Revell 1/96 Cutty Sark

Shipwreck

If you take Campbell's plans, which are in error, and convert them to 1/96, you will just multiply the error. For example, the General Plan has an 20.750" length (on my copy of the plan). In 1/96 that is about 27.659", which creates your difference of 8' plus a little. Each of my copies of the plan have a different hull length, so it depends on which one you use as to what the error will be. My guess is that an actual ship based on the plans would be about 9' longer than the 212.5' specification.                 

If you use the method you describe of measuring an object from a drawing, and then using that measurement to base your enlargement on, and the drawing you measured is not printed precisely to scale, then you are right and there will be an error.   I did not take any measurements from my copy of the plan, I enlarged the plan so that the graphic scale, or scale bar, on the drawing was correctly sized to 1/96, therefore the original size of my copy was irrelevant. 

As far as the length of the ship is concerned, it's been a while since I went through this exercise so I will have to pull out my plans tonight and check my figures.  If your contention that Campbell drew the ship 8' to 9' too long is correct, then that would be a pretty monumental error on his part.

The specifications for the Cutty Sark call for a length of 212.5 feet. Campbell, per his note, used that for his drawing.  If you convert 212.5' to 1/96 scale it comes out to about 26.563". My Revell CS hull is 26.312". That is close enough for me!

If you take Campbell's plans, which are in error, and convert them to 1/96, you will just multiply the error. For example, the General Plan has an 20.750" length (on my copy of the plan). In 1/96 that is about 27.659", which creates your difference of 8' plus a little. Each of my copies of the plan have a different hull length, so it depends on which one you use as to what the error will be. My guess is that an actual ship based on the plans would be about 9' longer than the 212.5' specification.                 

Two of Campbell's three sheets have graphic scales drawn on them and these should allow one to scale the drawing, no matter what size the sheets are printed.  Several years ago I enlarged Campbell's general arrangement plan to 1/96, the same scale as the Revell kit, and compared the plan to the kit hull.  Per the Campbell drawings the Revell kit is about one inch, or eight scale feet, too short.  The angle and profile of the stem and stern, the number and locations of the small portholes at the bow, and the number of freeing ports along the bulwarks also do not match the Campbell drawings.  In short, if the Campell drawings are accurate, then the Revell hull is "off" in quite a few areas.

jtilley

In any case, the best way to resolve any question about measurements on a set of plans is to check the size of the "scale bar" - the line (usually near the bottom of the drawing) that indicates how "long" six, twelve, twenty-four, or a hundred feet (or meters, or whatever) appear in the drawing. 

John,

If you look closely at the photo I posted on 06/26/2010 you should be able to see my metric scale aligned with the scale bar on the drawing. That was how I confirmed that the reproduction was not at full scale.

Back in the day I used to draw on velum then a plastic film using Rotring pens. I would take my drawings to a local architects office and they would reproduce them on white(ish) paper. The print had black(ish) lines. I have been trying to remember the details of that process but my memory bank is not doing too well in that department. I have the feeling that the drawing film was a little costly. I think the reproductions must have been fairly inexpensive and became a matter of routine.

I was taught always to include both a scale bar and a statement on drawings.

One thing I occasionally came across was the definitive disclaimer “Not to Scale” on a set of dimensioned drawings that included both a scale bar and a statement. Very often the scale bar matched the statement so why the disclaimer? I hate the assumption that we are all idiots (or was it lack of self-confidence on the part of the draftsman).

Geoff

I don't know it for a fact, but I rather suspect the good folks at the Cutty Sark gift shop print up those plans to order.  If so, the errors we've been discussing may depend on how the machine was set up on that particular day by that particular person.

In any case, the best way to resolve any question about measurements on a set of plans is to check the size of the "scale bar" - the line (usually near the bottom of the drawing) that indicates how "long" six, twelve, twenty-four, or a hundred feet (or meters, or whatever) appear in the drawing. 

If there's no such scale bar on the drawing - shoot the draftsman.  A competent draftsman NEVER relies on a verbal statement, like "Scale:  1/8" = 1' ", to stand by itself.  He knows that, at some time or other the drawing is likely to be published in either enlarged or reduced form.  (I wish I had a dollar for every time I've preached that sermon to a grad student who's made a drawing of some archeological artifact to include in a thesis.  Theses get reproduced on microfilm; to the viewer of a microfilmed drawing a verbal statement of the scale is utterly useless.) 

Example - on a drawing that's supposedly on 1/96 scale, the distance between 0 and 50 feet on the scale bar should be exactly 6 1/4".  If it isn't, that means the drawing, somewhere along the line, has been reproduced at something other than full size. 

Whether the dimensions shown in the drawing correspond precisely to those of the real ship is another question entirely.

If you're interested there is a Yahoo Group for Cutty Sask builders here is the link and you need to join the group, not many conversations but some of the post are decent.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cuttysark/

BTW I'm doing a very special Cutty Sark Project that should blow off your deck shoes! 

