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Revell Cutty Sark - replacing pin-rails and dead-eyes

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  • Member since
    May 2006
  • From: Chapin, South Carolina
Revell Cutty Sark - replacing pin-rails and dead-eyes
Posted by Shipwreck on Monday, October 30, 2006 8:10 AM
It is common knowledge that the dead-eyes and pin-rails are out of scale on the Revell 1/96 Cutty Sark. How can that be fixed? Inorder to replace the pin-rails and pins they have to be strong enough to support the standing rigging. Metal pins can be obtained through third party suppliers, but how about those pin-rails? If the lower dead eyes are ordered with straps, I assume that the pin-rails would have to be notched inorder to allow the straps to pass through them? And, if the pins are brass how are they painted to represent wood? Thanks for your response.

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  • Member since
    August 2005
  • From: vernon hills illinois
Posted by sumpter250 on Monday, October 30, 2006 10:21 AM

  Deadeyes are set up on chainplates, and backing links, which take the strain of the standing rigging directly to the hull. The chainplates may pass inboard, or outboard of the bulwarks.When outboard, they often pass over channels. Pinrails, along the inboard side of the bulwarks, and the belaying pins in them, are for securing (belaying) the running rigging. In many cases, the strain of the running rigging on the pinrails,is taken up by knees on top of the rails, secured to the bulwarks. I am not familiar with the Cutty Sark's pinrails or chainplates so I can't give you a difinitive answer in this exact case.

Pete

Lead me not into temptation ..................I can find it myself

  • Member since
    May 2003
  • From: Greenville, NC
Posted by jtilley on Monday, October 30, 2006 2:14 PM

The Cutty Sark's deadeye configuration is a little unusual, because she's composite-built (i.e., wood-planked on iron frames).  There are no channels or backing links.  The deadeyes are set up to chainplates, wich are riveted to the insides of the bulwarks. 

I'm working on the office computer at the moment and don't have Mr. Campbell's plans in front of me, but I'll try to describe the arrangement from memory.  I'll check the plans this evening and make a correction if necessary.  By the way - if you want to improve the detail on the Revell kit, you really need to get a copy of those plans.  I've enthused over them elsewhere in this Forum, so I won't bother doing so again.  At about $20.00 (including shipping from Greenwich), they're among the biggest bargains in ship modeling. 

Let's start by discussing the prototype arrangement, and worry later about how to translate it into modifications to the kit.  For the moment let's stick to the fore- and mainmasts.  (The mizzen is different - and generally simpler.)  The deadeye is clamped in forged iron strop, the ends of which are a few inches apart at the bottom of the deadeye and have eyes forged in them.  The chainplate is another iron forging, with an eye at the top.  A bolt and nut secure the deadeye strop to the chainplate.  (There's a beautiful perspective sketch of this arrangement on one of Mr. Campbell's sheets.)  The chainplate passes through a hole in the pinrail, in such a way that the deadeye sits a few inches above the pinrail.  The lower end of the chainplate is shaped like an inverted T.  Two holes are bored in the crosspiece of the T.  Two rivets through those holes secure the chainplate to the sheet iron bulwark, just above the waterway.  The geometry of the whole system is carefully set up so that all the parts of it - chainplate, deadeyes, lanyards, shroud - form a straight line between the waterway and the lower masthead.  The necessity of making that line straight determines the location of the hole in the pinrail through which the chainplate passes.

Revell's rendition obviously simplifies the system almost beyond recognition.  The problems are:  (1) There are no chainplates.  The deadeyes for each gang of each mast are molded inegrally (complete with their lanyards), connected by a plastic bar at the bottom that's supposed to be glued to the pinrail.  (2) Since those parts are over-scale, the pinrails in way of the masts are made somewhat too wide.  (It's not too bad.  The real pinrails are wider in way of the masts, but not by that much.  I don't have the kit in front of me, but I suspect the discrepancy is in the neighborhood of 1/16".  You can get the exact dimension from Mr. Campbell's plans.)  (3) The belaying pins, being made of styrene and just about to scale, are too fragile to take any strain on the lines attached to them.  (In virtually every Cutty Sark kit I've seen in recent years, most of the belaying pins have been busted off before the lid's come off the box.)  (4) Just gluing the pinrails to the insides of the bulwarks is an invitation to trouble.  (Revell assumed the deadeyes would have those ghastly plastic-coated-thread "shrouds and ratlines," which don't exert any significant pull, glued to them.  Setting up scale shrouds under tension might well yank the pinrails loose.

