HMS Elephant Amati 1786

Hello all from California! My name is Jan. For my 26th birthday I bought the HMS Vanguard Amati 1787 kit off of Facebook Marketplace, having eyed it for several months. I didn't jump on it right away figuring the total market size of this hobby is very small and it wouldn't move quickly.
I have always loved ships of the Age of Sail and have dreamt of building a wooden ship, and so last year I finally took a giant leap and built the Mamoli HMY Mary to see if my patience had evolved to a level I could spend months on a single art project. My eventual goal was a ship of the line, so after that I built the Frigate Hermione (took ~10 months), and a Revell plastic Beagle kit.

This kit is a behemoth. The box weighs more than 30 pounds.
My plan is to build this kit as the HMS Elephant. I adore elephants, and shall try to build this ship so I can display her with an elephant figurehead and varnished wood sides. I don’t see many Elephant build logs on here, or on the internet in general. I trawled Instagram and found one public account with it.

First notes on unboxing and looking a the contents:

1. The kit is gorgeous, the plans themselves are a work of art. I have hung one on my wall. I stashed the ones I don’t need currently in a drawer. There are several smaller boxes containing some resin parts, various railings, anchors, deadeyes, buckets, cannons, false-cannons, carronades, and blocks.
2. A fancier kit will come with more fancy parts. I was pleased to see the deadeye chain plates came in photo etch; I had a devil of a time making them on my Frigate. The paper instructions are a nice change from the pdf I had to read from a CD included for the Frigate.
3. I don’t think I could take a stab at this without having done a 3 masted ship before. I'm proud of my Frigate and I hope this one turns out even better. The larger size of this ship (over 1 foot longer than the Frigate).
4. There are a lot of laser cut parts. The photoetch looks excellent.
5. The cannon carriages are cast metal. I've seen others replace these but for now I shall keep them. I might 3D print some extra carronades for the quarterdeck, as HMS Elephant was equipped with these and Amati sells each of them at a criminal price.
6. The copper plating will be a first for me, but that will only come many moons from now. It comes as sheets of etched copper that you can snap off in pieces

My existing model bench is somewhat smaller than the box, and so I commandeered a coffee table to assist in providing space. I still move apartments semi-frequently, otherwise I would buy a bigger craftbench. I aim to do as good a job as I can with the 2nd planking so I can preserve it un-painted. We shall see how well this goes.

jwignall said:

HMS Vanguard

Click to expand...

First, welcome to SoS Jan

The Vanguard was an Arrogant class 74 same as the Elephant so a great idea that you have as there is so much information about her. Depending on what you are looking to achieve there is the original contract from for Elephant which gives dimensions of every piece of the ship and more. There are also a lot of drawings on the RMG Collections website as well. https://www.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/search/Elephant 1786 plans

The contract was written earlier, 1781, but is described by RMG and on the cover page as being for Elephant, built by Parsons in Bursledon.
Cover page

Page 1 of 24 pages


Page 2


Have fun, and good luck.
Allan

Welcome Jan to the forums and greetings from Texas! Your Hermione is beautiful! Regards, Magic Mike

You might find this interesting.

Onwards ho. The bulkheads of the ship are laser cut out of MDF, which is soft and easy to sand. Much better than plywood. The instructions said to sand each bulkhead before installation but I felt that was strange so I glued everything into place first and then sanded. I sanded only the sternmost bulkhead before installation as the planks of the first planking bend sharply and join the transom at that bulkhead.
For planking the upper deck, I chose 100mm strips and then did a 4 butt shift every 25mm. This made placement of each plank very easy. I painted the plywood deck layout a dark grey to see if that would come out as caulking. At this scale, it shouldn’t really be visible, but I thought I’d give it a go. It ended up looking worse than expected, so I won’t paint the other decks’ plywood bases. Once the deck was planked, I cut it in half and glued it in place with plenty of clamps.
Some harsh lighting reveals Elephant's lovely lines that I hope to do justice to.
Fun fact: at this point (deck glued in, before bulwark planking begins) Elephant weighs 1980g according to my kitchen scale.


The instructions say to plank the inner bulwarks of the upper gundeck at this point, so I did so. I decided to paint the bulwarks a brick red acrylic paint before adding them so as not to spoil my deck or risk bleed through with masking tape. My Frigate Hermione had much more of a fire engine red which I ended up regretting, and I also presume a brick red would be more similar to red ochre used on ships of the day. There are about 3 full 7mm planks that can fit with no trimming between the upper gun deck and the underside of the spar deck support beams. After that I fit a fourth plank that I cut notches in, allowing me to snugly fit the fourth plank beneath the deck support frames. Once all the strips were glued in I applied a liberal amount of wood glue to the backside of the bulwarks. At this point I also glued the stern gallery balcony deck base in, and wetted it to get it to curve.


Future plans for deck include the addition of a pad for the capstans to sit on. The plans you so kindly linked suggest they should be there; it was unclear to me based on the model kit's instructions.