Yes, it is dealing with the Cutty Sark

Yes it's Different

Yes, you'll love it

John Tilley was told about it some month back and I've been in the dry fitting stage for a few months.

AND YES It will still be a few months more to see it...............friggin' Oil Spill got me up to my eyeballs in the stuff at work.

GeoffWilkinson

I was contemplating and extension to this so I could take measurements from the plans and convert those to mm at the 1/96 scale.

Then I noticed something odd. The rigging sheet and sail plans are to scale, however, in the infinite wisdom of marketing people (something I never did understand) they have taken the original drawing of the ‘General Layout’, digitized it and reduced by about 10% so the scale is now meaningless. 

This comment by Geoff kind-of got my attention because I have been doing some scratch building according to Campbell's plans. So I went back to the drawing board. What I found was that all three of MY Campbell's plans are consistent within about a 1% margin of error.

What I did find is that my Campbell plans were about 5% larger than the 1/128 scale should be compared to the stated actual length of 212.5 feet. This variance may be due to inconsistencies in reference points. For example Campbell and Longridge seem to measure the length from different points on the stern.

If you were building a Cutty Sark from Campbell's plans, it might end up being 9 feet too long; but converting small measurements to 1/96 scale would not create enough of a variance to worry about.

That said, your Campbell plans may have different variances than mine.

jtilley

The one kind of thread that most experienced modelers do reject is cotton.  It's flabby, it's fuzzy, and it has an abominable habit of over-reacting to changes in humidity.  (A line that you set up nice and taut tonight may go slack tomorrow - especially if you didn't run it over a cake of beeswax.)  I did, however, rig my model of the pilot boat Phantom ( http://www.hmsvictoryscalemodels.be/JohnTilleyPhantom/index.html ) with the stuff that came with the Model Shipways kit (and available separately from Model Expo).  Model Expo describes it as a "cotton-poly mix."  To my notion it's pretty nice stuff; it really looks like rope, ties in knots easily, and generally handles very nicely.  I'm not sure I would have used it on a major project, but in that case I figured if the rigging all fell apart at once I could replace it in a few evenings.  The model's been finished for about five years now; so far so good.

John,

Humidity, I live in Florida - tell me about it!

Seriously though, that is very useful input. I did use beeswax on the yarn supplied for my Beagle - but mainly to try and get ris of the 'fuzz' - it didn't seem to help that much. The rigging still looks good (tension I mean) but then it is only a few months old.

I have just looked at the Coats and Clarke thread I bought the other day, one of which is a 26% cotton 74% polyester mix. It looks good on the reel but seems to develop 'fuzz' when I start handling it. It does not look good it I try to 'de-fuz' it with a flame.

I am going to try and find a good fabric store locally as I was disappointed with the range stocked at Wal-Mart, not to mention the knowledge of the shop assistant.

Wire. I was so pleased with myself when I 'discovered' the source for a very malleable wire to make the minature eyebolts and cleats (the wire in sandwich bag ties) also the not so malleable copper wire for the belay pins.

So, now I need to find sources for both thread and wire but I don't want to just order stuff, blindly, online.

Geoff

caramonraistlin

Geoff:

I'd like  to make a suggestion on the stirrups and footropes. On my Constitution I 1st made a simple rig (a couple of pieces of flat balsa attached to a balsa base with a paralel gap bewteen to hold the yard) to rig the footrope assemblies off of the masts. I used very fine wire to make the stirrups and attached them to the yards. Then I used black thread and ran them through the stirrups. Lastly. I tied them to the stirrups where they passed through and put a small drop of super glue at each point. What was nice about the wire stirrups is they could be aligned as needed and held their alignment. Once painted a dark color (black), they looked like rope. I tried stirrups made of thread but unless they were stiffened somehow they wouldn't hang right but tended to curl slightly up. Give this a try, I think you'll like it. Also on my jig I put spacing marks for the various lengths of yards such that I could get the spacing of the stirrups right each time.

 Michael Lacey 

 

Michael,

Thanks for that input. I have taken a look at the few footropes and stirrups that I have made and I am very disappointed with their appearance. I am now seriously considering using wire for some parts of the rigging as you suggest. I do know that I have to redo the existing work and am pleased that I paused when I did.

Geoff

bondoman

Longridge used silk thread, and he de-fuzzied it by passing it over a flame. Might be worth a try.

I did use this technique with the yarn supplied in the Revell kit of the Beagle which did have some 'fuzz'. Of course, you cannot do this with polyester - it melts/catches on fire instantly!

I was fairly impressed by the stuff in the Cutty Sark kit (see earlier post) but then, I'm new to this so am easily impressed at this stage.

Geoff

Geoff Wilkinson

I know I have a long way to go before seriously worrying about rigging but I did make a start on a couple footropes (that was just before the original question that started this thread) but I was unhappy with the ‘fuzzy’ thread I had used. The yarn supplied with the kit was just too big for the footropes.

