I took a break from working directly on the model this weekend and spent some time working on tracing/planning the rigging of the ship. I saw somewhere in the past where a modeler used Photoshop to make layers of rigging so that it could be viewed as individual layers or all of the rigging could be viewed at one time. I liked the idea, so I created such a file for the Endurance. Here are some examples from the PSD file of what I ended up with.
I scanned the outline of the ship from the plans and removed the rigging that was in that particular scan leaving me with just the ship. I took out the grayish background leaving the black outlines over a plain white background.
I then drew in the fore & aft standing rigging and the bowsprit rigging (each on their own layers and put them in a layers group. Shrouds, deadeyes and back stays were drawn on separate layers and groups and then the two standing rigging groups were nested inside a single layer group.
I then prepared individual layers for the different types of running rigging and added them to a running rigging group shown below with the standing rigging group made invisible (except two stays that I needed for attachment of the braces.
Each jib and its rigging was added to a jibs group shown below with the fore/aft rigging layer visible.
I then added the sails to a sails group and placed it under most of the other groups so as not to hide the rigging that was already added to the file.
Here it is with all groups/layers visible.
The big question - Was it worthwhile to go to the effort to do this? Possible not, but it was fun. I still need to do the square sail rigging, but that might require a front or back view to do. You do get a sense of where you need an eye on a block, which the instructions/plans do not mention. I also noted that there seems to be at least one block that needs to be a double, but I'm not certain if the plan calls for one. This is a fairly simple rig, but a more complex model such as a full square rigger might benefit more from this approach. I think the different colors of the lines will be helpful going forward.
The next step might be to number the lines by attachment point on the deck plan to make it quicker to identify where each line ties.