Danish Bomb Vessel 1771, "Den Gloende", POB, 1:48

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I decided it's time to start a build log for this ship.

I'm doing the drawings as a collaborative effort with @JosephH he offered to rework my drawings in 3D to see it things fit together before I start hacking up wood. I posted in the research section a while back and will probably repeat some of that information.

I'm planning on doing this as a Plank on Bulkhead fully masted and rigged, and then I would like to do a cross section cut where you can see the inner workings of the mortar bed and have it placed in the same case under the bow sprit.

I downloaded 42 plans from the Danish National Archives for bomb vessels of this class. There were 8 built the names are,

’Dristighed’ – ‘Boldness’
’Modet’ – ‘Courage’
’Mandighed’ – ‘Manly’
‘Forskækkelse’ - Frightening’
‘Den gloende’ – ‘Glowing hot’
‘Cometen’ – The Comet
‘Dragen – The Dragon
‘Alvorlighed’ (The) Serious

The Danish refer to these as “Type Bombadér – Hukkert”

Thanks to @William and Inger for this definition; A lesser north European freight or fishing vessel common in the 17th.C. The hull was round ‘gattet’ (the same form both ends but with a quite flat bottom (keel) and therefore drew very little water. It was usually two masted: the first a full-rigger mast which stood quite some way back on the ship and a lesser ‘skønnet’ mast ( schooner-rigged mizzen mast) and a bow sprit with a long standing jib'.
Main references I’m using;
  • Plans from the Danish national archives, most are in the A1237 series.
  • The Bomb Vessel GRANADO (Anatomy of the Ship) by Peter Goodwin.(trying to use only when everything else fails see explanation below).
  • The Bomb Vessel - Shore Bombardment Ships of the Age of Sail by Chris Ware
Thanks to @Uwek both of these books have reviews in the book section.

This is one of those elephant in the room issues so I’m going to address it right up front. This ship class looks a lot like the Granado, which for those that don’t know is an English bomb vessel. The Granado was built in 1742 the Danish ships were built in 1771, I have read, it wasn’t unusual for shipwrights to move around in the 1700’s. Even if that isn’t what happened here, it would be hard to make a case that the designer of these ships hadn’t seen the Granado or at least the plans. The similarity is hard to miss even the overall size is nearly identical. That being said there are some definite differences. The most obvious is the Danish ships have a bed of ropes under the mortars for shock absorbers. The Granado does not. Some of the fittings are drawn differently, and the Danish ships have six windows in the stern instead of 5 and no stern gallery on the side.

One thing that drew me to this particular class of ship is that the plans also include plans for masting and sails. Of note is that the English plans for the Granado do not include sail and mast plans but the rigged models of the Granado I’ve seen match the Danish sail and mast plans. My suspicion is that the Danish plans were used to rig the Granado models.
So to this point in order to build the Danish ship as much as possible the only thing I’ve used the Granado book for is to understand the construction of the stern. There is a Wing Transom and 6 transom beams shown on the Danish plan that I didn’t understand, so I used the Granado book to figure out how the stern was most likely constructed.

Here's the layout and the body plans from the Danish archives so these plans are free download from their website.

Layout-1237-a-XL.png


image-XL.png


On the Historic end of things, I’ve done a lot of research with some but not a great deal of success. These ships were built at a relative time of peace for the Danish and there doesn't seem to be much to be found on the history of the particular ships. I thought possibly they could have gone to the Caribean or possibly sunk or scuttled in one of the Battles of Copenhagen however neither any searches of the Carribean that I could find or records of the ships sunk and taken in the Battle of Copenhagen or any of the English NMM records had any reference to any of these ships.

The Den Gloende was built in 1771 and fitted out as a bomb vessel originally. The only other record I could find for the Den Gloende is when the Danish government bought the Danish East India Company and renamed it the Danish Asiatic Company in 1772. There is maintenance record for the ship that indicates the ship was transferred to the Danish Asiatic Company and most likely re-fit. The plans call for an alternate 16 gun loadout for use as an armed escort or it could have been refit for merchant purposes, the record is unclear about this. I'm going to build it as it was originally fit out as a bomb vessel.

I'll continue below with what I've been doing the last Couple months.
 
