La Belle 1/48

As you mentioned, that you are searching for onformation about rigging.....I just remembered a web-page with a lot of thesis written and published by the Texas University

http://nautarch.tamu.edu/

here you can find with this link a master thesis written by Catharine Leigh Inbody Corder dated December 2007 with the title:

La Belle: Rigging in the Days of the Spritsail Topmast, a Reconstruction of a Seventeenth-Century Ship's Rig

Synopsis:
La Belle's rigging assemblage has provided a rare and valuable source of knowledge of 17th-century riggin in general and in particular, French and small-ship rigging characteristics. With over 400 individual items including nearly 160 wood and iron artifacts, this assemblage stands out as one of the most substantial and varied among all available rigging assemblages and currently is the only assemblage of 17th-century French rigging published. Furthermore, French rigging in gerneral has not been as well definted as English rigging, nor has the 17th century been as well researched as the 18th. As such, La Belle's rigging assemblage has provided a valuable source of knowledge whose research will hopefully provicde a valuable foundation on which future studies can be built. Specifically, this project has attempted to catalogue these artifacts and reconstruction a plausible 17th-century French rig. This projects has further attempted to define the differences between the better known English rigging features and those more characteristic of the French and the Dutch. The reconstruction is based on the specific details derived from La Belle's artifacts as well as contemporary French and other continental sources such as rigging assemblages, ship models, treatises, and nautical dictionaries. Together, these have suggested that La Belle probably carried a relatively simple rig with decidedly seventeenth-century characteristics and a Dutch influence.


check this out:
http://nautarch.tamu.edu/Theses/pdf-files/Corder-MA2007.pdf
 
I did see the monograph. It’s very detailed and thorough, but it’s more complicated than I need for my purposes,
 
Heading into the home stretch on the model.
Completed most of the rigging. This is where there are deficiencies in the kit.
The blocks were pretty much unusable. Many of them even lacked holes to run line through. I discarded them all and used my collection of unused blocks from previous models. My blocks may not be of the highest quality, but I’ve never noticed block quality in looking at my models or anyone else’s.
The other issue is that the rigging information is sketchy and incomplete. I had to rely on online photos of various versions of the ship (which were hard to see which lines went where) as well as looking at how I rigged my previous models.
You may notice some loose lines on the deck. These will be used to tie down the ship’s boat.
I’m open to any suggestions.

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I still need to add the falconets, ship’s boat, lantern, flag, pennant , rope coils, and a couple of crew figures to show scale. Then some touch up on paint.
 
The kit did not come with the falconets. Several were found in the la belle’s wreck. The archeologists did not specify their length, but they wrote that the bore of the falconets was 2/3 that of the carriage guns. I could not find any off the shelf falconets that were the right size or period. I finally found falconet barrels at a Czech company, RB , that were about the right size and I modified them using parts from other swivel guns.

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La Salle would be happy! And you can be proud! You did a very good job........she is is looking very good!
And now ? After the ship is before a ship.......
 
The lantern that came with the kit was not something I wanted to try to construct. It consisted of 24 tiny photo etched pieces. Instead I bought a lantern (by Amati?) . Painted it and glazed it with Krystal Klear.

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That looks great. How long did it take you to complete the model?
 
Both the windlass and the ship’s boat were from Master Korbel. The kit didn’t come with a boat kit and the windlass required square holes and tapering that I didn’t think I could do successfully.

Beautiful model! So much to bring your eye into all of the details and the crew is first rate. I think I might end up looking for a windlass kit as well as I can feel a struggle coming on in 1:64 :)
 
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