Model Shipways "Sultana" Group Build 2006

Decided to go ahead and layout the decking using my 1/32" x 5/64" basswood that I stripped myself - wasn't fun doing it that way, but I am happy with it.

I then could not rest on the stain as I looked and found something I liked but could not find it locally. I settled on using some Danish Oil that I had laying around. I guess I am not too picky huh !
I used a dremel to drill out the nail holes in the deck. I can subdue then simply by sanding over them. I chose a random point kinda - not choosy on the selection of the deck nails (faux)

Now, I can move on to laying the "inside" bulwarks.

Thanks BCS. Actually I think I am just being dumb. I stared at the plans and the transom does indeed overlap at the sides and it clearly shows that the curved fashion piece tapers to bridge the gap between the transom and the thinner wale. I hadn't noticed that before. I clearly am not studying the plans carefully enough.

I think I am going to be ok. My whole stern/transom isn't going to be a masterpiece but I think it will come together ok.

Fippy,

I am sure you will be able to get some better information from the others who have finished this part but one thing that may help a bit is the shaping of the rear deck.  From the plans, it looks as if the deck should have a curve to it, rather than being straight.  That will give some added distance for the transom to fit over.  A slight proportionate reduction in the sizes of all of the windows in addition to putting in the curve may solve the problem.

Bruce

My jolly boat is almost completed now, I think the 5th coat of paint should do it. I'm trying a different experiment with the transom windows too - I'll post full details if it turns out. :)

However, my stern is still causing me grief. I've rebuilt and reshaped it (not completely done yet), but am finding that my transom is too wide for the rear of the vessel.







See how it overlaps the sides? Hmmm... I can't really trim the transom without losing windows and I think it would be wrong to pad the ship's sides to make the stern wider? Suggestions are very welcome, thank you.

Chuck,

More outstanding photos.  Hard to believe it was once something like the somewhat misshapened block of basswood that I am now torturing.  Much to look forward to!

Bruce

Yes the masts are glued into position.  I attach any blocks or eyebolts while they are off the model and do all of my rigging after the masts are stepped.  Everyone has their own comfort zone for rigging.  I use super glue (CA) for most of my models while alternating with carpenter's glue.  It depend on the feature I am working on.  I used CA to fasten the transom to hull.  You are correct in saying there isnt much to glue to, but I held it in position and it went pretty smooth.  If you are going to create the transom in two layers as I did, the first layer can be pinned to the hull while it dries.  The second layer will cover up those holes and have a large surface to glue to.

 

Thanks Fippy

Whats going to be our next project?  Just kidding.

 

Chuck

Chuck, that looks absolutely gorgeous. Are your masts glued in yet? I read somewhere that all the rigging should be done with the masts off the vessel and then the masts stepped and the hanging lines secured to the hull. that sounds like an accident waiting to happen.

I have a question about glues while I am here. Up to now I have been using white carpenters glue as my glue of choice when I can clamp, or pin parts (like the sternpost), and then super glue for fiddly little pieces - basically parts of the jolly boat so far. I also have some 5-minute epoxy. How does everyone in the group choose their glue? For example... how do you glue the transom on? It doesn't look like there is any way to clamp it, and the contact areas are small, so I was going to use superglue. Or should I use the 5-min epoxy? I don't want to pin it because the transom is stained and so I can't disguise the holes by filling and painting.

Thanks,

Very neat - Very clean lines !  This is an awesome build Chuck and thanks again for your timely help.

Donnie

Here are a couple of pictures I just took a few minutes ago.  I am about to start rugging the ratlines next.  I am working hard to finish up the next chapter before I go away on vacation.  I want to get the ratlines finished and the anchors in place.  With a little luck I will also get the stays rigged as well.

I want to tell all of you that I am enjoying your company while we work together on this project.  It is a lot better than going it alone.

Chuck

 

Thanks everyone and particularly Chuck for taking the time to doctor my photo to explain his point. Chuck, absolutely I do not mind at all. I am thrilled that everyone in this group is so helpful, and particularly patient with newbies like me. :) Constructive criticism is always welcome, after all how am I going to learn if I don't listen very carefully to you experts. I only hope that when I have a few ships under my belt I can pass on such knowledge to other newbies. I'm loving this hobby so far.

I actually just finished tacking on a chunk of wood to my stern but to be honest it is too thick and I don't like it. I think I'm going to chisel it off again and follow your suggestion. Thanks! BCS, you are also correct - my transom is too vertical. I shall rectify that too.

Thanks everyone, especially for the encouragement.