I have just tried to compare the threads I now have.

I anticipate that I have a whole new confusing world to explore when it comes to yarn and I know this has been much talked about before. At this stage of my knowledge I would be reluctant to start ordering stuff online so any advice would be much appreciated.

Oof.  The subject of rigging line is a complicated one, and one that's guaranteed to raise controversy among experienced modelers.  I have to start by admitting that it's been quite a few years since I rigged a reasonably complex model, and the market has changed a good deal since then.

The clerk's assertion that "they don't make silk thread anymore" is, of course, baloney.  Do a google search on "silk thread" and you'll immediately find several sources.  But I've never used any of them; the last time I rigged a full-rigged ship model (the little Hancock, which I finished in 1984), it was possible to buy silk thread in well-equipped fabric stores.

The big problem with any kind of commercially-produced thread is that it only comes in a small range of diameters.  (As the Campbell plans make clear, the rigging of a ship like the Cutty Sark included wire and rope in dozens of sizes.  We can't hope to reproduce every one of them, but a good rigging job will include six or eight.)  I was able to find two sizes of silk back in the early eighties, and almost all the line in the Hancock was made from it.  I built a "rope-making machine," with which to "spin up" any diameter I wanted.  The mechanics of the gadget aren't actually especially complicated; the basics of it are explained in most advanced books on ship modeling.  (I made mine from the gears and other parts in a Lego set, screwed down to a four-foot-long board, with a piece of model airplane rubber to produce the necessary tension.  I have no idea how many different sizes of thread I eventually made.)  But I'm not sure I'd encourage anybody to go that route on a first effort. 

Some experts say the only acceptable rigging material is linen, because it doesn't deteriorate.  I disagree.  When I was working in a maritime museum I saw plenty of old - and not-so-old - pieces of linen rigging that had snapped.  I also saw examples of silk thread that had lasted longer.  Plenty of surviving medieval tapestries are made of silk thread stitched on a linen backing.  The truth is that the atmospherice conditions, handling, and care to which a model is subjected have far more to do with the longevity of its rigging than the material of its rigging.  (Linen doesn't respond any better to attacks by incompetent observers of the feline variety than any other material does.)

The one kind of thread that most experienced modelers do reject is cotton.  It's flabby, it's fuzzy, and it has an abominable habit of over-reacting to changes in humidity.  (A line that you set up nice and taut tonight may go slack tomorrow - especially if you didn't run it over a cake of beeswax.)  I did, however, rig my model of the pilot boat Phantom ( http://www.hmsvictoryscalemodels.be/JohnTilleyPhantom/index.html ) with the stuff that came with the Model Shipways kit (and available separately from Model Expo).  Model Expo describes it as a "cotton-poly mix."  To my notion it's pretty nice stuff; it really looks like rope, ties easily, and generally handles very nicely.  I'm not sure I would have used it on a major project, but in that case I figured if the rigging all fell apart at once I could replace it in a few evenings.  The model's been finished for about five years now; so far so good.

There are a couple of specialty firms nowadays that sell twisted linen line made specially for ship models.  The samples I've seen look excellent, but I haven't had occasion to try them.

I usually use wire for any line that has to sag.  (That includes footropes and ratlines.  The ratlines on the Hancock are made from a spool of nickel-chromium wire, about .002 in diameter, that a friend happend to find in a war surplus store.  I probably would have used thread if I'd been working on 1/96 scale, though.)  Either copper or brass wire works well for footropes.  If you've got a well-stocked hobby shop within driving distance, try its model railroad department.  If not, try Radio Shack.  Copper wire may well be soft enough to work without modification; brass will be flexible enough if you pass it over a candle flame before trying to bend it.  Be on the lookout for small, sharp-pointed pliers; they're a boon to that kind of work.  The footropes of the Hancock are made of brass wire; the stirrups were pinched together around the footropes themselves, and soldered (with lead-free solder), before they were attached to the (wood) yards.

Hope that helps a little.  Good luck.

Geoff:

I'd like  to make a suggestion on the stirrups and footropes. On my Constitution I 1st made a simple rig (a couple of pieces of flat balsa attached to a balsa base with a paralel gap bewteen to hold the yard) to rig the footrope assemblies off of the masts. I used very fine wire to make the stirrups and attached them to the yards. Then I used black thread and ran them through the stirrups. Lastly. I tied them to the stirrups where they passed through and put a small drop of super glue at each point. What was nice about the wire stirrups is they could be aligned as needed and held their alignment. Once painted a dark color (black), they looked like rope. I tried stirrups made of thread but unless they were stiffened somehow they wouldn't hang right but tended to curl slightly up. Give this a try, I think you'll like it. Also on my jig I put spacing marks for the various lengths of yards such that I could get the spacing of the stirrups right each time.

