Mast-erfully done

Or at least pretty okay-ily done. (Oak-ily done?)

Masts on Essence, guns on Expeditious. I found the cardboard too hard to work with, so I switched to paper for Expeditious's guns.

 14 British 24pdrs a side. A broadside weight of 336!(Or do you give both sides together for weight of metal?) Plus two long 9s for bow chasers.

And Expeditious's dear surprise - two long 12 stern chasers! You get abaft of this ship, you're asking for it.

I was all set to drill some holes for the masts, and then I realized, oh god, I don't want to do that. So instead I just used a small pin and wedged the masts in. And since the masts were made the same height (whoops), I just set them at different depths to somewhat counteract that. The bowsprit will need to be glued but the rest are solid.

And this doesn't look like much, but I've got the spars attached to the masts. There may be a better way to do this, but I'm fine with this so far. The next step, I'll make some notches in the spars and glue them to the masts. The sails are still just plain paper, at this point, and honestly, they may stay that way.

Sails, spars, and guns

Back at work, so work has slowed at the dockyard. Two sets of sails and all their spars have been cut.

 I honestly don't know if I have cut all the right ones, and I'm not sure if the size is right, but it seems like I have enough to at least look... mostly good. The next step is deciding if I want to try and build a curve into them before assembling them on the masts, or if I just want to force a curve when I put them ON the masts. They're just heavy paper, and I think I probably want to reinforce them. Possibly white glue, possibly varnish, maybe even plasti-dip, if it comes in matte. *shrugs*

I realized I forgot a piece of the bowspirt, so I added that to both of them, and did an experiment with gunports. I'm not sure I like that, mostly because they're uneven, but I'm not sure I'd want to paint them on, so I'll probably stick with the cardboard, for now.

Mast-ive Attack

Not a whole lot of visible progress today. Mostly just a day waiting for glue to dry.

I made more masts, tried to correct yesterdays, which were indeed too long. And I gave the paper railing another coat of white glue to stiffen and seal it up. I toyed with cutting out some stern galleries out of balsa, but honestly they just looked huge and out of place, so I'll just paint/carve them on, and try to plan them a little better on the next ship.

A Cutting-out Expedition

Work's begun!

The Royal Navy made up some kits in Chatham to be sent to Kingston during the War in 1812. They got as far as Montreal before the Admiralty went "screw it" and sold them, but the plans reached Kingston and one of them was built. Sort of. The frigates were designed with 32 guns, the plans have 42, and the only one ever built had 56.

Psyche was built, and I intended to build her sister, Prompte. But, knowing I would not be able to make things exactly accurate, I intended to build my own ship. Based of the plans for the Psyche and Prompte, thus, the Psyche-class, I decided to call my ship Expeditious, to honour the real ship, and also because it sounded painfully British.

The first step was scaling. Boy. I hate math.

The instructions I'm sort of following are for 1/1200th scale, but I decided to build in 1/600th.  After a lot of "what the hells" I got it things figured out and printed off plans.

Then came the cutting. As the instructions were for 1/1200th and I was doing 1/600th, I upsized from 1/16 inch balsa to 1/8th inch. Rather than glue the plans to the wood I simply traced, figuring that would save some paper for later, if I need the plans for any reason.

Can anyone spot the mistake yet?

Quite pleased with myself I then set about gluing and clamping the decks. I didn't worry too much about any roughness, since I knew I'd be sanding, anyway.

Once the glue was hard enough I removed the clamp, very pleased with my work so far. Until I realize I forgot to cut out a piece! And with wood glue in there, I'd never be able to carve it out.

So I made a another ship!

Whoops!

Initially I figured I'd used the botched one simply for practice, but then I realize that, for Psyche to have carried 56 guns (even if half of them were carronades), she had to have been converted into a two-decker - and likely a flush-decked ship, at that. Even if she wasn't actually, mine could be, and that was enough justification to not scrap it.

Ah but then I've a second ship, so what to call it? Well, I would have liked something Greek, but I wanted it to start with an e, so I went with Essence. Sort of close to Psyche... in a way.

The next step, carried out the following day after the glue had fully cured was simple sanding.

I may have messed up the proper lines a little during this step but hey, they're fictitious ships anyway! After the sanding, I was going to try and follow the instructions and print out the side profile to stick on, but frankly, getting it small enough while still being visible enough was going to be too much work for too little reward, so I just experimented with paper strips and white glue for a while until something came together.

The crinkly paper on Expeditious's port side looks bothersome, but it dries straight. The tips need trimming once dry, as well.

This deprives me of exact locations for gunports and the like, but I'll figure that out when I come to it.