Fippy,

You are moving along at a good pace.  I hope you dont mind me making a suggestion.  It looks as though the stern post could be thinned down somewhat giving you more room on the counter to create the hole for the rudder.  In combination with adding an 1/8" thick back to your stern as shown below.  I hope you dont take offense to my doctoring of your photo.  I am only trying to help and I think for your first wooden build you are doing a great job. 

Chuck Passaro

Fippy,

The great thing about wood is that there is usually a way to work around just about any problem with some pieces, glue and filler.  Thanks to you and Donnie to be getting ahead of the rest of us and finding out the difficult parts.

Rather than just being a problem with the angle of the stern post, from the photo it looks as if the angle of the transom may be more vertical than it could be.  It is hard to tell from the angle of the photo but if that is the case, one fix may be to add a piece on to the transom and shape the correct angle.  That would give more deck length to put the rudder post through.  If the angle is in fact correct and the deck the right length then this may not help much.

Bruce

Well, I finally found the ship to build using the Sultana as a base, it is under the "Copperhead" title in the "ships" thread.

    Please post some more pics, everyone, us novices need the information!

              greg

Wow, everyone's progress is looking good!  If you need a good simple photo editing program,  I can highly recommend this freeware:

http://www.irfanview.com/index.htm

Fippy,
of course yours is shaping up very nicely. You are way ahead of me. Let me say that I probably needed to start on stern, rudder section before I started teh deck on mine.
I would not do any thing drastic by adding or taking away hull right now. I think that I would study the plans again and hopfully there is an answer to your situation in the plans.
Your angle on the stern looks right - looks like mine too. Do you still have your template of the profile of the hull. I think that I would reach for that again. I am sure that you
have your hull ok. It might be that the Rudder is required to be shorter than you have it. You have done alot of work on your hull and I say cut your rudder to fit - leave the hull alone.
This is only my humble 2 cents worth Fippy.

Donnie

Looks great Donnie! That's coming along really nicely.
I've been installing my stem, keel, sternpost, here's a (fuzzy) pic of the stem.


I've also been working on the jolly boat which is a real PITA... I keep breaking it it's so small.

I ran into a snafu with my rudder. The photo below explains it all. Umm..... no deck for the rudder to go through!!
I figure the solution is 2-fold and your advice is greatly appreciated...
1. I think the angle of my sternpost & hence rudder is too acute and needs to be closer to vertical. This will bring the upper rudder post further forward. This means building a shim for the sternpost to bring it closer to vertical and reshaping the hull accordingly.
2. I think I need to build an extender to the stern.. pad it out with wood and reshape the whole thing again. This would add another half inch to the deck.

Ah well... we learn from mistakes and this is a big one. :)

Sorry about the fuzzy and really large photos. My desktop went belly up and I have no software on this laptop to shrink the images.

I plan to do my decking and then lay my inside bulwarks. Again, I stripped my own decking. from a sheet of basswood 1/32" thick. Width is about 5/64 " for each deck strip.

Not at all finished with the upper planking, but got my own reasons / desires to start some on the deck.

Donnie

Sounds good, Dan. I'm really looking forward to seeing your photos since I was considering the Tallow lower hull too, which I believe is more historically accurate, although I like the purity of white, especially as I am going to paint my upper hull yellow. Did you plank your upper hull like others are doing, or just paint it tan?

Russ is correct,  there were no cannons on the Sultana.  There were only the 8 swivel guns mounted on the stocks.  I want to mention someting else.  I recall that some of you are building the older variations of this kit.  The plans for them have changed a lot since then.  The rigging plan is completely different.  The masts and spars are much more simplified now.  This is based on new information.  For example.  The trestle trees and mast heads have a completely different configuration now as well as the main stay and main topmast stays.  If anyone has questions about these differences please let me know.  It will probably be some time before that need arrives though.  The hull and fittings details remain unchanged.

Chuck

 

Dan:

That box art is from the older kit. They just kept using the old box art even when they brought the kit back. For those with the more recent kits, note that the box art has the model with the carriage mounted cannons on deck, but in the updated instruction booklet, they use a more recent photo in which she is without cannons.

Over the years, research has been done on the Sultana and her history has been polished up a bit so that we now know much more about her than in the old days. Sultana did not have any carriage guns. Swivels, yes, but no cannons on carriages.

