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Post by fredhocker on Jun 24, 2019 8:52:47 GMT
Hi Peter,
The rule with the stitching on leather chafing gear is simple - it faces away from the area of greatest wear, since if were on the wearing face, the stitching would chafe through quickly. The mainstay chafing gear follows this rule pretty well, since I think that the leather sleeve in this area is specifically to protect the stay collar where it goes through the hole in the stem head or bowsprit knee (twille).
On a shroud, the main wear comes on the forward side of the forwardmost shroud, so the seam would face aft.
Shrouds and other lines are served in the rigging loft, before they are taken to the ship, but chafing gear is determined by where a line contacts another, and with a few exceptions is difficult to predict. It is more often rigged on the ship.
In many cases, the people who make up the rigging in the loft (the riggers) are not the people who rig the ship. The ship is usually rigged by its crew, sometimes with assistance from the rigging loft if alterations have to be made, etc. A ship could be completely downrigged and rerigged at sea, except for pulling out the lower masts, so the skills needed for setting up the rigging were present in the crew. Serving on shrouds, etc. was part of the manufacturing process, while adding chafing gear was part of the rigging process. Inventories of boatswain's stores (the boatswain/bosun was responsible for the maintenance of rigging) issued to ships normally include a number of hides for making semi-permanent chafing gear.
Fred
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Post by fredhocker on Jun 24, 2019 8:42:24 GMT
Hi John, We are keeping a list of people who have emailed us to ask about the book, so that we can let them know when it is out.We will also post here, and on a number of other modelling fora.
All the text of part 1 is in to the publisher, and we are not working on formatting illustrations. Fred
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Post by fredhocker on Jun 12, 2019 6:50:41 GMT
That will look cool! From what we can see, there was a line of ringbolts in the deck, one in each deck beam alongside the hatches. Train tackles were probably taken to a ringbolt on the far side of the deck from the gun.
Fred
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Post by fredhocker on Jun 12, 2019 6:49:06 GMT
Hi Kirill,
Vasa had no sheathing or extra protection on the bottom. The single layer of planking (about 10 cm thick) was covered with a layer of tar, and may have had some kind of tallow-based anti-fouling coating, but that was it. Since there are no shipworms in the Baltic, there was no need for a sacrificial layer like we see in Batavia and Warwick. The Swedish navy did employ secondary planking or sheathing as a repair technique, or for making an old, leaking hull watertight. We found this on the remains of Scepter, a ship built in 1614 and kept in service into the 1630s, then buried as shore cribbing in 1639-1640. It had been badly strained in a grounding in the 1620s, and the repair involved a second layer of oak planking, followed by pine sheathing. If Vasa had stayed in service for 30 years, it might had been sheathed at some point.
Cheers, Fred
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Post by fredhocker on Jun 10, 2019 6:34:59 GMT
The guns were rigged with a pair of breeching tackles (what you mean by outhauls). These were not permanently attached, but could be removed and reversed to use as train tackles (inhauls). There were two hooks on the side of the carriage, one facing in each direction, and the other end of the tackle was attached to a ringbolt in the side of the ship with a quick-release toggle. When a tackle was needed to haul the gun inboard, one of the breeching tackles was detached and reversed on the carriage, the toggle taken to a ringbolt in the deck behind the gun. Train tackles were not normally rigged in action, as they were a massive tripping hazard in a confined space and not usually needed. If you show one rigged (which is a cool idea), make sure to leave one of the breeching tackles off.
Fred
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Post by fredhocker on Jun 3, 2019 7:28:22 GMT
Hi Peter,
Tough to say how much of this is atual and how much is appearance. The background to these sculptures is a surface which is curved in all three dimensions, so there is no straight reference line against which to measure. The Vasa drawing you show is an older one, and is not a measured drawing but an artistic interpretation, so I would not rely on it. Looking at our digital documentation of the hull is not really conclusive either, since the sculptures themeselves are irregular in outline, but it looks to me like the sculptures below the lower windows are very close to vertical, but the outermost ones might lean outward very slightly. The upper row might lean inward slightly. Both rows are warriors of Gideon, dressed in Roman armor and carrying trumpets (shofar) and torches.
