1/96 Scale Wrapped Hammocks

I've done something similar - once.  On my little model of the frigate Hancock I made the hammocks out of the same material I used for the furled sails:  fine tissue paper painted with a mixture of acrylic paint and white glue.  That concoction simultaneously stiffens the material, settles any fuzz in it, and imparts an appropriate color.  I cut the treated tissue into hammock-sized strips, rolled it up, and lashed the bundle with silk thread.  It took quite a while to make the necessary 200 or so, but once I got in the groove I was able to make about two hammocks every five minutes.  Here's a link to some pictures:  http://gallery.drydockmodels.com/hancock .

I'm not a fan of cloth fabric for ship modeling purposes. The only fabric I've ever seen that had sufficiently fine weave was so thin it was translucent.  That treated tissue (I usually use the finest grade of the "silkspan" stuff that's sold to balsa aircraft modelers, or, if I only need it in small quantities, photographic lens tissue) has a good texture, is reasonably durable, and to my eye at least looks about right.  I've generally worked on pretty small scales, though (the Hancock is on 3/32" = 1'); if I were working on a bigger scale I might well feel differently.

Hope this helps a little.  Good luck.

Fantastic model!

What did you use for the netting that held the hammocks? That looks pretty fine. Thanks on the tissue, I will give it a try!

Thanks so much....

TMW

Many thanks for the kind remarks.  If I remember correctly (I built that model a long time ago), the netting is just a fine nylon mesh that I bought at a fabric store.  Such places sell quite a variety of such materials.  The trick is to make sure the mesh has a square pattern.  Some of it is hexagonal, which looks pretty odd on a ship model.

Actually I think the mesh in this case may be a little too fine.  The hammock nettings on restored ships of the period (H.M.S. Victory, for instance) generally seem to be quite coarse, with openings four or five inches wide.  But I suspect that sort of thing varied quite a bit from ship to ship and from time to time.

The "ropes" running along the edges of the netting are in fact very thin strips of masking tape.  The adhesive on that material doesn't last long; it generally cuts loose in less than a year.  If I remember right, I just relied on the tape adhesive to stick long enough for me to paint the edge of the netting - tape and all - with a mixture of black paint and Elmer's glue.  I finished the model in 1984 and the hammocks show no sign of falling apart.

We had a good discussion some months back of ways to make sails.  It's in a thread titled "Real cloth sails?"  It's probably several pages back from this one by now, but you might find it worth reading.