Michael Lacey 

Longridge used silk thread, and he de-fuzzied it by passing it over a flame. Might be worth a try.

Geoff thanks for posting that photo, and Thanks John Tilly for informing that those things are shroud fairleads.

Forgive the late response.

jtilley

The flip side of the coin, of course, is the price.  Even if the modeler has to change the scale, those three sheets of paper still represent one of the biggest bargains in ship modeling.

Personally, I always like to have a set of plans on the scale of the model available.  Geoff's right, of course:  that's especially important if you're working from scratch.  But even in a kit-based project it's mighty handy to be able to take dimensions directly from the plans.  And having model-sized plans on hand makes it a lot easier to visualize in advance what the finished model's going to look like.

Modeler these days don't know how good they've got it.

I am more than happy with the price and it makes me feel good that I have made a tiny contribution towards the rebuilding of the original.

It also makes me feel comfortable just having the plans since the Revell drawings are so poor they do nothing to inspire confidence.

I agree that modelers these days don’t know how good they’ve got it. I am sure that if I had attempted this project a third time without the benefit if the internet and dissemination of knowledge from a forum such as this I would have ended up disappointed once more and a third shipwreck!

Domestic duties have conspired to keep me separated from my computer, workbench and model for the past couple of days. On the plus side, while shopping in Wal-Mart, I suddenly found myself in the sewing department examining the small selection of reels on the Coats and Clark rack (imagine that!). I remembered seeing mention of this firm elsewhere on the forum.

I picked out a couple of reels, one mercerized Egyptian cotton labeled ART A271 – T37 and one 26%cotton 74%polyester labeled ART A220 – T3 to be going on with. I asked one of the assistants about silk thread. She replied “They don’t make silk anymore” I made some smart comment about the extinction of worms but they didn’t get it. Anyway, I thought I would look at the Coats & Clark website when I got home, expecting to find a wealth of information. No such luck.

I know I have a long way to go before seriously worrying about rigging but I did make a start on a couple footropes (that was just before the original question that started this thread) but I was unhappy with the ‘fuzzy’ thread I had used. The yarn supplied with the kit was just too big for the footropes.

I have just tried to compare the threads I now have.

I anticipate that I have a whole new confusing world to explore when it comes to yarn and I know this has been much talked about before. At this stage of my knowledge I would be reluctant to start ordering stuff online so any advice would be much appreciated.

One thing is clear – the stuff from the Dollar Store is going in the trash!

Geoff

In an effort to throw brief clarity on several subjects raised, here follows:

Microsoft and it's brethren have robbed math from the scaling game, in favor of an evil thing called "paper size". Much as they destroyed the definition of a font, which is a type family; in favor of it's children, the variations involving the attributes of being "condensed" or "bold" among many others: they have made scaling a process that now relies on graphic rather than numerical scales.

I have found that the only sure way to get a set of drawings printed at a size one needs is to take the mother drawings, the "originals"; draw a very precise set of two points on them, then do the math and instruct the person at the keyboard of the repro house to make those two points a certain different distance apart on the reproduction.

As for what a blueprint is: originally it was a sheet of paper that had an emulsion in it that when exposed to ultraviolet light and then washed with water, turned blue.The process was by contact print. Drawings on paper are transparent, the pencil is opaque. The exposed areas were fixed; the lines washed away. The second generation, "bluelines" use an emulsion that washes away with ammonia gas, leaving the blue as lines. When run through a UV exposure between rollers, the paper was then run through an ammonia atmosphere and the print was made.

Currently all prints tend to be large format laser prints, black lines deposited on white paper.

I recently bought a set of plans for the Bogue class CVE carriers from Floating Drydock. They are blue with white lines, but they are color inkjet, not blueprints.

I honestly can't tell whether I'm looking at pixelation or just mediocre-quality printing - the equivalent of third-generation xeroxing or something of the sort.  Part of the problem may well be that by the time the current vendors got around to doing whatever they did to the drawings, the originals were getting old.  I'm not sure exactly when Mr. Campbell made them, but I think it was in either the very late fifties or early sixties. 

The bottom line is that the drawings are first-rate and the printing job is third-rate (at best).  That's a real shame.  And I'd be willing to bet that the individual responsible for changing the scale on one sheet honestly didn't know that he/she was doing anything wrong.

The flip side of the coin, of course, is the price.  Even if the modeler has to change the scale, those three sheets of paper still represent one of the biggest bargains in ship modeling.

Personally, I always like to have a set of plans on the scale of the model available.  Geoff's right, of course:  that's especially important if you're working from scratch.  But even in a kit-based project it's mighty handy to be able to take dimensions directly from the plans.  And having model-sized plans on hand makes it a lot easier to visualize in advance what the finished model's going to look like.

