New build: Airfix Wasa *Finished 5-20*

well so far i've only been removing as I go. so it's only been section by section and side to side. the idea is to do a before and after. the Airfix instructions vs google. basically I've found some pics of what other modelers have done with wood kits and used that as a reference. Thanks for the help and the heads up you always seem to give direction right when it's needed.

I didn't want to say this earlier, but since you've removed the rigging you'd already installed....I think most sailing ship modelers who've been at it for a while would agree that the easiest and most practical way to rig a ship model is to follow (with certain deviations) the sequence that the riggers of the real things followed.  That means the first lines to go into place are the shrouds.  Then come the stays and other standing rigging, followed by the running rigging.

The old timers also were in the habit of rigging the masts section-by-section - that is, installing and rigging all three lower masts, then adding and rigging the topmasts, then the topgallant masts.  That sequence minimizes the tendency of spars and lines to interfere with each other.  It also helps ensure that the rigging of the lower masts and yards doesn't intefere with that of the upper spars.  The rigging of the real ship was designed in such a way that the topmasts, for instance, could be taken out of the ship without disturbing the rigging that held up the lower masts. 

Hope that helps a little.  Good luck.

so I decide last night that the rigging that i did was boring and not very good. so i decided to take most of it off and restart from the beginning. I don't know why the thought never crossed my mind that the instructions were basic and didn't have very much detail. So after some google searches I think I have pretty good idea of what needs to be done.

I managed to put up some of the rigging last night. I've got to say that the second time around is always easier and much faster. After everything was said and done, the riggings had a little bit of sag on them so to tighten them all up again I added string on the bow-spirit to give everything proper tension. next up ratlines.....

i'm going to try to get some better pics with some butchers paper that I have for a back drop. hopefully that will help with the detail.

 

If you haven't seen this, here's a link to the National Geographic site abt the ship, which is the basis of the article in "Men, Ships and the Sea".

http://www.abc.se/~pa/publ/vasa.htm#I.%20Brief%20history%20of%20the%20birth%20and%20disappearance%20of

For what it's worth, here's a link to a discussion about sails that we had here in the Forum some time ago:  /forums/350912/ShowPost.aspx

The whole subject is guaranteed to get a discussion going among ship modelers - and almost all of them have strong opinions one way or another about it.  As can be seen in that thread, my own personal tastes run against "set" sails under most circumstances.  But here's a link to the work of a gentleman who, over an extremely long and productive career, has learned how to make "set" sails as effectively as anybody I've encountered:  http://www.donaldmcnarryshipmodels.com/menu.html

I always hesitate a little before pointing people in the direction of Mr. McNarry.  His work is inspirational, but (to me at least) also intimidating.  Be sure to note the scales and sizes of the models in the pictures.  To this gentleman, that Airfix Wasa is big.

Good luck.

kapudan_emir_effendi wrote:

enemeink wrote: I've read an article on how you can use the vac-formed sails as a mold for paper sails so i think i'm going to try that first. greetings ! I'm following your Vasa build up with keenest interest. You are quite inspiring ! thank you and bless your skill May I ask if you can provide us with that article too ? sails for plastic kits is an issue that annoys most serious modelers and any innovation towards accuracy is more than welcome. cheers

I read this at modelingmadness.com. The author was building the lindberg "la flore" kit and mentioned how he made the sails out of paper and I thought that I would also try this since it turned out so well for him. Here is the link it is under colors and markings and the 4th paragraph down from there. enjoy.

http://www.modelingmadness.com/reviews/misc/ships/ewaldpi.htm

 

enemeink wrote:

I've read an article on how you can use the vac-formed sails as a mold for paper sails so i think i'm going to try that first.

greetings ! I'm following your Vasa build up with keenest interest. You are quite inspiring ! thank you and bless your skill May I ask if you can provide us with that article too ? sails for plastic kits is an issue that annoys most serious modelers and any innovation towards accuracy is more than welcome.

cheers

Thanks!

Yes I intend to show her with her sails raised, but i don't think that i'm going to use the vac-formed ones this time. I've read an article on how you can use the vac-formed sails as a mold for paper sails so i think i'm going to try that first. And there are only one position for the sails. there's only a block mating surface so the sails and yards are set square and can't be set at an angle, unless i want to get real creative.