So schedule wise, I'm hoping to start the actual construction somewhere around Christmas time. I'd particularly like to get my Constitution rigging done before I start on this. After downloading the plans I imported the files into Autocad. I have been using Acad for almost 30years so I didn't have to deal with a learning curve on the software. Here's a screen shot of my current drawing.

BIGDRAWING-XL.png


I've probably spent 50 to 60 hours on this so far, first I drew the frames and the keel section and then it became an iterative process figuring out how to incorporate bracing for the masts and false decks etc. When you decide to put in a brace for the mast for instance you have to figure out the size and then go and modify the frames and the backbone to accommodate that part. It's a constant process of designing one part and then figuring out how to modify the parts around it to accommodate what you just designed. And as Dave Stevens pointed out in one of the threads he wrote there is also quite a bit of interpretation where you just have to make some of it up.

A lot of details are not accounted for yet I have the main line of planking drawn on but haven't figured out how many planks and where. Those types of details I've decided will be best dealt with during the build or in Josephs 3D model. It should be really interesting to see if my design is buildable. I'm sure I'll get it eventually.

All I had left to do on my drawing is the masts, yards, and bow sprit. Then I was going to just start building and modify as I go. With Joseph working on it in 3D hopefully I can fix at least some of the issues before they happen in real space.
 
So I finally got the Drawings and Plans to Full Scale so that it is easier to work with. I checked them for skewing and various other things. I was happy when it was very minimal. In here I marked out the frames they are 22" apart and 10" wide and they matched up perfectly with the plans. I just offset each one by 22" and when finished noticed that they all exactly lined up.

Josie is going to do POB but I will also draw a POF version as I draw his up the Loft I create for the Hull to check the Bulkheads will also give me the frames for the POF

Bomb-03.jpg
 
Here I loaded Jodies Drawings and overlayed to the Plans and other than a little difference in the bow they matched up pretty good.

Next I will trace some of his drawings so that I only have certain ones that I need to set up the Loft. and which I will use later for drawing in the lower decks and interior which will be used for the POF and Cross SectionBomb-01.jpg
 
So today is slow I went and traded my car in for a differrent one same year with only 200 miles more but works better for getting in and out and doensnt hurt trying to get up from my old low car.

So I got the Core of the POB hull drawn out and adjusted for the thickness of the deck. I will start doing some 3D work on it and the keel now to see how it looks and to get ready for test fitting the frames.

Bomb-07.jpg
 
So schedule wise, I'm hoping to start the actual construction somewhere around Christmas time. I'd particularly like to get my Constitution rigging done before I start on this. After downloading the plans I imported the files into Autocad. I have been using Acad for almost 30years so I didn't have to deal with a learning curve on the software. Here's a screen shot of my current drawing.

BIGDRAWING-XL.png


I've probably spent 50 to 60 hours on this so far, first I drew the frames and the keel section and then it became an iterative process figuring out how to incorporate bracing for the masts and false decks etc. When you decide to put in a brace for the mast for instance you have to figure out the size and then go and modify the frames and the backbone to accommodate that part. It's a constant process of designing one part and then figuring out how to modify the parts around it to accommodate what you just designed. And as Dave Stevens pointed out in one of the threads he wrote there is also quite a bit of interpretation where you just have to make some of it up.

A lot of details are not accounted for yet I have the main line of planking drawn on but haven't figured out how many planks and where. Those types of details I've decided will be best dealt with during the build or in Josephs 3D model. It should be really interesting to see if my design is buildable. I'm sure I'll get it eventually.

All I had left to do on my drawing is the masts, yards, and bow sprit. Then I was going to just start building and modify as I go. With Joseph working on it in 3D hopefully I can fix at least some of the issues before they happen in real space.
Hallo Jodie,

This sound and looks like a very interesting project, so I am looking forward to see your further preparation and later permanent work on this project :cool:
 
Thought I'd talk a little about what I've been doing with this design, and some of the things I've had to deal with as I have time here and there.

This is my first time so I had to do some research to understand the plans. I read several articles that talked about how to loft bulkheads etc. The one I got the most from reading in the Practicum for the US Eagle Brig on the modelshipbuilder website.

I started by tracing the sheer body and half breadth plans. Here is a pdf of the tracing.