As a demonstration of how such things have changed, I recall what I had to go through in order to get drawings of the frigate Hancock on the scale of my model (3/32"=1').  I ordered a set of Howard I. Chapelle's plans from the Smithsonian.  (They cost, if I remember right, about $35.00 - in 1978.)  They consisted of two blueprinted sheets, on 1/48 scale.  (And the Smithsonian folded them up and sent them to me in an envelope, rather than rolled in a mailing tube.  Arrgghh!)  I took the blueprints to a local architectural printing firm (in Columbus, Ohio), which took photographs of them with an enormous camera that generated negatives on sheet film at the right scale.  One of the guys there painstakingly touched up any little spots and glitches on the negatives with a brush and correction fluid, on a light table.  He then made me a stack of contact prints (which came out as white lines on a blue background).  I don't remember the bill for the whole job, but I think it approached $100 (1978 dollars, that is).  But once I had the negatives I could get as many prints as I wanted for very minimal expense.  I bought a big stack of them and cut them up to make templates - thereby eliminating a potential source of error because I didn't have to trace them.

How times have changed!  A few months ago I bought a set of plans for the U.S.S. North Carolina from the Floating Drydock; they're on 1/350 scale.  Since I want to build my model of her from the 1/700 Trumpeter kit, I laid the plans on the glass of my Epson all-in-one printer/copier/scanner ($125), set it on 50%, and pushed the "copy" button.  The 1/350 plans didn't fit on the glass, of course, so I had to make my copies in several shots and glue them together.  But the total outlay for the copy job (i.e., the ink and the paper) was surely under a dollar - and took about fifteen minutes.

Modeler these days don't know how good they've got it.

jtilley

I have to confess that this inconsistency in the scale of the Campbell prints is news to me.  I'm glad Geoff noticed it.  I've heard of such things happening elsewhere; it seems the good people who are assigned the job of actually running off the copies aren't model builders, and honestly don't realize what a heinous sin they're commiting when they change the scale of scale drawing - even slightly.

The plans are printed on A1 size paper (23.4" × 33.1"). Campbell probably used the old Atlas size paper when he drew this plan (26" x 34"), a size used by Architects and Industrial designers in the UK before WWII.

The worst thing about this reproduction is the loss of detail when the originals were digitised. This may have been the thing that caught my attention when trying to read notations on the drawing. Below are photos of parts of the drawing and it is possible to see the pixellation in the reproduction.

You can also see the scale on the drawing measures 86.25mm when it should be 95.25mm.

jtilley

Suggestion one:  take the offending sheet to a local printing firm that has a photocopy machine that can do enlargements and reductions, and have a print made to the right scale.  Some such places have self-service machines.  (One used to have to worry that proportional distortions would creep in, but I think the copier manufacturers have solved that problem.)  If the guy running the machine raises a stink about the copyright notice, white it out and take the sheet someplace else.  (I guarantee Mr. Campbell, who was a model enthusiast himself, wouldn't mind.  And he'd be furious at the person who changed the scale.)

I have no idea why Mr. Campbell picked 1/128 (3/32"=1') for those drawings.  (It does happen to be a scale that I like - or used to like.  It's the one I used for my model of the frigate Hancock.  That was a long time ago, though; I'm not at all sure my 59-year-old fingers and eyeballs are up to that sort of thing now.)  If you can get access to a self-service copier, or if the guy running the non-self-service one isn't too uptight about copyright law, you can quite easily - and not-very-expensively - get the three sheets enlarged to 1/96.  And I'd recommend doing that.  There's just no substitute for having easy access to a set of plans on the same scale as the model. 

If I were scratch building I would have been very upset by this issue but this is a kit. I am more interesed in the detail. Enlarging the plans would not improve the resolution.

I'll see how I get on with a magnifying glass and spreadsheet for now.

I like the metric scale of 1:100 - don't need a calculator for that, even my slightly senile brain can handle that convertion.

Geoff

CapnMac82

Now, Elissa is a very late example from the sailing era, 1877.  But, the photos on the site

http://www.galvestonhistory.org/1877_Tall_Ship_Elissa.asp

Show just how many lines are in use on a working ship, and give a great sense of just how much "more" than "less" is, too.

 

Some very nice hi-res pictures. Thanks for that interesting link.

Geoff

GeoffWilkinson

I have been pouring over the Campbell plans for many hours the past couple of days. The first thing that struck me though was the scale, 3/32” to 1 inch. I dug out my old, antique, architectural scales from when I was at college in the UK. None matched this scale. I have been trying to concentrate on the drawings but I can’t get this question out of my head – ‘Why did they come up with that scale?’

Geoff,

3/32 is actually a pretty common scale, both in architecture and ship modeling. All the architectural scales I have include it and there is a company in England called Fleetscale which produces a large range of warship hulls in 1/128.

That is very odd.  Does it say that it is reduced somewhere on the sheet? I bought a set of the Campbell plans 3-4 years ago and my General Arrangement plan appears to be correctly to scale.  In any case, there is a graphic scale at the top of the sheet that can be used with a pair of dividers, or you can mark off a sheet of paper to make your own scale ruler.

