Sails

True, Jake, and the sails were sent down in port.

Well the idea of furled sail would only be while at sea or for SHORT (usually 3 days of less) port visits (99.5%) . Remember the sails were prone to rot and mildrew so ship masters did not like to keep them furled unless nedded.

Jake

Hi, I'm kinda new at this and this is my first post. Hope you don"t mind me jumpin in.

Just got the 1/96th USS Constitution by Revell. And the first thing I asked myself after openning the box and setting the Vaccu-sails aside was "can I use the rigging" that came with the kit?

Am actually impressed with the ratlines, but there is the issue of the material being appropriate to the scale.

The Sail...

I saw a short article in FSM 1995 by Robert Wilson suggesting the use of a ball, paper, a hair dryer and a kercheif. Breifly describing it, moist paper ( with the sketch of the sail on it ) on the ball, pulled tightly and dried off with the hair dryer. later snipping off the shape of the sail. Curious. Was wondering if this has been tried.

The compromise, as mentioned would be to have the sails furled.

Pretty much interested in the topics ( Sail Ships ) here. After building a "boxed" scale Spanish Galleon by Revell a couple of years back I got hooked. Presently working on an Academy 1/160th Cutty Sark and the querry about using the kit provided lines caught my eye.

Hope you don't mind me participating, being a newbie n all.
Thanks.

That is a beautiful model, widepaul. What ship is it?

On the first page of this Forum there's a post titled "Bounty drops anchor." It contains a beautiful photo of the H.M.S. Bounty replica that was built for the Brando/Howard movie, back in the early '60s. Her sails are nicely furled to the yards; the photo is an excellent reference regarding what a furled sail looks like. The size of the "bundles" relative to the yards is particularly worth noting.

When deciding on a material for sails, be sure to bear in mind the scale of the model. I have yet to encounter a natural or synthetic woven fabric that, to my eye, comes close to being satisfactory on any scale smaller than about 1/8" = 1'; I personally wouldn't use it for furled sails on anything smaller than 3/16" = 1'. The "ballooner cloth" I've seen does indeed have a nice, sailcloth-like color and texture, but on 1/8 " = 1' it would be a couple of inches thick. About the thinnest cloth I've found is the silk used by flying model airplane builders. It's considerably thinner than ballooner cloth, but so thin that it's virtually transparent.

You obviously are never going to find a material (paper, cloth, plastic or otherwise) that's actually "to scale" on a small-scale model. (Aluminum foil would come close, but would bring its own set of problems - including the fact that it isn't transluscent.) My preference on small scales continues to be silkspan; when it's subjected to the paint-and-glue treatment I described at such nauseating length above, it completely loses the fuzzy texture that it has in its raw state. And (so far at least) it seems to hold up well.

One point. If you do decide to use cloth, do not under any circumstances follow the advice of the old-time ship model handbooks and dye it with tea. Tea contains tannic acid, which is death to most fabrics. A few years back I had to restore an old model with tea-dyed linen sails. They were quite literally disintegrating. I called up the head of conservation at Colonial Williamsburg (which has lots of experience with fabric conservation) for advice; he told me nothing could be done, other than to "back" the old sails with an iron-on synthetic mesh to keep them from disintegrating further. (That worked, in that it kept each sail in one piece, but I thought they looked like hell. Fortunately the client seemed happy with them.) From the standpoint of longevity it's best not to dye fabric at all. If it is necessary to tint it, use a high-quality dye that's made for the purpose.

Good luck.

The cloth that you want is called balooner cloth. I believe that Model Expo still carries it. It is a very fine weeve cotton cloth that works really well for sails. Her is a link to a ship model that I used balooner cloth on...


http://www.modelshipgallery.com/gallery/misc/sail/privateer-pb/rattlesnake-index.html

good luck - cloth sails are always better than plastic!!

-paul

Robert:
First off, kudos on your decision not to use the vacu-formed sails!

jtilley has hit the nail on the head with his method of making and installing sails. About the only thing i would do differently is use a very thin tight weave fabric, almost like a silk or sateen, but this brings its' own problems.

You don't want to see the weave of the fabric because it is out of scale, so you will probably have difficulty getting something suitable for your scale. Also you need a sewing machine with a very small needle and fine stitching, not to mention someone who knows how to use it!

I personally like to furl my sails or brail them up to the yards. This is a compromise between furling and setting that allows all the rigging to be examined and does not block the view of the deck. Brailing means to hang the sails on the yards and then use the clews, bunts, and leeches to draw the sail up to the yard without completely furling it. You see sails set like this when ships enter or leave harbor, or in preparation for taking the sails down.

If you are going to set the sails, for a bit of added realism, brace the yards around, as they were seldom squared when under sail.

If you are going to furl them, remember they furled onto the top of the yard, and were bundled in towards the mast on most ships (the rigging pulled the corners into the mast, not straight up).

Also, with the sails furled, the yards should be lowered.

I am sure you will receive as many different opinions as there are builders, so go with what you feel comfortable with, and maybe try a couple of the methods on some scraps to see how you fare.
Good luck,
Bruce

This is a controversial subject among ship modelers. You'll get different - and quite emphatic - answers from different people.

