the lower two gun decks, although curving my brass tubes would have been easy, but would certainly like to address it on the upper two. I've also added a detail that tends to get ignored, as I go up. The tween decks in these ships had a lot of columns, in particular to support the muntins and lesser subframing around openings. I've been adding quite a few.

EDIT: I pulled out the weather deck and it's cast thick and flat. Probably going to stay that way.

My recollection is that Heller included styrene beams (fewer than the actual number, understandably) that were supposed to set the camber on all the deck parts.  (That marked a big improvement over most of the company's earlier kits, including the Soleil Royal and the two French eighteenth-century ships of the line, which had flat decks.)  I wouldn't be surprised to learn that, due to the quality control problems that seem to be plaguing Heller kits these days, the "beams" don't have the right camber any more.

Many plastic kits ignore deck camber.  The one that deals with it most successfully, in my experience, is the Airfix Bounty.  It has very narrow, cambered beams molded integrally with the deck.  Unfortunately that kit has almost nothing else to recommend it.

Thank you, several good sources. I'll see what I can find. The lower two plastic gun decks are flat, as they were split down the middle so that they could be fidgeted down into the hull. I haven't looked at the upper two in a while. I can live with a flat upper gun deck, and I think that the weather deck may be a single piece with camber.

So, the Bluejacket price is $33.60 for one sq. ft. of the 1/16", $ 25.60 for the 3/32" and $ 21.60 for the 1/8".

That seems affordable. I also would block out a rectangle for each gun on the upper gun deck, so they don't sit high in the ports. I've heard of people clipping off the bottom of the trucks, but that seems a little radical. And of course, except for under the boat skids, the pattern of the butt ends wont much matter, plus that area has a lot of gratings too.

I'm glad, your model has inspired me to get back to work on mine.

Kit manufacturers have been trying for years to figure out ways to make decks out of single pieces.  The worst offenders, to my eye, are the HECEPOB companies that try to make decks out of plywood.

A ship's deck, with rare exceptions (e.g. aircraft carriers), is curved in two dimensions:  sheer from fore to aft, and camber from port to starboard.  That means that the surface of a deck is a compound curve.  Plywood, or any sheet of any other rigid material, doesn't like to be forced into a compound curve.  Our ancestors figured out hundreds of years ago that the solution is to make the deck out of narrow planks.  On a model, that takes some time (though not as much as lots of people apparently think), but is actually easier than trying to force a sheet of some material into the requisite compound curve.

I'm a big booster of holly for the purpose, but if you don't want to go that route basswood is a good second choice.  If you're planking over genuine beams, the deck probably should be at least 1/32" thick.  If you're laying the planks over a styrene deck piece, you might want to look into the .020" strips that Bluejacket sells specifically for planking:  http://www.bluejacketinc.com/fittings/wood3.htm . 

I also saw recently, on the Freetime Hobbies site, a line of thin maple planks with pressure-sensitive adhesive on the back.  As I remember, the narrower widths sold out almost immediately.

This *ost takes me down a slight alley in my memory. Apologies in advance for the detour.

Way back in middle school in the 60's there was still a course called "Industrial Arts", or "shop" for short. Imagine, we still had a society where learning how to make things with machine tools was a good living.

So in "architectural drafting", we designed houses. But here's the nasty part. This particular teacher's idea of an architectural elevation was to draw the framing at 1/4" = 1'-0" scale. All of the elevations, floor plans and roof framing. And not a framing plan like is made for a steel building,with single lines indicating each member. No, double lines spaced a scale 1 1/2" apart. Drawn on a paper that was just like the stuff "manila folders" are made out of, only light green. With a 4H pencil, which meant mistakes could not really be erased without leaving a groove, or tearing the facing off the paper. Which of course meant starting over. And hand cleanliness was enforced by inspection, and if necessary, remedy with a "Navy brush". Needless to say we were all terrified of the teacher, and got pretty good at drafting.

Once the drawings were "done", we stretched waxed paper over them and cut and glued strip wood together with white glue. Mr. Costarella spent all afternoon at a table saw making the stuff for us. I got as far as placing my pyramidal pier blocks on my base. I think one boy got his floor framed and a wall up.

But I sure learned some wood modeling skills.

Eventually, in spite of this, I did become an architect. But as soon as those plans solidified, I was banned forever by my father from using table saws.

I have been stalled for a while on my big Victory with how to plank the upper gun deck. The middle and lower are just painted, which is fine, but the upper is of course more visible through the boats etc. My earlier idea was to replace the plastic decks with scribed sheets of wood. But it's not going to be satisfactory in terms of the end joints, or the caulking of the long seams.Having looked at some recent posts, and reading some of yours from earlier, John; I've come to the conclusion that if I do it "one board at at time" it will be easier in the long run, better looking and allow for some details such as the king plank, joggled planks and so forth. Thanks for the fine example set.