If you want, email me your mailing address.  I have copies of the Campbell plans that I have enlarged to 1/96.  I can send you a set of those and you can work at 1:1.

Wow - reading Prof. Tilley´s post I wanted to explain the "oldfashioned" blueprint-system, since I to work in a companies internal "copy-shop" were I had to create the micro-films of original drawings and were I was ordered to create the copies from the micro-films and from original ink drawings which were still existing in those days. But .. I would not be able to explain the process THAT precise! Great!

Concerning the copy-right: I do not know how a judge would see that in the US - here in Germany the copy-right is to prevent that the original creator of something does not get money for HIS creation because of someone else selling copies. BUT it is absolutly o.k. if someone who bought legaly a print, a legal copy, .. copies this to create a safty-copy, to create a working-base! So if the copyshop owner fears the copyright: explain that you want to use the copy for your working bench and that you want to safe your original from getting dirty or even destroyed. As long as you don´t sell the copies there is no need to fear someone!

jtilley

Those were old-fashioned blueprints - blue ink on white paper and a faint smell of ammonia.  I imagine all of them were to the same scale (though I don't know that I actually ever checked).  The blueprint process normally produces prints at full-size.  (I wonder if anybody bothers with genuine blueprints any more.)

Diazo printing (to use the term-of-art) is really only available in the largest of cities and the smallest of towns (where a machine is owned in-house at an engineer's or architect's or contractor's office).  CAD and chemistry have eclipsed its reign.

The "why" of using it was in that the copies were made in contact to the original, so each copy precisely matched its original (which included any flaws or defects).  Ovine vellum was used for originals due to its long-term stability in length and width.  The term was carried forward to all-linen rag paper when that became available.  For serious permanence, mylar film was introduced (but it requires special inks and pencil "leads").  Rolled wet-process blueprints hugely vulnerable to spills, as they are more "ink" than drawing.

Originally, the copy, called a print, was exposed to light then developed wet.  This produced a blue sheet with white lines upon it.  Since the print was wetted, controlling the rate it changed dimension when dry became an issue.  That, and the chemicals brought about the "dry" process, where the paper was exposed to ammonia compounds aver the photo-sensitive sheet had the original "shot" onto it.  Compounds in the paper allowed production of brown, black, or blue lines on a white background.  Which improved the readability no end.  The downside being that the paper never stops being some photo sensitive, and the lines will fade.  Depending on how well-regulated the developer was on printing, there can be traces of the ammonia in the plans too. 

Enter the modern day.  Large-format scanners and printers have kept getting better for lower prices.  The HR cost of having ammonia-based chemicals in one's print shop (along with all the MSDS sheets, and employee briefings, etc.) kept getting ever more expensive.  CAD made it possible to have "direct" printing, too.  So, most print shops either scan one's full-sized "wet stamped" sheets, or print the e-stamped sheets to need.

Good for "us" though, not that difficult to get a set of plans shot to even middling random enlargement (like 13%) at a reasonable cost.

Which reminds me, I need to get a new set of USS Boyd DD-554 plans from Floating Drydock if AFD still carries those, mine are faded to nothingness before I could get them scanned.

jtilley

I once happened to stumble upon the schooner Bluenose II when her crew was "setting up" her lower rigging.  They hauled the deadeye lanyards taut, thereby tightening the shrouds.  Then, one shroud at a time, they took off the seizings above the deadeyes, slacked off the lanyard, pulled the shroud around the deadeye a bit, and rerigged the seizing so the deadeye sat six inches or so higher than its neighbors.  Then they rerigged the lanyard, hauled it taut so the deadeye came down to exactly the right height, tied off the lanyard, and moved on to the next shroud.  Maybe that's how it was typically done.

That is the process they use on Galveston's Elissa.  New volunteers seem to comment on just how much is completely "taken to bits" in sailing practice.  But, that's often the only way to combat salt water and its ill effects on the artifices of Man.

Now, Elissa is a very late example from the sailing era, 1877.  But, the photos on the site

http://www.galvestonhistory.org/1877_Tall_Ship_Elissa.asp

Show just how many lines are in use on a working ship, and give a great sense of just how much "more" than "less" is, too.

I have to confess that this inconsistency in the scale of the Campbell prints is news to me.  I'm glad Geoff noticed it.  I've heard of such things happening elsewhere; it seems the good people who are assigned the job of actually running off the copies aren't model builders, and honestly don't realize what a heinous sin they're commiting when they change the scale of scale drawing - even slightly.

I used to have a copy of the set that I bought many years ago from Model Shipways (when it was a little tiny firm operating out of a little storefront in Bogota, New Jersey).  Those were old-fashioned blueprints - blue ink on white paper and a faint smell of ammonia.  I imagine all of them were to the same scale (though I don't know that I actually ever checked).  The blueprint process normally produces prints at full-size.  (I wonder if anybody bothers with genuine blueprints any more.)