Body%20Plan-XL.jpg


I will probably make the mistake numerous times of using the term frames when I should have said bulkheads. Sorry about that, for some reason I keep doing it and can't seem to stop myself:)

There are nine of these body plans and six of the centerline cross section plans in the archives. While comparing the different plans they are dated differently which helped figure out what came later. However the Latest body plan was several months later that the latest and most complete cross section plan. The most obvious difference was on the stem in the front of the ship. The stem was elongated and chopped off on the top on the latest body plan; however none of the cross section plans showed the revised stem. I'm confident the stem was revise to hold the various figureheads so I used the stem on the body plan.

One of the first things that jumped out at me when I started drawing is the waterlines (The dark blue lines above) are not parallel to the Keel that is why they are angled on the body plan on the right. I still need to add marks to the framed for where this line is. I also had to do some adjusting to get the frames and waterlines spaced equally.

This brings me to the first thing that really came to my mind that I needed to pay attention to because I'm building a model not a real 1:1 ship. That is making things sized so I don't have to mill every piece of lumber to a custom size. The original plans are in Fods, a Fod is 1.03051 International Feet So I scaled the plans to feet and then back down to 1:48 or 1/4" equals a foot. At this point that made the distance from the bottom of the rabbet to the bottom of the keel about 0.285 inches with the width of the keel drawing at .245". The original Keel was 1 Fod Wide by 1.5 fods high from the bottom to the top of the keelson. 1 Fod by 1 Fod to the bottom of the rabbet. That means the correct size for the Keel would be 0.258" square. That's great if you're just drawing a picture or if you want to mill odd sized lumber, but that's not the case for me. So I decided to go with 1/4" square.

I also decided I would use 1/4" plywood for the bulkheads. I read at some point a discussion about plywood, and knew from it, that all 1/4" plywood is not the same thickness. As a matter of fact there are at least five different thicknesses of 1/4" plywood at the local home improvement stores alone. I decided to go with poplar here which is actually 5mm thick or 0.198". This matters if you are going to use the locations of the bulkheads to locate sweep and gun ports, masts mortar beds etc. So it doesn't really matter what a person picks to do the design with but a they will need to use the right thickness to match the design or it'll throw off the locations of some items.

Below is a closeup of some of the Bulkheads

CloseFrame-XL.jpg


Just to give an Idea of how the process has been working I first drew up the bulkheads with the deck all the way accross. I accounted for a deck thickness of 1/16" for my planking but didn't think about the false deck underneath so that had to be adjusted for. I then went through and looked at where the bulkheads were interfearing with openings in the deck. one frame was conflicting with the mizzen mast. So back and forth I went. On the bulkheads above bulkheads 6 and 3 are under a mortar. Bulkhead 0 has a grating above it, 21 and 24 have braces for the upper portion of the stern that had to be angled to miss the windows. So back and forth I went till I couldn't think of anything else.

Next time I have some time I'll talk a little about coming up with the stern parts.
 
Thought I'd talk a little about what I've been doing with this design, and some of the things I've had to deal with as I have time here and there.

This is my first time so I had to do some research to understand the plans. I read several articles that talked about how to loft bulkheads etc. The one I got the most from reading in the Practicum for the US Eagle Brig on the modelshipbuilder website.

I started by tracing the sheer body and half breadth plans. Here is a pdf of the tracing.

Body%20Plan-XL.jpg


I will probably make the mistake numerous times of using the term frames when I should have said bulkheads. Sorry about that, for some reason I keep doing it and can't seem to stop myself:)

There are nine of these body plans and six of the centerline cross section plans in the archives. While comparing the different plans they are dated differently which helped figure out what came later. However the Latest body plan was several months later that the latest and most complete cross section plan. The most obvious difference was on the stem in the front of the ship. The stem was elongated and chopped off on the top on the latest body plan; however none of the cross section plans showed the revised stem. I'm confident the stem was revise to hold the various figureheads so I used the stem on the body plan.

One of the first things that jumped out at me when I started drawing is the waterlines (The dark blue lines above) are not parallel to the Keel that is why they are angled on the body plan on the right. I still need to add marks to the framed for where this line is. I also had to do some adjusting to get the frames and waterlines spaced equally.