If there is any lean, it is purely aesthetic, to harmonize with the overall shape of the transom and to accommodate the curved background. I doubt it has any more meaning than this.
Fred
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Post by fredhocker on Jun 3, 2019 6:40:10 GMT
Hi Peter,
Leather chafing gear cannot be continuous, since cowhides are limited in size, and is made up of segments. I would be curious to know if there had been chafing gear in the hole in the stem head - I would expect so.
None of the rope we have, which includes fragments of both standing and running rigging, has very much tar on it. There is good evidence that most of it was tarred "in the yarn" (individual yarns were tarred before being laid into rope), but no evidence for heavy external applications of tar. Tar survives very well on other parts of the ship, so it does not appear to be a preservation issue. Vasa was new, so one might expect relatively little surface tar. As the ship aged, it would have been necessary to tar the standing rigging, on could expect.
Fred
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Post by fredhocker on May 23, 2019 6:16:07 GMT
It was more fun than people should be allowed to have!
Fred
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Post by fredhocker on May 3, 2019 7:42:48 GMT
Afraid I do not read Russian, but the lines marked in red on the accompanying drawing indicate the lower surface of the deck where it meets the side of the ship. Is this what you are asking about?
Fred
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Post by fredhocker on May 2, 2019 12:18:53 GMT
deAgostini is more accurate, since it is based on more recent information. Because of the partworks format, it is more expensive, but the cost is spread over two years +. I think that the sculptures in the deAg kit are excellent, and since I can remake anything that is wood but I am not a great micro-carver, that would make the choice for me. I think that the Sergal kit uses good quality materials, and the fittings are fine. Some of its accuracy issues are fixable. I have not built it, so cannot comment on how much fun it is or how much of a struggle.
Fred
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Post by fredhocker on May 2, 2019 12:13:45 GMT
Is there some way to filter out the vape ads and other crap which people are posting into this forum?
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Post by fredhocker on May 2, 2019 12:12:30 GMT
This kind of leather chafing gear is seen in a number of places on ships, even today. It was commonly rigged on anchor cables at the hawsehole, for example. An alternative treatment for the forwardmost shroud could be to serve it fully. We have a few pieces of such leather chafing gear among the Vasa finds, although most are small and were found loose.
Fred
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Post by fredhocker on Apr 30, 2019 6:54:37 GMT
The fall of the cat tackle is belayed on a big cleat on top of the beam which crosses over the cathead. The Corel instructions show an incorrect arrangement. The cat blcok is single-sheave block with an iron hook on it. The fall deadeneds in a hole in the cathead behind the sheave slot, then down to the cat block, then up and over one of the sheaves in the end of the cathead, then back to the cleat. The other hole and sheave are for the cat stopper, a line to tie the head of the anchor up to the cathead. Fromt he hole down through the anchor ring, up and over the other ehsave in the cathead, and belayed on the same big cleat as the cat tackle.
Fred
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Post by fredhocker on Mar 28, 2019 10:27:36 GMT
Hi Peter,
Unfortunately, the shrouds did not survive, and there is no clear wear evidence at the masthead or in the top to suggest in what order the shrouds were set up. I would not worry about the order too much. A lot of the "rules" that governed rigging by the later 18th and 19th centuries, and which most researcher use to extrapolate backwards in time, were still being formulated in the 17th century. In the surviving material from Vasa, we see some things that follow the later rules (tablings and roping on the sails for example) and other things that do not (cringles and seizings on the sails, for example). It makes no functional difference at all whether the first pair of shrouds over the masthead are port or starboard, so I can imagine that there is some real-world variation. Important to keep in mind here that the people writing the rules are not the people doing the actual work.
By the way, it is just a top, not a "fighting top." That is a later term.
Fred
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Post by fredhocker on Feb 26, 2019 14:19:13 GMT
Very impressive!
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