shrouds and lanyards

Oh wow,

I am not worthy.

Pete I am sure you wrote the bove with the best of intentions, but I only understood about 5%. words such as to, a, is, and a few 3 letter words.

Why couldn't they have just called everything something like this, that, these, those. Than all they have to say is pull the big rope from that big piece of wood so the 3rd cloth will open up. Don't touch the tacky black rope, jus the other colored one. I will tell you when to stop. No, on the other side. That thingy goes over that thinging with a few of those rope thingys to keep it there. etc......

Here is my list of books I am having sent from Amazon. First shipped to my dad for free shipping and then to here. Tey want about $3.00 for each book plus the shipping fee. I don't understand why it costs money to remove a book from a shelve for international orders but not local? Maybe they use white satin gloves for the handling. Perhaps with these books, I will understand what Pete said, or more than likely having to order more books to figure out the first books. I did see an illustrated encyclopedia for sailing ships. Any good?

List:

Modeling Books:

Ships of Christopher Columbus (Anatomy of a ship)

Basics of Ship Modeling By Ashey

The Way of a Ship: By Villiers

Sailing Ship Rigs and Rigging: By Underhill

Ship Modeling Simplified: By Mastini

The Ship Model Builders Assistant: By Davis

I hope these come in handy

Robert

sumpter250 wrote:

Robert, It took me quite a while to remember what the * jeers were! Jeers are temporary tackles used to hoist the lower yards, they were usually set up under the tops, and held the yards until the lifts could be rigged, and the cranes reassembled. Halyards (haliards) are used to raise sail. Lifts, position yards horizontally. Braces rotate the yards around the mast, to position sails to port or starboard. The Spanker is usually a gaff headed, fore and aft sail rigged to the mizzen mast ( in a three mast ship).topping lifts adjust the outer end of the boom (vertically)  The Throat haliard lifts the forward end of the gaff, the Peak haliard lifts the aft end of the gaff.( the peak haliard can be used to adjust the fullness of a gaff headed sail, sometimes called a fisherman's reef) Boom sheets, or just "sheets" set the angle of fore and aft sails, and set the lower corners of square sails. Vangs, typically attach to the aft end of the gaff, and can be used to change the angle(port to starboard) of the gaff. Outhauls, are usually used on the foot of a fore and aft sail, to stretch the foot along the boom. An outhaul is also attached to the reef cringle (eye in the sail), to stretch the "new foot" of the sail when it is reefed down ( made smaller to handle heavier winds). Downhauls are used on jibs (and sometimes on "jib headed" sails) to aid taking down sail. The professor caught me with "Jib outhaulers", as most jibs are attached to stays with rings, or "hanks",and normally would not have outhauls. I have had the pleasure of going out on the bowsprit to cast off the gaskets on the heads'ls so they could be hoisted. Also been there to take in heads'ls and secure them. Pete

Oh much clearer

I'll get it all in maybe a year or so I'm sure,lol

Robert,

It took me quite a while to remember what the * jeers were! Jeers are temporary tackles used to hoist the lower yards, they were usually set up under the tops, and held the yards until the lifts could be rigged, and the cranes reassembled. Halyards (haliards) are used to raise sail. Lifts, position yards horizontally. Braces rotate the yards around the mast, to position sails to port or starboard.

The Spanker is usually a gaff headed, fore and aft sail rigged to the mizzen mast ( in a three mast ship).topping lifts adjust the outer end of the boom (vertically)  The Throat haliard lifts the forward end of the gaff, the Peak haliard lifts the aft end of the gaff.( the peak haliard can be used to adjust the fullness of a gaff headed sail, sometimes called a fisherman's reef) Boom sheets, or just "sheets" set the angle of fore and aft sails, and set the lower corners of square sails. Vangs, typically attach to the aft end of the gaff, and can be used to change the angle(port to starboard) of the gaff. Outhauls, are usually used on the foot of a fore and aft sail, to stretch the foot along the boom. An outhaul is also attached to the reef cringle (eye in the sail), to stretch the "new foot" of the sail when it is reefed down ( made smaller to handle heavier winds). Downhauls are used on jibs (and sometimes on "jib headed" sails) to aid taking down sail.

The professor caught me with "Jib outhaulers", as most jibs are attached to stays with rings, or "hanks",and normally would not have outhauls. I have had the pleasure of going out on the bowsprit to cast off the gaskets on the heads'ls so they could be hoisted. Also been there to take in heads'ls and secure them.

