Hello Friends...
In the past, members have jokingly said that I am on
@Kolderstok 's payroll and I understand that. But tonight as I go with you through the construction process of the lifeboats, I want to illustrate why I am such a fan of the company.
So as you all probably know by now, the Willem Barentsz had two lifeboats - a bok (the smaller of the two lifeboats) and a schuit (the bigger one of the two. I have now established, with a reasonable amount of certainty, that "bok" refers to sloop and "schuit" refers to boat. First I will look at the smaller of the two boats - the bok or sloop.
If you look at the above drawing, you will see that the bok has squared-off stern and that is the way the boat comes in the kit.
Holding the sloop in my hand, I couldn't help but think that Hans has wry sense of humor. I can just imagine how he must sit and laugh at all builders trying to concoct this tiny little thing together.
Right from the beginning, it was never my intention to display the smaller boat on deck. At barely 7cm long, it is simply too small to show the details that I would like to incorporate. However, I still wanted to build it for a few reasons. As you saw last night, I used it to get closure on the placement of the windlass and secondly, I wanted to see if I could put it together.
Well as you can imagine it was a "gepriegel" fumble of the first waters, but in the end, I did it.
I was happy about the fact that I could build it without any glue residue on the inside. After it was used in last night's measurement, it was a case of mission accomplished.
Now let's move on to the "schuit" or boat, which as the larger of the two, is much more interesting.
The lifeboat that Hans has always supplied with his ships looks like this.
This the lifeboat from my Haarlem/Batavia which I am using as illustration.
And this is what the framework of the boat looks like.
As per usual this was the boat that Hans supplied as the bigger one of the WB as well. No surprises there. This picture shows the current state of build on the boat. Please note that it has the same squared-off stern as the smaller sloop.
But now if we look at the drawing below, we have a problem ...
Here you can clearly see that the boat is supposed to have a rounded stern and not a squared-off one. So what did Hans do?
Unlike a majority of kit manufacturers, he did not just supply a generic lifeboat - no, he redesigned it into one with a rounded stern.
If you look at the indication of the red lines, you can see the rounded stern of this framework.
Now to me that is impressive and is a sheer indication of attention to detail and paying attention to historical accuracy. It is a lot of extra work, because I will end up building three lifeboats of which only one will be displayed, but this is work I gladly accept. You may wonder why I am also building the bigger boat with the squared stern - the answer is easy: Practice!
I have to agree with you - that raw herring is also not on my menu!
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