Russ

 

I have been busy with work and its been a few weeks, but I have made some progress though I am having trouble getting the stern to look just right.  My first try looked good but I used too thin of material and it broke,  I fixed that problem and shoud be done  with it soon.  I painted  my hull the Model Shipways Talow and the wale black.  I have also painted above the waterline with the tan color recomended by model shipways and I think it looks good, I will post pictures for that.  Following Chucks advice I recreated the hatch coverings and it is definitely worth it.  They look astronomically better than the cast metal pieces supplied with the kit.  I was able to salvage the gratings from left over pieces of boxwood that I had from a previous ship.  Trimmed in red it looks great.  I also decided to use .5 x 3mm tangynka for the deck planking with black pinstripe tape on the edges to simulate the caulking.  For the inside of the bulwarks I like the look of the red and will go with that   On the box for the Sultana it shows the ship outfitted with it looks like 4 brass caronades as well as the swivel guns.  I like the way it looks though I am not sure how authentice it is.  Anybody else have any thoughts on that.  Not sure in this scale if there will be enough room on the deck to properly rig the carronades.

 

that is usually how things work when you are building something. About the time you are finished with it, you say to yourself - oh, so that is how that is done!

Sorry guys, I have been out of pocket for the past week, I am getting geared up again hopefully tonight for another phase of building.

Donnie

Thanks jtilley, all good common sense as always.
You confirmed what I was suspecting about having to shorten the dowels, and absolutely I agree about the taper. Ironically, just last night I was reading about a very similar tapering method in Mastini's book for beginners, except he uses a file/rasp instead of sandpaper. Either way sounds good and I have a variable speed drill.
I haven't returned to the rigging plans to study them in greater detail. I was working on glueing my stem/keel/sternpost to the hull.
With the help of all you fine experts I'll figure it all out by the time I am done. :)

Fippy,

I think you may be getting a little mixed up by the photos of Chuck's excellent model.  It's surprising how much such things as the relative heights and rakes of masts can be distorted due to such things as camera angles and the changing focal length of a zoom lens. 

My suggestion is:  trust your plans.  They've been worked over by several generations of good designers.  That rigging plan is, in fact, a full-size drawing of all the spars in the ship.  Take your measurements from the drawing.

The dowels that come in the kit are just raw materials for making the masts.  They have to be cut to length.  You need to figure out how deep the hole you drilled in the hull for the mast is.  (Just how deep doesn't matter, as long as (a) it's deep enough to make the mast sturdy, and (b) you know how deep it is.)  Measure from the plan the length of the lower mast, from the deck to the lower masthead.  Add the depth of the hole in the hull to that figure, and you have the length to which the dowel needs to be cut. 

I imagine the masts also need to have their taper added.  You can take the measurements for that from the rigging plan too.  (Don't try to convince yourself that the masts don't need to be tapered.  If they aren't, they won't look right.)  As I imagine the instruction book explains, the easiest way to taper a spar is with an electric drill.  It's easiest to do before you cut the dowel to length.  Clamp your drill in a vise (or Workmate, or some other means of holding it steady).  Chuck the lower end of the dowel that's going to be the mast into the drill.  To keep the dowel from flying around and breaking, hold the other end in your left hand (assuming you're right handed), with a thick, soft rag to keep yourself from getting burned.  Then turn on the drill go to work with a sheet of medium-grade sandpaper.  Fold the sandpaper into a pad, and keep it moving up and down the length of the dowel.  It may take a little practice (and maybe a trip to the hardware store to buy a replacement dowel or two), but you'll quickly pick up the trick and you'll find that tapering a mast is quite simple - and quick.

If I remember correctly (as I may well not be doing), the yards, gaffs, and boom have some taper already turned in them - though they may need to be touched up a little.  Again, you can take the dimensions of them from the rigging plan.  Maybe it's worth noting that the draftsmen who draw such plans almost always employ a convention that's slightly at odds with reality.  The draftsman draws the yards as though they were swung around parallel to the ship's centerline.  In the real ship that couldn't be done; the standing rigging would get in the way.  But drawing them that way makes it easy to take their dimensions from the rigging plan.

Hope that helps a little.  Good luck.

Fippy,

Each mast is actually an assembly of two masts.  To be consistant with the kit terminology they are the lower masts and topmasts.  These are assembled together with the caps (upper black piece) and trestletrees (lower black piece).   The trestle trees are supported by the bibs directly under them.  If you have the same kit version that I do, look under the hull on the rigging diagram.  The bottom right hand corner should contain the information for all of these.  Including the cap, trestle trees and bibs.  The lower masts protrude through the trestle trees and into the cap.  I small square tennon needs to be carved into the end of the lower mast which fits into a corresponding square hole in the mast cap.  The top mast slides through another hole in this cap on the forward side (round hole).  It rests on top of the trestle trees with the help of a fid.  The fid prevents the top mast from falling through the trestle trees.  It is a small length of wood that is pushed through the heel of the top mast. If you locate the drawings for the masts in the lower right hand corner you will see that the hole for the fid is shown through the heel of the top mast.   Here is a close up image of the trestle trees and cap assembly for both masts.

