Thanks Roger. You are very welcome.
'Emma' - A Diorama making use of the sloop-rigged smack kit, Emma C Berry (1866), from Model Shipways, 1/32 Scale.
Thanks Roger. You are very welcome.
I was just looking at the models of some of the more experienced SoS members. There's a lot of very fine work going on here, isn't there?
That thought prompted me to tell any prospective readers of this thread that I consider myself a novice. I've built the PoB Artesiana Latina cutter, Le Renard to a standard which didn't please me very much to be honest. I built the Amati New Bedford Whaleboat, a large scale model which was constructed from the inside out over a strongback former - not quite PoF but not PoB either. That was a little more pleasing but still fell a long way short of my expectations. And I'm currently rigging the Vanguard Models Alert (1777). So, I'm very new to wooden ship modelling and this will be my first PoF style build. I have been a modeller in plastic on and off since 1965 and have built dioramas before.
I'm enjoying this new area of our hobby very much and learning every day which is very exciting for me. I love sharing my experiences on the forum and the writing and the building are mutually reinforcing if that makes sense. I make models to write about and writing about them encourages me to build.
As a novice, I write as a novice, and mainly for other novices. If you've already finished a PoF Victory built from scratch with Starbucks' coffee stirrers, you might find me a bit of a plodder, waxing lyrical about something that you learned twenty years ago. If you are a historical expert, you will find me annoyingly casual about dipping into the fantasy end of shipbuilding, though I do intend to build Emma the boat as well as I can.
I am a finger-painter in the world of fine art, a burger flipper at Claridges, a toddler attempting a marathon. As to succeeding with this project I have two chances - slim and no.
So there you go. As the great maritime philosopher Popeye said,
That thought prompted me to tell any prospective readers of this thread that I consider myself a novice. I've built the PoB Artesiana Latina cutter, Le Renard to a standard which didn't please me very much to be honest. I built the Amati New Bedford Whaleboat, a large scale model which was constructed from the inside out over a strongback former - not quite PoF but not PoB either. That was a little more pleasing but still fell a long way short of my expectations. And I'm currently rigging the Vanguard Models Alert (1777). So, I'm very new to wooden ship modelling and this will be my first PoF style build. I have been a modeller in plastic on and off since 1965 and have built dioramas before.
I'm enjoying this new area of our hobby very much and learning every day which is very exciting for me. I love sharing my experiences on the forum and the writing and the building are mutually reinforcing if that makes sense. I make models to write about and writing about them encourages me to build.
As a novice, I write as a novice, and mainly for other novices. If you've already finished a PoF Victory built from scratch with Starbucks' coffee stirrers, you might find me a bit of a plodder, waxing lyrical about something that you learned twenty years ago. If you are a historical expert, you will find me annoyingly casual about dipping into the fantasy end of shipbuilding, though I do intend to build Emma the boat as well as I can.
I am a finger-painter in the world of fine art, a burger flipper at Claridges, a toddler attempting a marathon. As to succeeding with this project I have two chances - slim and no.
So there you go. As the great maritime philosopher Popeye said,
So build your expectations accordingly. 
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Hi Smithy, I enjoyed reading your post about building Emma. If you look at the real boat's history you find she was a schooner at one point, used to haul lumber, and then a pleasure boat. I built this kit, took about 3 years (I'm slow) and it was my only plank on frame model until I built the Capt. John Smith's shallop kit. I am attaching my build log in case you might want it. I made all kinds of mistakes but I like how it turned out.
Guy
Guy
Thank you Guy,
My narrative for the diorama expands very nicely with the thought of converting my Emma into a pleasure craft. I'm still working out the details and I think I've narrowed the possibilities down to just one.
It will be useful to read your build log and perhaps avoid making the same mistakes over again - I plan to make plenty of my very own.
Keep posting . Keep updating.
Building my first ( a Ketch kit)
Its very humbling.
Building my first ( a Ketch kit)
Its very humbling.
Of course! This one will really take off soon and run, gallop throughout the winter frosts.
Humbling?
Yes it is not as easy as it looks to build…..to humble to be humbled ( my Ketch) in awe of skills required.
G'day Smithy,
I will pull up a chair and occupy it when I have time...
Sounds like an interesting build, looking forward to more.
Cheers,
Stephen.
I will pull up a chair and occupy it when I have time...
Sounds like an interesting build, looking forward to more.
Cheers,
Stephen.
Ah. Now I understand. Yes.
I was very good at the plastic aeroplanes. After fifty years who wouldn’t be. Then I found wooden ships and eek! I was a beginner again almost. I didn’t know the words, couldn’t read the plans, couldn’t do it!!!
But without the possibility of failure, success has few rewards and now I’ve promoted myself to novice the satisfaction with what my hands are doing is HUGE.
I made a mast for my Alert yesterday and took the day off today to savour the feeling.
Keep at it Monkey, it’s worth feeling humbly lost for a while.
Drop in and out as it suits you, mate. I’ll try to keep it interesting for you.
Looking forward to watching your build. Back in 75 I built the Dumas kit of Emma. It was made for RC and was a nice kit.
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Looking forward to looking forward. 
What a lot of sail on a small boat!
Thanks for this Steve. It’s a good price and I’ll certainly buy one when my bibliomoratorium expires towards the end of the month. (I have been challenged by a son who thinks it’s impossible for me to survive an entire month without buying books. It’s been an interesting experiment so far with many curious side effects. I’m looking forward to the 24th!)
Hello Gravman and welcome.
