What do you consider the most "trying or boring part of rigging?

For me this one's easy:  deadeye lanyards.  Getting them all set up equally taut and lined up properly, in such a way that the mast doesn't lean to one side or acquire too much (or not enough) rake.  With the deadeyes and lanyards out of the way, ratlines, to me personally, are relatively easy.  Just boring and time-consuming.

Personally I enjoy the rigging aspects of modelling almost more than the construction part of a build.

At least with deadeye lanyards and ratlines we are working outside of the ship, and time consuming as those jobs are there is a great sense of satisfaction to see nicely rattled down shrouds, and neatly set up deadeyes.

My own pet hate is the belaying of the Topsail and above running rigging lines, such as the bunts, leech, bowlines, and halliards. Invariably by this stage there is already a lot of rigging in place and the opportunities for snagging given a momentary lapse in concentration seem endless.

The stropping of the smaller rigging blocks also presents a level of tedium I could well do without.

Yup, all of those things can be tiresome, but for me, the worst is making sails!  I have yet to find a sail material that is easy to work with, and getting the seams right and the cut right (cloth has a 'bias,' which means it stretches in one direction, but not another), and all the grommets in, etc, etc..... Sheesh!

1. making the block strops. 2. Eye splices 3. tensioning the standing rigging, and getting enough tension in the running rigging, with out affecting any of the standing rigging. 4. the worst though, is getting well into the running rigging before finding the mistake in the standing rigging!

Have any of you ever used this deadeye jig tool for making the deadeyes up?

 http://cgi.ebay.com/DEADEYE-THREADING-SPACING-JIG-Sailing-Ship-Tool_W0QQitemZ200189333378QQihZ010QQcategoryZ152930QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD1VQQtrksidZp1638.m118.l1247QQcmdZViewItem

How do you like it? I was thinking of getting for the shop.

Jake

 

I've never tried that one in particular, but I've devised a fair number of jigs and fixtures for that purpose over the years and have never been able to get one to work acceptably.  It looks to me like this one just might work for the first set of deadeyes on a pair of shrouds.  But not for the second; for the second, which really sets up the tension, the lanyard just has to be rigged on the ship.  And in order to use the jig for the first pair, you'd have to have some means of attaching the lower deadeye to the chainplate after the lanyard's rigged.  It doesn't look to me as though it would save any time or effort over the old-fashioned method.

The latest issue of Ships in Scale contains an article about this topic by William Romero.  He shows a rather elaborate jigging arrangement for lower deadeyes that, at least on the large scale model illustrated in the article, seems to have worked pretty well.  But I question the practicality of it on the smaller scales that I normally favor.