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Post by fredhocker on Mar 4, 2014 7:28:43 GMT
Mary Rose appears to be built according to the whole-moulding method, although the hull has not yet been recorded in sufficient detail to know much more. Kronan was desigend by Francis Sheldon and so probably based on drawings. Examination of the wreck (I worked on the excavation for two seasons) suggests fairly typically English construction.
Trying to derive the design and construction method from the remains is one of the big challanges in this field, and there are a wide range of clues to look for. In Dutch ships, the plugged nail holes from the temporary fastenings are the best clue to the construction method (we see these all over Vasa), but one can also look for fastenings between the planks (tips of scarfs nailed to adjacent planks) as an indication that the planks were used as a major element in defining the form.
Ships built from plans more often have some or all of the frames built up into solid units, with floor timbers and futtocks fastened together into made frames. We see this in Iberian ships from the 13th century onward, for example. It is also common to see markings on the frame elements that show that they are being cut and fitted to patterns.
Earliest known hull design drawings are from the 1430s, although they are showing a design method that is at least a century older.
I will post a couple of pictures of the model.
Fred
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Post by fredhocker on Mar 3, 2014 9:00:08 GMT
Ha! This was the subject of my dissertation, which you can read in my book The Philosophy of Shipbuilding (Texas A&M Univeristy Press 2004).In the early 17th century, there were two main construction methods being used for large carvel ships in northern Europe. In England and France, the whole-moulding methods developed in the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages had been rapidly adopted in the 15th century. In this method, which survives today, the basic forms of the ship are drawn out on paper or full size to develop the shapes of the frames. These are cut out and set up on the keel to define the shape of the hull and then covered with planking. There are many different geometric methods available for determining transverse and longitundinal curves, and people started writing treatises about what the best curves were already in the 14th century. The earliest surviving northern European work on ship design, Mathew Baker's manuscript from the 1580s, follows this basic methodology. Design in this way allowed the establishing of benchmarks and rational improvement based on careful control of hull shape and eventually led to naval architecture as we know it today, but it required a fairly sophisticated grasp of geometry.
In the northern Netherlands, there were no drawings in use. Instead, the hull was laid up in a different order. Once the keel and posts had been set up, the bottom planks were assembled out to the turn of the bilge, held together by clamps,shores and blocks of wood nailed across the seams. A mould or two might be used to control the deadrise, but it might be established by eye or by measurement from a centerline. Once the bottom was planked, the floor timbers were cut to fit and fastened in place. As they were added, the temporary blocks were pulled and the nail holes filled with little whittled pegs. The floor timbers stiffened the bottom and allowed it to serve as a base on which the rest of the ship was built. Futtocks to define the shape of the sides were set up between the floor timbers and faired with battens and eventually the wales.The space between the outermost bottom plank and the lower wale could then be planked. This method, although it limited the range of hull shapes which could be built somewhat, was very edfficient in its use of materials and manpower, since frames did not have to be carefully squared so that they could be matched to drawn curves and the bottom planks could use the full extent of the tree's width. Dutch merchants had also mastered the wood market and could provide materials at the best prices, so Dutch ships cost less per ton of capacity to build and were thus popular with owners.
Both methods produced ships which had similar structural properties, since they used planks and frames in similar ways, but the design and construction methods were quite different. By about the middle of the century, people building in the Mediteranean/English/French tradition had caught up to the Dutch somewhat in efficiency and the limitations on hull form had moved the market away from Dutch construction. The Dutch method also did not lend itself to the growing bureaucraticization that affected naval construction as the century developed - it generated no drawings to allow the customer to evaluate the design in advance, and no paper trail to follow if things went wrong. Dutch shipwrights began using drawings sometime in mid-century and largely abandoned the bottom-based method for large ships.
Dutch shipwrights had been working for the Swedish navy since sometime in the later 16th century, and under Karl IX large numbers of them were recruited (his rival Christian IV in Denmark was doing the same thing). Karl had begun building ships even before he was king, establishing a navy for the revolt he led against King Sigismund while he was Duke of Södermanland in the 1590s, and this became the basis of the royal navy after he deposed Sigismund in 1599. Henrik Hybertsson, who designed Vasa, moved to Sweden in 1602 or so to work for Karl. Dutch master shipwrights continued to dominate the Swedish navy yards until the 1660s, when the navy under Karl XI began recruiting English and Scottish shipwrights such as Francis Sheldon, who came to Sweden in 1660 (I have a model he built that year for the king sitting in my office).
That is the short version!
Fred
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Post by fredhocker on Mar 3, 2014 8:34:14 GMT
The lower gundeck ports are about 75-80 cm wide and 79-84 cm high at the outer opening, while the upper gundeck ports (and the last port on each side on the lower gundeck) are 73-75 cm square. It is not a big difference, but noticeable even from a distance. It is not possible to say with any certainty why it was done this way, although it was already an established tradition in ships with multiple gundecks to have graduated ports. The difference may be purely aesthetic - the profusion of sculptures and the money spent on them indicate that aesthetic considerations were often important in warship design. If you draw out a side elevation of a multi-decked ships and make all the ports the same size, it looks odd.
It is possible that the different port sizes reflect the complicated armament history of the ship. At least seven different armament plans for Vasa survive, all of them made before the ship sailed. Most of the plans from 1626 and 1628 provide for a unitary armament on the gundecks, with two full decks of 24-pounders. The surviving plans from 1627, as well as one from 1626, stipulate a mixed armament of 24-pounders on the lower gundeck and 12-pounders on the upper gundeck. The ports were probably cut and finished during 1627, so it may be that the armament plans being discussed at the admiralty influenced the construction of the ports.