Pete

Yes, sorry for the partial thread hijack, but like you, I still don't get all the terminology.

This kit would have been a damn site harder were it not for these people, they are so friendly and willing to share their collective "brains" it makes it so much more enjoyable learning.

Prof. Tilley and Vapo,

While I started this thread I haven't actualy contributed to it. It has been fascinating just to read your Questions and Answers. Like you Vapo, the vocabulary is taking its time sinking in, but it is coming along. Now I just wish I could understand what your are talking about.

eg. this is off of the Victory thread you are all part of:

From Prof. Tilley

My normal suggestion is to figure on including all the standing rigging and those portions of the running rigging that hold the yards in position and make them move.  That means the halyards, jeers, lifts, and braces, plus the basic gear for the spanker (topping lifts, peak and throat halyards, boom sheets, and vangs) and perhaps the basic gear for the jibs and staysails (halyards, downhaulers, and jib outhaulers).

When I can confidently answer what all of those items are or what it means I will feel sooooooo much better.

With that being said, don't stop. This is great.

Robert

I'm not aware of any contemporary treatise that explains in any detail just what the precise logic behind any rigging details was.  Many practices evolved over the centuries, without a great deal of logic - other than the fact that experience had proven that they worked.

The basic principle, though, is that running rigging runs and standing rigging stands.  A block is a device designed to make it easy for a line to be hauled on - by a minimal number of people.  Running rigging lines move through the blocks constantly, every time the ship undertakes any sort of maneuver.  Just how often the deadeyes on the shrouds and backstays had to be adjusted I don't know; it probably varied considerably according to the size of the rope, the age of the rope, and the weather.  But the shrouds were intended to be as rigid as possible.

I'm aware of one partial exception.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, it was customary in some ships to slack off the foremost shroud on the lee side in order to give the lower yard a little more room to swing.  I've seen some old plans in which the foremost shrouds on the fore and main masts were set up with heavy blocks, apparently to make that process easier.  (If memory serves, one contemporary sailplan of the Constitution shows that arrangement.  I may be wrong about that, though.)  That's also why, in some ships, most of the ratlines stopped short of the foremost shroud.  The one of the lee side would spend quite a bit of its time hanging slack; the ratlines would have stopped it from doing that. 

On board an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century warship, with hundreds of men to keep occupied, overhauling the standing rigging seems to have been a near-daily exercise.  My guess is that such a vessel's deadeyes would have been neatly aligned virtually all the time.  I don't have any real information to support the following, but my guess is that things were a bit less stringent in the merchant service.  H.M.S. Victory had nine yards permanently fastened to her masts and a crew of between 800 and 1000.  The Cutty Sark had fifteen yards and a crew of 28 - including the officers and such people as the cook, the carpenter, and the steward, who rarely if ever went aloft.  Maintaining the rigging of such a ship must have kept the able seamen mighty busy.  (Actually the Cutty Sark is a bad example.  Her lower rigging is made of wire, which doesn't stretch nearly as much as rope.)

The first rigging blocks were chunks (blocks) of wood with holes drilled through them.  I'm not exactly sure when the movable sheave made its appearance - but it probably was pretty early.  (The blocks found in the surviving Viking ships, as I recall, don't have sheaves.  The wreck of the Mary Rose, which sank in 1545, has yielded dozens of blocks with movable sheaves - along with deadeyes, a complete set of parrel trucks and rollers, and all sorts of other remarkably modern-looking fittings.) 

The purpose of a block is to multiply the force of the person/people heaving on the line.  The sheave in the block turns in order to minimize the counteracting factor of friction.  Under normal circumstances the lanyard that connects a pair of deadeyes doesn't move.  The deadeyes don't have movable sheaves; their purpose is to impose a maximum of friction.  You'll see the effect when you start rigging them.  You'll find that pulling on the end of the lanyard makes it run pretty freely through all those holes - until you thread it through the last one.  Then the whole assembly seems to lock up; to adjust the completed lanyard you have to pull on the individual parts of it. 

The development of the sailing ship took a long time, and its evolution produced some things that didn't make much sense.  (In the Cutty Sark, for instance, we have three lower topsails, which are nowhere near the top; they're next to the bottom.  And the lowest square sail on the mizzenmast isn't called the mizzen course or mizzen sail; it's called the crojack.  One could go on indefinitely.)  But all those developments, slow though they were, were rational.  The old boys knew what they were doing.