I studied those old blueprints so much, and exposed them to light so often, that they eventually became illegible.  A couple of years ago I ordered a replacement set from the ship's gift shop.  They're printed in black ink on a stiffer, sort of cheap-looking white paper.  I'm not going to complain about the quality of the paper in view of the price, but if somebody's changed the scale of one sheet so it doesn't match the others....

Suggestion one:  take the offending sheet to a local printing firm that has a photocopy machine that can do enlargements and reductions, and have a print made to the right scale.  Some such places have self-service machines.  (One used to have to worry that proportional distortions would creep in, but I think the copier manufacturers have solved that problem.)  If the guy running the machine raises a stink about the copyright notice, white it out and take the sheet someplace else.  (I guarantee Mr. Campbell, who was a model enthusiast himself, wouldn't mind.  And he'd be furious at the person who changed the scale.)

Suggestion two:  buy a pocket-sized electronic calculator that works in feet, inches, and fractions.  You'll find it's one of the most useful tools on your workbench (and it will save you the trouble of having a web-connected computer in your workshop).  The one I use is a Radio Shack "Decimal/Fractional Yard-Foot-Inch Calculator" that I bought for about $35 more than twenty years ago; it still works perfectly.  But there are lots of others on the market.  You can pick up one at Lowe's, Sears, or Home Depot that will, in addition to all those functions, convert from English to metric, make stair riser calculations, solve rafter slope problems, work out materials estimates, and do all sorts of other things that are involved in the engineering and construction trades - for less money than I paid for my old Radio Shack one.  And some time back I found a bright yellow calculator at Wal-Mart that does all the basic dimensional calculations (down to 1/64"), and makes English-metric conversions.  Price:  $7.95. 

I have no idea why Mr. Campbell picked 1/128 (3/32"=1') for those drawings.  (It does happen to be a scale that I like - or used to like.  It's the one I used for my model of the frigate Hancock.  That was a long time ago, though; I'm not at all sure my 59-year-old fingers and eyeballs are up to that sort of thing now.)  If you can get access to a self-service copier, or if the guy running the non-self-service one isn't too uptight about copyright law, you can quite easily - and not-very-expensively - get the three sheets enlarged to 1/96.  And I'd recommend doing that.  There's just no substitute for having easy access to a set of plans on the same scale as the model. 

That's one of the big advantages we enjoy in living in this age of cheap, electronic copies.  The time was when just about every book on model building included a terrifying set of instructions on enlarging plans by drawing a grid over them and making the enlarged copy by hand on an appropriately scaled-up grid.  Good gawd....

Now this takes some pretty deft mental arithmetic on the part of the ship builders.

There are scale calculators available for online ( http://www.stanstrains.com/SoftwareHandyConverter.htm )

and work bench use (http://www.albion.edu/mathcs/MBollman/CI/modelcalc.htm ) . Very very handy.

jtilley

All these details are shown in the Campbell plans.  I wouldn't recommend trying to work on this level of detail without them.

John,

I have been pouring over the Campbell plans for many hours the past couple of days. The first thing that struck me though was the scale, 3/32” to 1 inch. I dug out my old, antique, architectural scales from when I was at college in the UK. None matched this scale. I have been trying to concentrate on the drawings but I can’t get this question out of my head – ‘Why did they come up with that scale?’

OK, 1/32 on that scale equals 4 inches or 1/3 foot (who works in thirds?). 1 inch equals 10’8” and so on.

Now this takes some pretty deft mental arithmetic on the part of the ship builders.

A while ago I made a very simple spreadsheet to convert from imperial measurements in millimeters on the scale of 1/96 i.e. a 10” deadeye on the ship would need a 2.5mm for the model.

I was contemplating and extension to this so I could take measurements from the plans and convert those to mm at the 1/96 scale.

Then I noticed something odd. The rigging sheet and sail plans are to scale, however, in the infinite wisdom of marketing people (something I never did understand) they have taken the original drawing of the ‘General Layout’, digitized it and reduced by about 10% so the scale is now meaningless.

A little bit of thought later I came to the conclusion I just needed a scale to apply to measurements on the plans to measurements on the model.

The number I came up with – 1.375

Now I’m not sure why I did all this in the first place!

Little things are sent to try us.  

Geoff

Well, finally made a decision! Having studied all the evidence and listened to the advice on the Forum, tonight  I found the photo below.

All those molded rings on the yards and spars have to go and be replaced with tiny eyebolts in the correct place.

At least the opening question on this thread can be closed. Just got to keep working on all the others!

Several interesting questions have come up in this thread recently.  For the sake of time and space, I'll take the liberty of responding (albeit not with any definitive answers) to several of them in one post.

I think we can rule out the possibility of the Cutty Sark's shrouds being combined with burton pendants.  The burton pendant had passed out of use - especially in the merchant service - long before this particular ship was built.