One practical consequence of the port size was the salvage methods in the 1660s. The lower parts are large enough to allow a gun to be pulled out through them, but the smaller ports of the upper gundeck are just enough smaller to make this impractical, and so the salvors ripped up the upper deck and got the guns out through the beams. The two guns at the after end of the lower gundeck, which have smaller ports, were two of the three guns still left on the ship. There is evidence that the salvors tried to remove these but could not.
Fred
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Parral
Feb 27, 2014 13:34:15 GMT
Post by fredhocker on Feb 27, 2014 13:34:15 GMT
The lower yard parrels were adjustable, since slacking them made it possible to brace around harder. The exact rigging is uncertain, although Anderson gives examples of a couple of ways to rig them. Fred
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Post by fredhocker on Feb 27, 2014 13:31:09 GMT
I have to measure a set of hinges for the the replica section of ship side we are building as a target for the cannon copy, so will take a picture then. Not sure how accurate they are, but I will check that too. Fred
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Post by fredhocker on Feb 24, 2014 8:45:49 GMT
Thanks Shel!
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Post by fredhocker on Feb 21, 2014 7:40:13 GMT
Thanks Jan and Ulises!
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Post by fredhocker on Feb 17, 2014 14:53:02 GMT
Thanks Matti, that is exactly the sort of feedback we are looking for.
Fred
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Post by fredhocker on Feb 17, 2014 9:22:25 GMT
I wonder if the members of this forum could help us out with a little survey we are doing at the museum. We would like to know what you think of the different Vasa wooden kits currently on the market. As far as I know, there are at least three, Billing and Corel in 1:75 and Sergal (Mantua?) in 1:60. Are there any others that you are building? If you are in the process of building one of these kits, or have finished one, could you provide a brief evaluation (or a long one, if you like) that covers the following points: 1. Kit format (plank-on-frame/plank-on-bulkhead/solid hull) and type of materials (metal castings or plastic sculptures/gun/gun carriages/fittings) 2. Quality and quantity of materials 3. Nature of documentation (plans/instructions/reference material) and its quality 4. Ease or pleasure of construction 5. Value No need to worry about accuracy, I already know that none of them are as accurate as we would like! I also know that none of them provide really adequate documentation, otherwise we would not need this web forum . What we are looking for is some sense of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the available offerings, based on first-hand experience rather than the typical internet or model publication in-box review. Thanks! Fred
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Post by fredhocker on Feb 17, 2014 8:31:05 GMT
The main topsail bowlines probably belay at pins in the caprails along with a lot of the other topsail gear. There were probably round fairleads seized to the shrouds to guide them (we have plenty of spare fairleads, nice little lathe-turned items). Your lead, to the aftermost fore shroud, is a logical option. From there, the line would follow the shroud down to the rail, possibly going through a fairlead somewhere above the fiferail.
In general, very little of the rigging is belayed in the middle of the ship, most of it was led to the caprails.
Fred
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Post by fredhocker on Feb 17, 2014 8:26:10 GMT
Hi Shel,
Eight balusters will still work, as long the spacing is not exactly even.
I should have mentioned that there is a bolster along the underside of the top railing of the beakhead to minimize chafe from the tacks.
In reality, there is a lot of potential fouling of the fore tacks and spritsail sheets on the anchors, catheads and sculptures, and we have not yet worked out what the optimal lead is fore everything.
Fred
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Post by fredhocker on Feb 17, 2014 8:22:25 GMT
Where we have been able to analyze the paint scheme in detail, it is clear that the original sculptures were painted with highlights and shadows to enhance the detail and surface relief, not just solid colors. When the museum's 1:10 model was first painted, the sculptor who made the carvings wanted to paint them. He did so, but without highlights and shadows, so it was necessary to repaint the sculptures. Many of the pictures on our website were taken before the repainting, and thus do not have the same depth that the model does now.
As Matti noted, we have only analyzed paint remains on about 80 invididual pieces of ornament, and from that extrapolated the overall paint scheme. We tried to get samples from at least one element in a group (thus we sampled one of the 19 surviving ROman emperors from the beakhead very thoroughly), but we cannot guarantee that the group was entirely consistent in its painting, so modelers have plenty of freedom.
Fred
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Post by fredhocker on Feb 10, 2014 8:13:45 GMT
After crossing under the beakhead, through the fairlead nailed to the bottom of it, the tack passes up on the opposite side, through a slot in the gratings just inboard of the head box, and up to the foredeck railing, where it was probably belayed on a large cleat fastened to the lower railing where it crossed over the cathead. The cleat itself does not survive, so we do not know what the dimensions are, but the bolts for it are there, and show that it was at an angle, after end outboard, and it could also be used for belaying the cat stopper and cat tackle.
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Post by fredhocker on Feb 5, 2014 13:01:47 GMT
Hi Cedric,
This is a request that we get fairly often (you are the second company in the last ten days), and needs to be answered by someone higher on the food chain than I am, since it involves commercial rights and the use of our brand. We have had several companies interested in producing Vasa models, and we have collaborated with some of them, with varied results. We do have a scan of the ship, as well as digital documentation of other kinds, but we will probably wait until we have published that data ourselves before making it available. It also needs to be remembered that a scan shows the ship as it is today, not as it was built (dimensional differences up to 25 cm). In the case of your company, we would want to see what kind of kits you produce, at what quality and price level, and have some indication of what your track record is in working with other museums and source material.
I would suggest that you write to the director of the museum, Magnus Olofsson (magnus.olofsson@maritima.se), with your request.
Fred Hocker
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Post by fredhocker on Feb 5, 2014 12:49:08 GMT
My bad! I need to edit that document again. The one-pounders were definitely NOT swivels, they were carriage guns. Your interpretation of what a swivel gun is is correct. There were mounts for these in the stern gallery, but no evidence any were delivered.
I have now fixed the post above! Fred
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