Thank you JT,

So it was a case of the shrouds were set to a length(intitialy) that would allow the captain to maintain the ship that "looked" good. But after several weeks at sea, it's conceivable that those deadeyes were a little more up and down? then just tarted up for the sail into home port kind of thing? makes sense I guess.

A few months ago, I would not have even known what those terms meant, lol

As a side note, why move away from block and tackle? it would have been far easier to retighten a block and lash it off, than to redo a deadeye and then re bind the lanyard?

Lol, look at the first few posts I made, I said every answer poses two questions that I did not know I wanted to know before still going strong.....

These are perfectly reasonable questions, without completely straightforward answers.

Our best evidence about such things takes the form of photographs, with paintings and drawings (by artists who knew what they were doing) a good second-best.  Preserved ships and modern full-sized replicas also are useful in establishing what actually works and what doesn't.

In theory, all the shrouds have to be in nearly-identical tension or they can't do their job.  That means that on the weather side of the ship they're extremely taut, and on the lee side (in a strong wind) they're slack.  In just about every photograph of a sailing ship I've ever seen, the upper deadeyes are lined up pretty precisely in a straight line parallel to the lower ones.  That's also how they've been arranged in every real ship and replica I've ever seen. 

Most of the preserved ships, and all of the photographs, in question date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During that period the process of lining up the deadeyes was made easier by a fitting called a "sheer pole" - a simple iron or wood rod that was seized to the shrouds just above the upper deadeyes.  The sheer pole made sure that all the deadeyes were in line - even if some of the shrouds were a little more taut than others. 

The sheer pole apparently made its appearance late in the seventeenth century.  For earlier periods, all we have to consult are paintings and drawings.  The vast majority of the ones I've seen show the deadeyes neatly lined up - sheer pole or no.  A couple of weeks ago my students and I took a field trip to Jamestown Settlement, and I took some pictures of the replicas of the early-seventeenth-century ships Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery.  Their deadeyes are lined up quite precisely - and they don't have sheer poles.  The guys who work on them tighten the shrouds every few days (more frequently when the ships are at sea).  I'm pretty sure the rope they use is some sort of non-stretchy modern synthetic (though it looks pretty convincing), but the appearance of those ships certainly matches what little contemporary graphic evidence we have.

I just looked through the contemporary pictures in a new book, The Tudor Navy, by Arthur Nelson.  In a lot of those old prints and paintings it's hard to see the details of the rigging, but in those where the deadeyes are visible they're lined up in parallel rows.

Remember that the seizings and lanyards aren't permanent, and can be adjusted fairly easily.  It was common practice to slack off the lanyard of the foremost shroud on the lee side of the ship, to give the lower yard a little more room to swing.  And I once watched a sailor on board the replica schooner Bluenose II while he overhauled the lower rigging.  He loosed the ends of the lanyards, then untied the seizings of each lower shroud, pulled the shroud a little further around the deadeye, replaced the seizings, and hove the lanyard taut.  When he was finished, the deadeyes were all arranged in a nice, straight row - slightly closer to the lower deadeyes than they'd been before he started.

With all that said, I do have my doubts about how neatly such things were actually done in practice.  I suspect that a ship at sea, far out of sight of land, that had just been through a storm, wasn't quite as ship-shape as the paintings and photos lead us to believe - with respect to the alignment of the deadeyes and plenty of other stuff.

I'd also emphasize again that we're talking here about practices that became common long after 1492.  Some good reconstructions of Columbus's ships don't have deadeyes; their shrouds are set up with block and tackle.  And the few contemporary pictures from the period suggest that ships' rigging in the late fifteenth century was in general treated a good bit more casually than it was later.

JT, forgive me questioning you please, but I have a question.

The lower row of deadeyes, will indeed be fixed, as they are tied down to whatever holds them, either rope or iron, there is then a lanyard thats purpose is to control the tension in the shroud right?

That said, there is no way the upper dead eyes will all be in line, as each one will require a certain position in order to maintain the correct shroud tension, unless the shrouds were all exactly correct in length and stretched at sea with the same amount.

Each shroud is different in length to it's neighbour, so would stretch at a greater or lessor rate(longer rope stretched more than a short one)

To have the dead eyes in the arrangment you discuss, would look good, but would have required an "ass" of a captain to enforce such uniformity, was it realy like that?

Again, sorry for the inquisitive mind, I'll stay and do detention but I have to know! lol

The way it's supposed to work (there are exceptions to every rule) is that the line of upper deadeyes is parallel to the line of lower deadeyes.  The vertical distance between upper and lower deadeyes (viewed from the side) is supposed to remain constant.  But the vertical distance isn't the only dimension that concerns the modeler.