This brings me to the first thing that really came to my mind that I needed to pay attention to because I'm building a model not a real 1:1 ship. That is making things sized so I don't have to mill every piece of lumber to a custom size. The original plans are in Fods, a Fod is 1.03051 International Feet So I scaled the plans to feet and then back down to 1:48 or 1/4" equals a foot. At this point that made the distance from the bottom of the rabbet to the bottom of the keel about 0.285 inches with the width of the keel drawing at .245". The original Keel was 1 Fod Wide by 1.5 fods high from the bottom to the top of the keelson. 1 Fod by 1 Fod to the bottom of the rabbet. That means the correct size for the Keel would be 0.258" square. That's great if you're just drawing a picture or if you want to mill odd sized lumber, but that's not the case for me. So I decided to go with 1/4" square.

I also decided I would use 1/4" plywood for the bulkheads. I read at some point a discussion about plywood, and knew from it, that all 1/4" plywood is not the same thickness. As a matter of fact there are at least five different thicknesses of 1/4" plywood at the local home improvement stores alone. I decided to go with poplar here which is actually 5mm thick or 0.198". This matters if you are going to use the locations of the bulkheads to locate sweep and gun ports, masts mortar beds etc. So it doesn't really matter what a person picks to do the design with but a they will need to use the right thickness to match the design or it'll throw off the locations of some items.

Below is a closeup of some of the Bulkheads

CloseFrame-XL.jpg


Just to give an Idea of how the process has been working I first drew up the bulkheads with the deck all the way accross. I accounted for a deck thickness of 1/16" for my planking but didn't think about the false deck underneath so that had to be adjusted for. I then went through and looked at where the bulkheads were interfearing with openings in the deck. one frame was conflicting with the mizzen mast. So back and forth I went. On the bulkheads above bulkheads 6 and 3 are under a mortar. Bulkhead 0 has a grating above it, 21 and 24 have braces for the upper portion of the stern that had to be angled to miss the windows. So back and forth I went till I couldn't think of anything else.

Next time I have some time I'll talk a little about coming up with the stern parts.
Thumbs-Up Thumbs-Up
 
So I been slow this last few days and this week working retail i been working lot of overtime and even on my days off prepping due to thanksgiving and black friday. I figure after this week I will be back hot and heavy on my portion of this project
 
So I've been poking along at this project when I have a little time here and there. In the meantime I'm about half done with rigging the Constitution so I should update that; however that's not what this thread is about:)

I did a little 3d drafting work. Enough to figure out a couple things. First I don't really want to put in the effort to get good at it, that could be its own hobby. The second it's a good tool to at least do some basic checks of my design. I discovered several design issues where parts were interfering with each other and had to adjust the heights on a few frames and cut a slot into the back of the forward mortar bed. There's also the issue of the real world allowing pieces to be tweaked to fit, whereas the computer wants everything to match exactly. I'm going to leave the 3d stuff to Joseph but it was an interesting side trip to mess around with 3d stuff.

I also realized I had the sweep ports up in the middle of the gun port level.

gunport-XL.png


So I adjusted those to match the bottom of the gun ports. It's interesting that on the plan the gun ports on this ship follow the angle of the top rail but with vertical sides, so they are really parallelograms instead of rectangles.

DenGloende%20Side-XL.png


I did a basic design for the windlass. Really mostly a dimensional plan. I haven't figured out how to approach this just yet. I could either construct it around a small rod in the center or use a large rod and use the lathe and mill to cut it down from one piece. If anyone knows of an easy way to construct this I'd like to hear your thoughts. Here's the drawing.

DenGloende%20windy-X3.png


I also drew up the stern for the design and figurehead (graphically). Here's what the stern of the Den Gloende looked like.

DenGloende%20Sternl-X3.png


Here's the figurehead. I'm considering drawing this and the Mortars in 3d and having them printed. There is a local makers space here that I just might be able to do it for the cost of the material. At any rate the figurehead is a mortar shell with flames coming out the top.

DenGloende%20bow-X3.png


I'm definitely far enough along now to start cutting out some frames but am going to force myself to finish rigging the Constitution first, and may build a plastic model at the same time I start this. That won't take long plastic is what I have the most experience with..
 
So I got the rigging finished on the Constitution and I'm ready to move on to this and likely another project at the same time. The other will probably be a kit and the idea will be that this will lag behind; and in a fairly short period of time I'll have the projects in different stages so I can work on different parts of builds at the same time. This will help reduce the monotony of some of the repetitive tasks.