I also spent some time today on the masts. Again, I had to deviate from the instructions, since I couldn't be bothered with music wire, and decided I didn't much mind if each section was the same width. Ergo, toothpicks.

Everything's curing now, and I'll get back to the hulls tomorrow. As well as figure out if the masts are hilariously too tall or not. I suspect they are.

Her Majesty's Ship Indecision

I've realized that all my fussing over what 1/1200 scale ship I want to build is because I essentially want two different things.

I want a model to sit up there with my books, and I want a story. I can write a story about some Canadian-born ship Captain in the Napoleonic era any day, and I was honestly overthinking it, as it applied to the model.

So. I'm going to build a model ship. Possibly not a Canadian one, just one with clear, complete plans and instructions, and if I enjoy that, maybe I'll work on a slightly harder one. (Re: Prompte.)

This sort of overthinking is certainly a flaw of mine, but I see it in others, and even (especially?) in communities, as well.

Twenty years ago when I first got into Warhammer, a picture of a Skink or a gallery of Space Marine chapters with nothing but names was enough to inspire me and make me dream up endless stories. Now if I don't know the entire life story of every single member of that chapter, I feel like I can't tell an effective story. And, okay, with historical fiction you do need a bit more depth to your research. But in the end I just want a little toy ship that looks neat. No need to trying to wrangle how a Canadian-born captain in the Royal Navy went from a captured Dutch fourth-rate to a Bermuda sloop named after the former to a "Canadian-built" frigate.

I can just build the damn thing, slap a name on her hull, and let myself dream.

Tromp Card

Gonna build a sister-ship to the Tromp.

Dutch-built, in Rotterdam (my family's from... well near there), British-captured, 56 guns, fourth-rate. Perfect for my fantasy ship. I'll name mine after some other Dutch Admiral, and then cut that down like the British did, and then say she cruised off America during 1812. And of course saw other action in the Napoleonic Wars.

Plans exist for her, but I'm not sure they're complete. Either way, I can figure it out.

Prompte-ly Stalled

My ideas about building Prompte are stalling out, purely because I can't fit my idea into the setting.

The fact is, even is Prompte's frame just sat there in Montreal moldering it got broken up for firewood (which it could have - I still don't know) if it had been finished, the Royal Navy would have taken it and ex-Provincial Marine men wouldn't have set foot on her.

There's a little room for "woops another frigate was built on the lakes and has slipped through history", because frankly everyone involved did a lot of lying, but if there had been another frigate, then the fact is it never did anything.

So without doing an alternate history scenario, which I'm neither prepared to do or knowledgeable enough to make good enough, there's no real way to squeeze this fantasy Canadian ship of mine in.

(An alternate history WOULD be fun, though. Yeo was to be replaced by Edward Owen, an altogether better officer from what I can gather. And while Owen was certainly not rash, I doubt he would have been so useless as Yeo was, and would have made a proper war of Lake Ontario - or at least helped Drummond.

That's another thing - Yeo rarely ever helped the rest of the war. I don't see Drummond as being, shall we say, responsive, to sending some of his militiamen to serve as Marines on this fantasy ship.

But then, Owen definitely wouldn't have given a ship to a Provincial Marine man. Yeo might have, if only out of spite. Though I still highly doubt that.)

So the fact is, while I still love Prince Regent and Princess Charlotte, and while Pysche's plans are ripe for building Prompte, I'm just not sure that that is a direction I want to go, anymore.

It might be better to just make up a ship for the Atlantic theatre. There were privateers there, lots in fact, but I would probably rather have it a Royal Navy ship, with a Canadian-born captain.

If I do that, then I have a few more pieces of information I need, and a few decisions to make. Would I rather a captured ship, or one built in Canada? (That is, fictionally built in Canada.) If it's built in Canada, it obviously can't have been built in Upper Canada, since you couldn't get out of the Lakes in those days. So, where did the British build ships in North Amercia? Halifax seems a likely candidate, though I haven't yet found any evidence of shipbuilding going on there during the War of 1812. But then, since the ship I intend to build wouldn't have really existed, that's fine, isn't it?

Well, the North American station headquarters had left Halifax for Bermuda long before the War, so that may be a better birthplace for the ship... even though it's not Canadian. :'(

Bermuda seems to have had several naming schemes. Fish, then women, then flowers... and never built anything with more than 18 guns. Then again, Bermuda sloops were impressive little ships, for their purpose. No shame in commanding one.

But you know what, I might just make this fictional ship a captured Dutch ship built in Rotterdam.

Okay, now that my loggerhea is at an end, I guess I'll go look for plans of Dutch ships?