What's on my desk? Part 64.
Hello again.
Last week of March, last week of the quarter again...
I've been working on the Fram rigging and have had some setbacks. Luckily it wasn't unfixable, and things like this help us learn and give us experience for future builds. More on that later.
My plan was to only rig the shrouds after doing the 'interior' ropes, but I noticed there are a couple of tackle blocks attached directly to the shroud lines. To be honest, I was a bit wary of this work, as it looks complicated and difficult. I looked up some rigging guides on the ol' interwebs and decided to tackle it now. Turns out it's not actually too hard!
The deadeyes all need to be on the same height, so one of the guides showed how to use a very simple jig: just a piece of bent metal wire:
You'll notice I looped the shroud rope around the deadeye and tied it with raw wire in two places. It's not actually tied; I used some drops of superglue to get it all together. I guesstimated the length of the loopback, thinking that in real life they wouldn't be all the exact same size. You'll see later how that will turn out...
Anyway, with the metal piece in place, I wrap the rope around the mast, over the trestle tree (keep that in mind...) and back down to the other side, where I inserted a deadeye at approximately the correct height (the rope has some elasticity and needs to be pulled tight in any case).
Then it's a matter of replacing the jig with rope:
'Easy peasy', I thought at this point. It goes together pretty fast and looks great. This is fun!
But this is just the first one...
Every next one is a bit harder because it needs to be level, and you get less and less space to manipulate the cord. Also: the deadeyes need to be oriented correctly: the 'center' eye needs to be on the bottom for the bottom ones and on top for the uppers. The top ones are loose in the rope, so I can still turn these. The bottom ones are very fixed into the metal ring and don't turn very well. I did know this at the time and tried to orient them correctly, but that didn't always turn out perfectly.
There are six shroud lines. Five of them go around the mast and will have ratlines, the sixth one is a standing rigging line to the top of the mast. Remember I'm stretching the lines over the trestle tree? Yeah, turns out that I didn't fix that thing well enough and I pulled it too hard, breaking it:
I tried to fix it, but as there were already 3 ropes installed that needed to be taut, that was just completely impossible and every attempt broke it more. So I measured out where it went, cut the deadeye lanyards and re-installed the trestle tree first. I cut new short braces and this time I drilled a hole through the mast to push a piece of metal through, providing extra strength:
I cut off the extra metal, dyed the wood pieces and stetched the shrouds over it, installing the transverse beams along with it.
Each mast has a trestle tree. For the main mast I'm not very worried, because that one is bigger and pretty well fixed, but the foremast has the exact same thing and now I'm scared I'll break that one as well... And as I've already rigged the yardarms to it that would be an unmitigated disaster...
Anyway, I then could finish the shroud lines:
The bridge structure is in the way of the rearmost two, pushing them out of line, so I decided to tie a spreader bar in them:
It's just a piece of brass rod, painted black. The loopbacks with the raw thread are approximately on the same level, but this could have looked a bit better if I had measured out the loop. I'll do this on the other shrouds.
One more thing: see the lanyards in between the deadeyes? Yeah, that's the wrong thread. There's two thicknesses of brown thread in the box and I used the 0.5 mm instead of the 0.15... Let's hope I still have enough 0.5 for the rest of the rigging.
These are the main shrouds, going from the ship hull up to 3/4 of the mast. From the trestle tree up to the top of the mast there's a secondary shroud. This time I used one length of rope for each side, looping the thread in on itself and 'tying' it with brown thread:
These again need to be rigged with deadeyes. I tied one of the ratlines already, just because I had a small piece of raw thread and wanted to see how hard this would be. That's the small connecting raw thread just above the deadeyes and loopback. These ratlines are the footsteps in the rope ladder. You can't really tighten them because the shroud lines need to be straight. So that will be a challenge...
And here again an overview picture of how far along I am:
While the whole wood ship model thing is a very nice change of pace and it really is a very nice model, the next project will be plastic again... :-) In fact, I'll see if I can bring in something easy to work on this week for when I'm completely sick of rigging. Sometimes you just need to set something aside and let it rest for a bit...
That's it.
See you next week!