Mikey, I'm afraid I don't understand your first comment.  My model of the Hancock certainly isn't plank-on bulkhead.  It is, as I said in the first post of this thread, plank-on-solid.  I'm unaware of any Hancock kit, in any format.  Where was it "represented as plank on bulkhead"?

Model Shipways offers a very nice plank-on-bulkhead Niagara:  http://www.modelexpo-online.com/product.asp?ITEMNO=MS2240 .

Whether styrene is a better material than wood for planking is questionable.  Basswood strips are a good deal cheaper than styrene ones - generally speaking.  In my opinion the best planking material of all is holly.  If you have a miniature table saw (which I didn't when I built the Hancock) you can rip your own planks from a sheet of holly veneer, which costs about $1.50 a square foot. 

What amazes me John is that the Hancock was represented as Plank on Bulkhead. But I have never seen a ship model of very many of the ships from the War of 1812 namely any of the ships of the Lake Erie fleet like the USS Niagra. And I see the Niagra almost regularly once a year when she sails through the Soo Locks where I work.

BTW John styrene actually does make a better option than actual wood since it would usually be cheaper than wood with one sheet making lots of planks. And if you have an idea how many planks you need per side dictates how many sheets of styrene you need. And if I remember Evergreen styrene sheets still cost under $10 a pack. I think it might be interesting if someone can make plastic bulkheads and keels to make a cheaper but sturdier plank on bulkhead ship kit.

WOW!

That certainly is a beautiful ship, your talent and patience in building such a thing is astonishing, I hope at some point in the future to even build a ship half as nice as that.

You must be a proud owner! Didn't think it was even possible to fully rig a ship model as such at any tabletop scale!

Pete

Thank you Professor for posting this.  It is truly awe inspiring and what I try and strive for with my ships although I know a have a ways to go.  I really love the rigging on this and your other ships, but then again I really like the hulls too.

Steve

That color scheme shows up (albeit not consistently) in quite a few eighteenth-century frigate models.  It seems to have been a matter of aesthetics.

Sometimes just the flat face of the muzzle was red; sometimes the red extended back to the first reinforce.  I suspect it depended on somebody's taste.

With 20/20 hindsight, I wish I hadn't used such a bright red.  My excuse is that I based that choice on contemporary models.  It's been pretty firmly established now, though, that the inboard works (of British warships, at least) were painted with a dull "red ochre" - and that it was intended to serve as a general-purpose primer, not, as we thought for many years, to camouflage blood stains.  (My guess is that it eventually came to be a tradition with not a lot of thought behind it, and that hiding blood was considered a useful benefit.)

BTW just noticed. Why are the muzzles of the cannons red?

Obvious answer- "because they were in reality".

New to me.

This looks great, Prof.  It feels especially good when a model looks so good after so many years, anemic sailors notwithstanding.

Great work!

Rick Heinbaugh

John,

It's so nice to see the Hancock once more! I'm delighted that you're posting pictures again and look forward to many more images of your models.

Mike

Looks great!

John,

Your Continental Navy Ship Hancock is a beautiful model, as is your HMAV Bounty. It's terrific to see your work here.

Bill Morrison

Wow, what can I say?  

That is very, very impressive.  Dang.

Many thanks, GMorrison.  Yes, studding sails came into use in the late seventeenth century.  In a few minutes' digging on the web I couldn't find any pictures of the Hancock that showed her with studding sails set, but inventories of two other Continental frigates, the Raleigh and Alliance, do make it clear that they had studding sails.  I think it's a fair assumption that the Hancock set them too; she would have been an unusual frigate if she hadn't.

That's wonderful to see, and congratulations for tackling the posting issue. I think it's a wonderful model; the builder obviously understood rigging!

If I were to ever build something like that, I'd consider it a lifetime achievement. Well done.

Are those studding sail booms, and if so when did that come into usage on fully rigged ships?

I'll host you a bottle of Malmsy in officers mess!

Many thanks, gentlemen.  I don't know that Mac users are any more discerning than anybody else, but they're happy.  There seems to be general agreement in the photography world that the Mac is preferable to Windows for photo editing.  I don't have enough experience with the Mac yet to form an opinion, but I can say that it works mighty well.  It obviously has considerably more photo editing capacity than I do.

That is beautiful work Dr. Tilley. Did you know that Mac users are discerning people? Congratulations!

It's good to see your Hancock again, it has been quite a while.

Great to see your photo post, Professor! (I know it's been vexing you for a while.)

Look forward to seeing more. Always...more....