Fifty years ago. I was in a model making hiatus in 75, as an eighteen year old airman living in barracks with little space for any delicate hobbies. I seem to recall that drinking and music were the major entertainments, and chasing women of course.
Time passed.
The passage of time is the theme of the diorama. I’m going to build my Emma (shall I call her Emma S?) at the end of a very long life. Don’t be dismayed though, it’s a happy scene I’m planning.
Looking forward to looking forward.
The log is well underway Peter, and I haven’t even officially opened the box yet. I’ll try to do that today with the traditional review of the kit. I think that's a useful thing to do because it will remind me that most readers haven’t actually built an Emma. When we get head down in a build it seems to be a common error to assume that everyone knows as much as the person with the model in front of them does, and that can make for a boring story.
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In-box Review
The box is open!
There are things in there that I like very much and of course, some things that are less impressive. It's not a new kit. There's a 2009 copyright date on the box but the instruction book is dated 1997. There won't be any 3D resin in here, just wood brass and string.
And some printed paper labels to stick on. I won't need these and even if I was making THE Emma C, and not my Emma S, I think I'd be able to hand paint in that rustic style.
There are three pages of parts list. I won't bother checking everything off against it, because anything missing can easily be replaced and there's going to be a lot that I won't use, at least not in the way that was intended.
Oh dear. I'd forgotten that I'd forgotten how to work in imperial fractions. Fractions make frictions! Thousandths of an inch are slightly more familiar from setting spark gaps back in the days of my old British cars but I've generally worked with metric measurements all my adult life. That will inevitably cause me some mathematical problems but it won't do me any harm to flex the old brain a bit.
I understand that in American 1/32 scale is also known as '3/8 scale' or 3/8 inch = 1 foot 0 Inches. I really don't know why Europe changed to the far more complicated metric system. Whatever were we thinking?
The instruction book is comprehensive. It's nearly 40 pages long and contains a lot of text and many drawings. It will be very helpful by teaching me not only what must be done but also how to do it. It's the best manual that I've ever seen in a kit, at this stage. I haven't actually read it yet and there might be devils in the detail, but overall, I'm impressed.
There are four large sheets of plans. The Rolling Stones album is not included in the box but it's handy to give you an idea of the size of the boat.
The plans are really nice. They include all of the 'blueprint' elements for taking measurements from as well as a gazillion drawings of particular problem areas. No space is wasted. The sheets look hand drawn and I'd be happy to have them hanging on my wall as artworks. It will be a pleasure to use them.
There are some white metal, brass and wood accessories and a few skeins of reasonable ropes. Less than I'm used to but I won't miss the guns etc.
And then my face fell like a red-hot ball-bearing in a bucket of butter.
Moving onto the wood, this is a fret full of frame components. It is making me fretful, for sure, as well as antsy, fidgety, itchy, twitchy, querulous, whiney, worried, concerned and perturbed. Somewhen in the mists of time since I bought this last year I made a common beginner's mistake and confused boxwood with basswood. Unfortunately, this kit appears to be basswood throughout with the exception of the spars which are beech dowels.
It's soft and splintery, and the char extends across a lot of the reverse surface where it seems to have burst into flames under the laser. This is bad news to me because making tight joints and decent surfaces will be so much more difficult than it would in a harder, stronger wood. It also explains why this kit is often criticised for the fragility of the construction method. Thin frames in box or pear are strong enough but in something close to balsa, I'm going to have to be very careful not to bust it. I built a balsa flying aircraft model as a kid. It exploded into fragments on its first flight and I still remember the anguish!
There's some of the spectacular charring. Look carefully around the gratings and you can see the wood splintering.
This sheet isn't so bad. There is considerable variation in timber quality from piece to piece.
This sheet of deck beams (?) is quite nice.
The thickest piece contains the keel. It's bent a little bit but nothing to worry about. The thing that's on my mind is the difficulty of cutting rabbets and so on in wood that I can crush so easily with a fingernail. I'm going to be doing most of my cutting with very sharp blades, scalpels mostly.
And here's a snap of the stripwood. Or a splinter of the stripwood. The bundles of wood of different sized were secured with the sort of cheap sticky tape that leaves its glue behind when it's removed yet sticks strongly enough to rip a layer of wood away at the same time.
There is a LOT of stripwood in this kit. And for building a plank on frame, woodwork-orientated, show-stoppingly perfect model boat, it's mostly awful.
Hang on a minute though. Who here is expecting me to make a "woodwork-orientated, show-stoppingly perfect model boat"?
A very common mistake in diorama work is to separate the building of the model from the telling of the story. That way one can end up with a perfect model in a mismatched scenic setting which ain't the same thing as a diorama, not at all.
Let's take the longer view and think clearly of this project as the building of a diorama, the telling of a story in a single scene. It's the story that matters, that's why my log is titled "Emma - A Diorama".
In my story, which I'll sketch out in more detail in a later post, Emma S will be a tired old thing. I need to show the workings of entropy. I need rot; peeling paint; things falling apart; wood softly returning to the soil. For the tale I have in mind, basswood is possibly the best of all possible woods as it's already falling apart in my hands.
So that's alright then.
~~~~~~~~~~
Also, If I can build PoF with this stuff I'll be a genius when I start one in pear or cherry or box.
A nice introduction my friend. Let the sawdust (laser char) fly!
I am pulling up a seat! Looks like fun!
Hasten me not for lo I am already the impatient one.
Welcome Rob, welcome to the asylum.
My goodness, the people ARE rolling up. So many watchers, so little accomplished!
You are all going to be so disappointed if I crash and burn.Oh, wait a minute, crashing and burning are both part of the plan…