Looks great. The paint job is a spectacular success.

I'll take the liberty of makinig one small suggestion - which I wouldn't make if it wasn't easy deal with at this point in the process.  The topsail and topgallant yards appear to be in their raised positions.  They'd only be there when the sails were set.  So if you're going to use the vac-formed sails from the kit, the yards are in the right places.  But if you're going to have furled sails, or omit them altogether, the topsail and topgallant yards should be lowered to within a couple of feet above the caps on the masts below them.

As I remember, some Airfix kits provid alternative mounting holes for the yards in their raised and lowered positions.  I don't remember whether this kit does or not.

This is going to be a beautiful model.

so here is the latest update on the Wasa. the assembly is completed and all I have left is the rigging, which I started for a minute but didn't get very far. in the inturctions it doesn't say how to secure the long boat to the deck. It just shows it sitting there. so I clipped 2 link out of some cheap chain that I had and used that to secure the line for the boat.

 

ok so far the most time consuming part of this build is painting the hull. There are so many details that it Just boggles the mind. since there are no detailed drawings at the moment of how the bow of the ship is supposed to look I made assumptions as to how some of the figures would look. Not historically accurate I don't think, but close enough I guess. I'm going to start placing the guns this week. enjoy!

Remarkably enough, the Swedes did make a serious attempt to raise her within a few months after she sank.  That probably did some damage.  When it didn't work, various people did succeed in hauling up some of the guns - expensive objects that could be raised with the available technology and cleaned up for use on other ships.  Anytime a warship sank in the seventeenth or eighteenth century somebody tried to bring up the guns - usually without worrying much about what damage he did to the rest of the ship in the process.

It's really surprising that, given the efforts of the early salvors and the amount of traffic in Stockholm Harbor, the ship survived in such good shape for as long as she did.

In the Wasa report it also make note of some of warping of the decks being caused by blast rubble being dumped on the site when there was a new ship yard being built. with that said. it's amazing that they were able to raise most of it in one piece.

It's probably also worth noting that ships and their anchors, fishing nets and all sorts of other debris was likely to cause damage over the centuries.  It is just amazing to me how well-preserved the whole thing is after such a long time on the bottom!  As for the fo'c'sle issue, I refer to an elevated deck, either fully enclosed, or open towards the back (as in its original usage 'fore-CASTLE').  Tall enclosed fo'c'sles were very popular prior to the Spanish Armada, and even most of the larger English ships of the Elizabethans had very prominent fo'c'sles too (check out the contemporary paintings of the Dutchman artist, Vroom).  From my understanding, it was actually the Dutch who first popularized the 'race-built' or essentially flush-decked ships during their war of independence against Spain, mostly because this improved the sailing characteristics of the ship (less windage).  This is important to note, because it marks a definite transition in strategy from dependence on boarding operations (in which case a tall fo'c'sle is of very positive benefit), to a much greater dependence on cannon and gunfire to achieve victory.  Oddly, or perhaps not, when tactics changed to 'line ahead' and other battle formations (i.e. instead of an individual ship melee), the fo'c'sle appears to have made a definite comeback among all ship-builders, including the Dutch.

The grappling irons were what was used to try to raise the ship after she sank correct? i can see how dropping those repeatedly on the wreck to try to get it grab could cause so much damage.

That word "forecastle" is extremely generic, and has been used to mean different things during different periods - and, I suppose, in different places.  A nineteenth-century British or American merchant seaman might, for instance, call the place where his quarters were located the forecastle - even if it consisted of a deckhouse aft of the foremast.  I imagine the crew of the Wasa used the term (or rather its Swedish equivalent) to refer in general to the forward, upper portion of the ship.

So far as I'm aware, there's no doubt that the Wasa's current deck configuration is the one she had originally.  In modern English-language parlance she'd be labeled "flush decked" from the bow to the break of the quarterdeck.  The Airfix kit certainly seems to match the ship.

I believe there has been some discussion about the original configuration of the bow - specifically the rather odd (to non-Scandinavian eyes) "bulge" above the beakhead, where the beakhead bulkhead would be in an English ship.  As I understand it, that part of the ship was damaged when she was brought up (various people started bashing the wreck with grappling irons shortly after the sinking), and there's been some argument about how it looked originally. 