I think there's a general consensus among people who've been at it for a while that making truly set sails (i.e., sails with wind blowing in them) is extremely difficult if not impossible unless the scale is either very large (so every individual piece of the sail can be represented accurately) or very small (so nobody will notice that it isn't). The most successful attempts at set sails that I've seen have been on small-scale waterline models set in diorama-type bases. (Maybe this is a personal idiosyncrasy, but I've got a problem with ships on stands in glass cases with billowing sails. How did the wind get into that case - and why isn't the ship moving?)

If you can, get hold of a copy of Donald McNarry's book, Ship Models in Miniature. He's better at this particular aspect of modeling than anybody else I know of. He never works to a scale larger than 1/16"=1', andmakes his sails out of tissue paper. On small scales I think that's probably the best idea - either tissue or fine drafting vellum. When the light shines from behind a real sail, the spars and rigging behind it appear in silhouette. If your material duplicates that effect, you're on your way to success. You can represent the seams on the sail with pencil. (A 0.5 mm mechanical pencil works well. Good art supply stores sell packages of brown lead.) If the scale is small enough you can use the pencil to represent the reef points and other pieces of rigging attached to the sail as well.

Maritime museums have lots of examples of good set sails on large scales (say, 1/48 up), generally made of linen. That's quite a project for a mortal model maker, though one who could handle a sewing machine with a very fine stitch setting might be able to pull it off. I've never tried it.

I personally am partial to furled sails on models. To my notion they make a nice compromise; they demonstrate how the rigging works without making the model look like a fish out of water. To my eye a good model with furled sails, and its yards in the lowered positions, projects a look of latent power and action that's far more effective than phony-looking set sails. Over quite a few years I've worked out a technique for making furled sails that, I think, works pretty well.

The basic material is silkspan tissue. (Hobby shops that cater to flying airplane modelers carry it in various weights; you want the finest you can get. For small sails, lens tissue from a camera store works great.) Make up a simple wood frame (balsa will do) that's bigger than the sail in all dimensions and tape a piece of the tissue over it. Then mix up a batch of water-soluble hobby paint (I like PolyScale; I imagine other brands of acrylic would work too) in a very pale grey with a slight hint of beige. Next comes the key to the trick: before you apply the paint to the tissue paper, squirt a considerable amount (the proportion isn't critical; 50/50 will work) of Elmer's Glue into the paint. Next dillute the paint/glue mix with water till it's easy to handle with a brush, and paint the tissue with it. Let it dry completely.

The tissue is thin, but still too thick for the scale. One of the most common mistakes is to make the "bundle" of a furled sail too fat. It ought to be just about as big in diameter as the yard, gaff, or boom to which it's fastened - maybe even a little thinner. The bundle made by a square sail furled to a yard should, generally speaking, be thinner at the ends than in the middle. So mark out on the painted tissue paper a trapezoid shape, its width at the top the same as that of the finished sail, its width at the bottom about 1/4 that dimension, and its depth maybe about half that of the full sail. (That's far harder to describe than it is to draw.) Add onto each side a strip about 1/16" wide, which will form a hem. Cut the sail out.

Fold the hems on all four sides over, trapping a piece of fine thread of the same color as the running rigging. This is the bolt rope, and it's crucial to the success of the operation. (The hem over the boltrope isn't authentic, but nobody will notice.) Leave a small loop sticking out at each corner. Glue the hem with Elmer's, and let the whole thing dry. You now have before you a decidedly weird-looking conglomeration of stiffened tissue paper, paint, glue, and thread. Patience.

Mount the "sail" to the yard, using a needle and thread and making use of the two loops at the top corners. (If you're a stickler for accuracy, do some reading to find out how it was fastened on the prototype. If the ship dates from prior to about 1810, you can sew it to the yard with a single, long thread called a roband going around the yard in a spiral. If the ship is post-1810, the sail will be laced to the jackstay.) The boltrope will keep the roband thread from ripping through the edge of the sail.

Add the sheets, clewlines, buntlines, etc., but leave them slack for the time being. Don't fasten their ends to the belaying pins.

Now comes the real trick. Dip a paint brush in water and touch the sail with it. The Elmer's glue will soften up - but, astonishingly (and I don't have a scientific explanation for this phenomenon) the paint won't. The sail will get soft and rubbery. Take a pair of tweezers and bundle it up against the yard, being careful how you fold it. (Old photos and paintings are a big help for this stage.) The glue and paint have made the material surprisingly tough, but flexible. You'll find that the sail will furl up into a nice, tidy bundle that can then be secured with thread gaskets, just like the real thing. Tie off the various pieces of rigging and you're done.

This takes at least five times as long to read about as to do. The most time-consuming part of the process is waiting for the paint/glue mixture to dry. I've used this system on quite a few models; one of them is twenty-five years old now, and its furled sails look as good as new.

Other modelers will offer different opinions about putting sails on models; this is one person's. Take all of us with a shaker full of salt; we're all nuts. But you might want to give furled sails a try. Good luck.