I can only offer suggestions for fixing these problems - but they surely aren't insurmountable.  It's easy to slice off the plastic belaying pins, drill holes in the appropriate spots, and replace them with brass ones.  (If you don't have a lathe, I recommend the brass belaying pins from Bluejacket.)  Shaving down the outboard edges of the pinrails should present no problem.  It would be a good idea to reinforce the pinrails somehow - maybe with steel pins shoved through pre-drilled holes in the bulwarks and pinrails. 

Photos on the ship's website show a series of iron rod support braces under the pinrails, running from the pinrail to the bulwark just above the waterway.  Those fittings aren't shown on the plans.  That suggests that they're later additions; they don't seem like the kind of fitting Mr. Campbell would miss.

The trickiest problem involves the deadeyes and chainplates.  In this small a scale I wouldn't lose sleep worrying about the deadeye strops.  And the lower ends of the chainplates will be just about invisible, under the pinrails and behind all the coils of line hanging from them.  An approach I might try would be to twist a piece of wire around the deadeye, drill a hole in the appropriate spot on the pinrail, and shove the wire (which represents the chainplate) through that hole and through another hole in the waterway below.  The wire could then (assuming all this happens before the hull halves are glued together) be bent over and superglued under the waterway.  Nothin' should be able to yank that deadeye loose.

The arrangement for the mizzenmast is simpler.  The plans are a little vague in this department (about the only slightly sketchy feature of them I've found), but it appears that the lower mizzen deadeyes virtually sit on the poop deck.  (Maybe they have chainplates like the others; if so, the chainplates are rivetted to the bulwarks under the poop.)  A good way to handle them on the model might be simply to twist a piece of wire around each deadeye and shove the ends of the wire through a hole in the waterway, then spread ends out underneath and superglue them.  The mizzen pinrails are mounted on stanchions, which Revell represented pretty well.

While you're fussing with the insides of the bulwarks, you might want to think about slicing off all those little triangular gussets that support them.  The gussets are supposed to be A-shaped iron stanchions - and every second one of them is supposed to have a small eyebolt welded to it.  Not hard to represent with wire and solder.

One interesting point of detail:  the deadeye strops and the chainplates are painted white.  So are the seizings the secure the shrouds to the deadeyes, and all the blocks in the running rigging. 

Revell didn't pay much attention to the bulwarks, but they're actually rather interesting parts of the ship.  The bulwarks themselves are made of sheet iron as far up as the main rail.  (The ones on the Revell kit are, of course, far too thick for the scale, but that's not obvious on the finished model.  About the only material that would reproduce them to scale would be aluminum foil, or some other metal sheet - which would be too weak to support itself.)  The main rail, which forms the top of the iron portion of the bulwark, was originally varnished teak, but was later painted white.  (That white-painted rail and the gilded carved work at the bow appear to be the only colors that relieve the basic exterior color scheme:  black above the waterline and unpainted "yellow metal," "Muntz metal," below.  There's no white or red stripe at the waterline.)  

Above the main rail the bulwarks are wood, painted black outboard and white inboard.  Mr. Campbell calls that section of the bulwark the "topgallant bulwark."  (I think some of the panel detail inboard may have been unpainted, varnished teak.  I'm not sure about that, though.)  [Later edit:  The plans say the uppermost section of the bulwarks is made of teak except for the last few feet at the stern, where it's iron.  Photos on the ship's website show the insides of the teak portions of the bulwarks in varnished teak, with oval-shaped white-painted panels - similar to the way the deckhouse panels are painted.  Mr. Campbell suggests, though, that originally all the teak work was just varnished - including the deckhouses.]  The rails forming the top and bottom of the topgallant bulwark are varnished teak.  Abreast the main hatch, on each side, is a section of that upper, wood rail that can be lifted out, to provide extra clearance for swinging cargo into the hatch.   This is the kind of detail that's to be found all over those Campbell plans.

Hope that helps a little.  I'm afraid you got more than you asked for - or probably wanted - but those plans are so fascinating that it's hard to resist passing on some of the details on them.

Good luck.

Youth, talent, hard work, and enthusiasm are no match for old age and treachery.

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