The rake of the masts on my model are slightly more angled than shown in that photo I posted earlier.  I hadn't yet glued them onto the model so the correct angles were not established.  The angle isnt too far off but they will be raked even more.  The main mast will have a greater angle than the fore mast.  This is not shown on the kit supplied plans well.  It is shown more clearly on the plans drawn by Porti Takakjian that I am cross referencing.

 

 

I'm still confused about the masts. On your pic above Chuck, does the main mast end at the lowest black piece (Don't know the terminology sorry) or the upper black piece, i.e. at the bottom of where the "mast extension" joins or the top?

I have a 2nd set of plans with rigging but it does not mention the height of the masts. In my diagram, the main mast is only marginally taller than the foremast, less than half the difference on your model, Chuck. Though the plan says it is to scale, I would have to shorten the dowels considerably, which the instructions do not say. If I lay my dowel on the plans, it goes about 3 inches into the hull. That can't be right? So am I supposed the shorten the dowels? My guess is that the mast dowel extends to the 2nd black flat thing. (What IS that thing? :) A mast cap?), so I should shorten the dowel accordingly?

 My 2nd plan looks to be useful for rigging, stays, spars etc. but not much help on the mast itself, unless I am being really thick and missing something, which is possible. ;-)

I also notice that the rake of my masts is greater than yours Chuck. Yours seems more in line with the plans, but I followed the little rake template given in the instructions. I like yours better.

jtilley, thanks for your advice. I have never seen a set of mounting pedestals so I have been assuming they are less sturdy than they obviously are. How far does the screw go into the hull I wonder? Thanks for reassuring me.

Fippy

Great progress.  The main mast is noticably taller than the fore mast.  I suspect you may be missing one of the plan sheets.  You should have two large rolled sheets of plans.  One with the hull construction details and the other with the rigging plan.  The rigging plan shows every mast and spar drawn to scale.  Do you have that plan?  Anyway, I havent glued my masts into the deck permanently yet.  I still have to attach some blocks and eye bolts.  I dry fit them so the angles may not be correct but both masts rake significantly towards the stern.  As you can see the main mast is taller.  You have some time before you will need them, but looking at the lower masts in your photo I see that they are almost identical in length.  The next chapter of my guide should be available soon and will document the mast construction in detail.  Keep the sawdust flying.

Chuck

Normally in an eighteenth-century vessel the mainmast would be noticeably taller than the foremast.  The dimensions of all the spars, however, should be indicated quite clearly on the spar/sail plan that came with the kit.  The Model Shipways Sultana that I bought was one of the old, original ones, with plans by Howard I. Chapelle; as I understand it, the current issue comes with a different - and more detailed - set of plans.  But if they don't show the spar dimensions, my advice is to (a) throw them in the garbage can, and (b) see your attorney about filing suit against Model Shipways for selling such a thing.  Any wood kit that doesn't include spar dimensions has no business being on the market.

The spar plan may actually indicate the overal length of each spar (i.e., each mast, yard, gaff, and boom, plus the bowsprit) in numerical form.  If so, you need to pay heed to the fact that the overall lengths of the masts include the portion below the weather deck.  I suspect it's more likely that the spar/sail plan is just a full-size drawing of all the spars.  In that case, you need to measure the length of the mast from the deck to the masthead, and add the depth of the hole you drilled in the hull.

I frankly think you're worrying too much about putting pressure on the mounting pedestals.  If you use the wood screws that come with them, they'll be the sturdiest components of the model.  If you're worried about cracking something by making the model lean over to one side, you can shove an appropriately-sized piece of scrap wood under each bilge to take the strain.  If I were you I'd drill those holes in the bottom as soon as possible.  The danger of breaking something on the deck when the hull is upside down and you're drilling those holes is far greater than the chance of damaging the pedestals by putting pressure on them.

Good luck.

I've made some good progress I think. My keel, stem and sternpost are cut and shaped. I snapped the tricky pieces of the stem twice, but super glue saved the day. I also put the camber on my decks, carved out the hole for the ladder and drilled the mast holes. I'm trying to get the serious deck preparation done before I attach the keel, paint and mount on the pedestals; then I shall put as little pressure on the pedestals as possible, I hope.

Which brings me to a question. It is hard from the plans and photos to decide which mast stands higher, foremast or mainmast. Opinions? Does it matter? Should they be equal height?

Here's how my masts look so far. (I know the masts converge but I have some play in them so I can accurately position them before glueing.



I think my rake looks about right too?

Yeah very very nice. Good job! Can't wait to see a non-fuzzy photo ;-)

Thanks everyone for the sharpening advice. It sounds like an artform I probably won't develop in a hurry, so I bought new blades and I'll practice sharpening the old ones every now and then.