About the fo'c'sle; from everything I've read and seen of the ship it never had one.  The articles I've read on the ship say she was built during a time of transition in ship warfare between mainly boarding to mainly shooting the other ship to bits.  The Wasa was built with characteristics of both types of warfare.  One of the main purposes of the "fore castle" was to provide a raised platform to fire small arms down onto the other ship.  Maybe this was left off in compromise since she still had the raised aft and poop deck for small arms fire.

My little home computer took intolerably long to download all those pictures but on the basis of the hundred or so that I looked at in five minutes this seems to be one of the most spectacular websites I've ever seen.  Just about everything about this project - from the ship herself to the building to the conservation methods to the models in the museum to those spectacular drawings - is first-class.

The website says the new books series is to have five volumes; I thought it was four, but the more the merrier.  I've got Vol. I; my only criticism of it is that I have to wait for the other three (or four) before I can see all the pictures and read all the text.  Many thanks indeed, enemeink, for the link.  When I have the necessary time to let the computer download the whole thing I'll make a printout.

I also found this link for the "Wasa Report" there's about 450+ pictures of the ship.

http://www.wasadream.com/Index/indexenglish.html

 

Very nice paintwork you did there ! Keep the photo's coming.

cheers,

Julian

here's a better shot of the back.

I manged to get almost all of seams taken care of over the weekend and was able to get the final coat put on the hull. The pic of the transom isn't that clear I was messing with the settings on my Camera. I'll post a better one tomorrow. Enjoy!

Very intricate paint detail.  It looks great , must have been a painstaking effort. If the rest of the build looks that good , you will have a display case model . Thanks for showing and for the updates.

rg

So last night I started to lay down some of the read base coat on the rear of the ship. While that was drying I decided to dry fit the hull and deck. Much to my surprise there was some extreme warping between the 3 pieces. So I decided to halt the painting and put the hull together becuase there was going to be plenty of puttying and sanding to do. I was originally just going to paint the hull peices then put it all together, bad idea. Rookie mistakes I guess. On the  rear of the ship there is gaps every where. I'm hoping to smooth those out and fill this weekend. I also did some pre-shading in and around the gun ports. And the intructions for these are pretty awful.

I just copy and paste the one listed as IMG code. just click on it and it will automatically copy the link to your pc. so all you have to do after that is paste where you want it to go and the picture will show up after you click "post" when you are done typing you message.

  

You need to sign up with an online photo sharing site. We all like photobucket because its free. Once you have an account there, and upload your photos from your hard drive, there's a drop down under each of your photos. You pick the http// one which is usually  the second one down, click on that link, cut and then, back in FSM, compose window, set up a (img]Y(/img] string and paste in the link instead of  the Y. And substitute [ for (; I had to use ( to get it to post.

 

To tell you the truth, i still haven't figured out how to put photos on this forum!  Cut and paste doesn't work, and I don't see an appropriate button in the toolbar either.... too old and stupid i guess!  Any clues?

The Wasa was towed from the temporary dry dock, were she sat for 27 years, into the flooded dry dock at the new building in December 1988. It was first opened to the public during the summer of 1989, where visitors were allowed onto the construction site. The Wasa musem officially opened in 1990.

yeah the assembly of this seems pretty straight forward with not alot of assembly. The painting I figured would take some time to do and so far has..... granted i'm only a week into the build and have only put down base colors and shading. but this is giving me a perfect chance to dust off my airbrushig skills. Do you still have your Wasa? If so put a picture up it would be cool to see. The only ones I've ever seen are the wooden models.

I'll tell you one thing, that red color scheme is going to be a LOT more difficult to paint, as each of the small decorative figures has their own colorful scheme!  I built this model a number of years ago, and not knowing any better at the time, went with the blue, and just painted all of the figurines in gold (similar to the Royal Sovereign).  Even that was pretty time consuming!  One of the design features of Vasa that has always interested me is the fact that there is no fo'c'sle, which in England somewhat earlier than this was referred to as 'race-built.'  While this was a pretty well-known feature of small galleons and pinnaces of the 16th century, particularly among the English, does anyone know if this feature on Vasa is in fact accurate, or has the fo'c'sle been lost to time?  I don't recall this on any significant warship until the Dutch started producing their very large 80 gun ships at the end of the 17th century (Goueden Liuew, etc)......