But for now, on with this project. I spent some time messing around with 3D drafting and managed to piece some things together. Here's a couple views of my 3D Drawing. This is just the stern. The wing transom should be arched, and the transom beams (three pieces stacked below it) should be smaller on the bottom sides. This is where my 3D drawing efforts hit the skids.

stern-XL.png


However that being said this was a very useful exercise that found at least 10 places where I needed to modify parts so they will work. In the long run this will save time and quite a bit of wood as I had to make 3 alterations t the back bone, and would have needed to redo it.

Here you can see the bottom of the mortar beds and the main cabin floor etc.

mainl-XL.png


I also printed the plan for the backbone and the bulkheads at 1:1 on the plotter at work. Nice to have access to a large format printer. Santa Clause (The Admiral) got me a spindle sander for Christmas. So all I need now is some wood and I can start hacking away.
 
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Funny you should ask, a couple weeks ago I I had some time to get started on the actual model. First I bought a 2' X 4' Piece of plywood and cut it into pieces on my table saw.

dg-001-L.jpg

The next afternoon I used spray glue to attach the paper plans to the plywood.

dg-002-L.jpg

It was really cold, so I didn't get any scroll saw work done. I have the choice of filling the house with sawdust of doing the big mess producers outside.

Last Saturday, the weather finally got up to a livable temperature, 40F so I could get some sawdust made.

I was concerned that my scroll saw might not be up to the task from what I read, but it worked great. I have the Micromark MicroLux® Variable Speed Multi-Saw. I have the newest version, and was very impressed with it. It took me about 3 hours to cut out all the parts below. I can honestly say I cut these out as fast as I could with any saw. The limiting factor was how quickly I could cut accurately not how fast I could shove the wood through the saw. For a inexpensive option I think it's definitely worth the money. I paid the $139 that it usually seems to be on sale for.

I started out by cutting out center sections.

IMG_6276%20(779x1024)-XL.jpg

And then cut out the bulkheads.

IMG_6273%20(1280x639)-XL.jpg

I also cut out these parts for the transom beams. The extra line on the top of the paper is where the beams need to be tapered to. I decided to loft the top and bottom profile of these parts so I can taper them before installation. I think this will give me a profile closer to the original plan than I would get if I tried to free sand the taper on the back. There will be more on that when I get to that point.


IMG_6275%20(752x1024)-XL.jpg

Then Sunday I glued the three sections of the center together. The gaps are because I tried to align the templates with the bottom of the plywood to get a factory edge that is straight. Because the angles weren't cut perfectly when I clamped the parts to a metal yard stick to make the whole thing straight it cause the gaps to open up. In the future I'll just cut the bottom and sand it straight.


IMG_6278%20(1280x265)-XL.jpg

My plan is to go ahead and get the bulkheads attached and then do the rabbet strip and keel. I'd like to do the keel but to do that I'll have to wait for an order of materials. I also think it might be easier to get these all straight and perpendicular before working on the keel.

Should mention on here I do have a disk sander and a spindle sander that I used to clean these up.

Continued on next post.
 
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Monday night I glued up the first bulkhead. I used the steel blocks and clamps to make sure everything was square. On thing I took note of that is a little different from building a kit is there is just enough play in my scroll saw cutting that I could rock the bulkhead side to side and move the top of the rail area up and down a couple millimeters. So I had to make sure I had the side to side height correct as well as have everything else square. Here's how it looks now.

I also marked the location of the gun ports on the main deck in green and the 3 planks for the wales as I took the paper off.

xframe%20(1280x421)-X2.jpg

Last night I marked more of the bulkheads for strakes and gun ports and got them glued on.

shp01%20%281280x727%29-X2.jpg


The shreds of paper and glue are ugly but it'll all be hidden so I didn't put too much effort into getting the front of the bulkheads super clean.

shp02%20%281280x456%29-XL.jpg

Here you can see the gun port marks better. The red line is for the supports under the aft mortar deck.
shp03%20%281280x765%29-X2.jpg

This photo also accentuates how short and stubby this hull is. I stopped where I did because I'm going to take my rotary tool and do a rough tapering on the remaining bulkheads so I don't have to do so much sanding after they are installed. Particularly the front bulkhead has about a 45 degree taper on it.

Now that I'm working on this I got to thinking about colors. It's premature but I'd like to actually paint this if that is how it would have been finished. I can't read Danish so the best I've been able to do to this point is looking at some photos of existing Danish ships. If anyone has any words of wisdom about the colors etc. it would be appreciated. Though from what I've been reading it may have been built a few years to early to be painted.
 
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