In practical terms, it's difficult to achieve that situation with any sort of jig, because the angle between the mast and the shrouds isn't constant.  The foremost shroud in the gang is vertical, or nearly so.  The next one back is on a slight slope, and the next a more pronounced one.  In a big ship (e.g., H.M.S. Victory), the aftermost shroud on each mast forms quite a noticeable angle with the mast.  As a result, the actual, measured distance between the upper and lower deadeyes of that shroud is considerably greater than the distance between the upper and lower deadeyes of the first shroud.  To put it another way, the lanyard running between the aftermost pair of deadeyes is considerably longer than the lanyard running between the foremost pair.

In its notorious, 1/100-scale H.M.S. Victory kit, Heller tried to simplify the rigging job by molding the deadeyes on sprue frames with the appropriate distance between them.  The modeler was supposed to rig the lanyards between the deadeyes before removing the deadeyes from the frames.  It was a good idea that almost worked - but it didn't, because Heller forgot that not all deadeye pairs are the same distance apart.  Using that system would make the upper row of deadeyes slant downward toward the stern.

The other problem with jigs for this sort of thing is that they encourage the modeler to ignore the question of tension in the lines.  You could make a jig for each pair of deadeyes all right; it wouldn't really be difficult.  But unless you were extremely careful to set up all the shrouds with the same degree of tension, as soon as you removed the jig some of the deadeye pairs would droop and others would snap tight. 

My personal opinion is that, in situations like this, jigs are more trouble than they're worth.  Like I said earlier, I find the setting up of lower deadeyes one of the trickiest parts of rigging a ship model.  I don't think there's a way to make it really easy.  On the other hand, it's easy to fix a mistake if you make it:  cut the thread loose and start over.  And when the nice, straight, parallel rows of deadeyes are finished, they sure make the modeler feel like he/she has accomplished something.

The good news is that all the above applies primarily to ships of the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries.  There aren't a lot of contemporary pictures of ships from the era of Columbus, but the ones that do exist suggest that the sailors of that age were hardly obsessed with uniformity.  If there's a little variation in the spacing of the deadeyes on a model of the Santa Maria, it may well be authentic.  For that matter, as we discussed a little earlier in this thread, there's plenty of room for doubt as to whether such a ship would have deadeyes at all.

  Someone once suggested using a jig for building each pair of shrouds, before they were applied to the model. He didn't take into account that as each pair of shrouds was laid over the masthead, the next pair would have to be longer, because it lay on top of the eye of the preceding shroud.

   The upper deadeye of each shroud, pretty much has to be siezed in at "its own height", so even one jig can't really be used, unless the jig can be adjusted for each new deadeye. If it were easy, it wouldn't provide the challenge that makes it fun.

Pete

A light just went on in my head.  I think those lines running just above the deck of the Pamir are the cables running from the steering wheels on the midship deckhouse to the tiller head at the stern.  If I'm right, in real life they'd be either heavy steel wire or chain.

Regarding the shrouds of the Santa Maria, I need to start with a large caveat:  I've never done much research on 15th-century ships.  I have the impression that shrouds in those days were rigged pretty much like they were in later centuries, but I could be mistaken.  The following applies to 17th- through 19th-century rigging, but I think it's probably applicable to what you're doing.

Generally speaking, shrouds are set up in pairs.  Start with the first shroud on the starboard side.  Take a piece of the line you're going to use for the shroud and seize a deadeye into it.  Rig the lanyard between the upper and lower deadeyes and secure the end of the lanyard.  Make the distance between the upper and lower deadeyes about three times the diameter of the deadeye.  Run the shroud up around the masthead and back down again on the same side of the ship.  Seize the two parts of the shroud together temporarily, but leave the seizing line loose enough for the time being to let them slide up and down freely.  Seize the remaining upper deadeye into the loose end of the shroud, at a point that, when the lanyard is hauled taut, will make the upper deadeyes sit in line with each other. 

Then repeat the procedure to set up the first two shrouds on the port side of the ship.  Then do nos. 3 and 4 on the starboard side, etc.

If the number of shrouds on each side is odd, the first shroud goes up, all the way around the masthead, and down to become the first shroud on the other side of the ship.

I'm afraid there's no magic solution to the problem of aligning the deadeyes.  I personally find it one of the trickiest tasks in ship model rigging.  Some folks get good results by making a simple jig out of wire, to keep the deadeyes the proper distance apart.  Once you get some practice that probably won't be necessary.