There's plenty of evidence to show that passing the foremost shroud all the way around the lower masthead, and down to the foremost deadeye on the other side, was pretty common practice.  But that doesn't mean that's how the Cutty Sark was rigged.  (In any case, the difference between that method and the various others we've been talking about would be just about indetectable on a finished model.)

The whole purpose of the deadeye-and-lanyard arrangement is to make the shrouds adjustable.  They had to be, in order to take out the inevitable slack that would develop in them.  So no - the deadeyes and lanyards couldn't be "prefabricated."  The lower deadeyes of the lower shrouds would be permanently fixed to the channels.  The upper deadeye of each pair would be seized in the bight of the shroud.  (The old textbooks, such as David Steel's Elements of Rigging and Seamanship, go into some detail about how to figure out - approximately - where to seize the deadeye.)  Then the shroud would be gotten over the masthead and the lanyard would be rove and hove taut.

It would be perfectly feasible to slack off that "stiffener" that my acquaintance the Mystic Seaport rigger talked about, simply by easing the deadeye lanyard.  As a matter of fact I think I've seen at least one contemporary sail plan in which the foremost "shroud" was set up with blocks rather than deadeyes.  But at least one other discussion in this Forum sent me looking for that drawing and I couldn't find it.  It may be a product of my senile imagination.

Another question that came up in the Forum some time ago:  would the deadeyes of a real ship actually be in a nice straight line, as the drawings invariably show them?  Or would they get out of line as the shrouds were adjusted?  The answer seems to be - yes, they were somehow kept in line with each other.  From the late eighteenth century onward they had some help, in the form of the "sheer pole" - a wood or iron pole that was lashed to the shrouds just above the upper deadeyes.  Just how the whole assembly was kept lined up neatly I'm honestly not sure, but the evidence from contemporary paintings and, later, photographs is pretty decisive.  I can't recall ever having bumped into a photo of a sailing ship (even one coming into port after a long voyage) whose deadeyes weren't lined up.

I once happened to stumble upon the schooner Bluenose II when her crew was "setting up" her lower rigging.  They hauled the deadeye lanyards taut, thereby tightening the shrouds.  Then, one shroud at a time, they took off the seizings above the deadeyes, slacked off the lanyard, pulled the shroud around the deadeye a bit, and rerigged the seizing so the deadeye sat six inches or so higher than its neighbors.  Then they rerigged the lanyard, hauled it taut so the deadeye came down to exactly the right height, tied off the lanyard, and moved on to the next shroud.  Maybe that's how it was typically done.

All that makes an impressive argument for the replacement of old-fashioned rope standing rigging with wire (which scarcely stretches at all after it's had a little time to settle into its job).  Those twenty-eight guys on board the Cutty Sark probably didn't spend much of their time setting up the shrouds.  Gawd knows they had enough other stuff to keep them busy.

jtilley:

There are really three basic possibilities - all of which I've seen referred to in reputable sources.

1.  The odd-numbered shroud on each side is a single, separate piece of line, with an eyesplice that slips over the masthead.

2.  The odd-numbered shroud on each side is a separate piece of line, spliced or seized to its opposite number on the other side (as in Mondfeld's nos. 4 and 5).

3.  The odd-numbered pair is formed from a single line, running up to the masthead, wrapped around it, and taken down the other side.

Isn´t there a fourth possiblity??

In E.W. Petrejus´s beautiful book "the model of brigg irene" he shows how shrouds could be used in case of five shrouds ... the first line could be combined with the burton pendants. The end, which usually would go down from the mast and be the ´corresponding partner of the first (single) shroud would not go down completly - and would have an eye which could be used as a crane.

Here is a sample in which a sketch is shown:

http://www.modellboard.net/index.php?topic=16996.75

Look at answer/post  #80 - there is a sketch - and look at the beautiful model of Jaerschen. Great thing!

Petrejus says, that this technique was possible in war ships - but as well in commercial ships - if the number of shrouds was 3, 5, 7, 9 ... He also mentions version two and three of Prof. Tilley´s proposals as possible variants.

Wether this special technique has been used at the Cutty Sark ... I have no idea.. What do you think?

Concerning the question in your first post: there is a sketch in Petrejus´s book - page 184, pic. 424 in my german version of the book. The sketch is copied from "Middendorf". It clearly shows that there are two or three steel eyes, but not - as it might be necessary for the injection moulding technique - in horizontal direction - but downwards, versus the deck. Their purpose is not described. But I think you can see their use in the photo you posted in your fourth post. There is something attached from below the spar - into eyes which are welded to the steel bands .. This must be it!

bondoman

Was the Victory ever a prison hulk?

I think not. I belive there was talk of her being converted into a hospital ship around 1800 but, fortunately, it never happened.

She became flagship of the Comander of the Royal Navy and remains so today.

I have only visited her once in my life and I have only one word to discribe everything about her - Awesome!

If you ever get the chance - GO.

Geoff