Rejuvenating masts and spars of historic sailing ships

Steef66 said:
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Sometime I write articles for De Modelbouwer, a Dutch modelbuilding magazine. So I wrote this article about: Rejuvenating masts and spars of historic sailing ships.

You can download this article as pdf.

Succes
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Thank you. Just had a quick look that artical that is going to be a bit challenging but I will definitely give it go .
 
Interesting post. I just finished reading a book about the successful effort in the mid 1700’s to save the dome on St Peter’s Cathedral in Rome from collapsing. The author, a civil engineer describes how the Pope, (Benedict VI) put together a team of mathematicians USING Newton’s mechanical analysis techniques to analyze it. The author claims that this was the first known attempt to rationally analyze a structure.

So, the question: Did these shipwrights back actually know how to use statics and bending moments to analyze masts and yards or did they shape them by intuition?

Roger
 
Roger Pellett said:
Interesting post. I just finished reading a book about the successful effort in the mid 1700’s to save the dome on St Peter’s Cathedral in Rome from collapsing. The author, a civil engineer describes how the Pope, (Benedict VI) put together a team of mathematicians USING Newton’s mechanical analysis techniques to analyze it. The author claims that this was the first known attempt to rationally analyze a structure.

So, the question: Did these shipwrights back actually know how to use statics and bending moments to analyze masts and yards or did they shape them by intuition?

Roger
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Nicolaes Witsen describe this method in his book in the 17th century. I'd just translated it and explained it, so you can use this method to make spars and mast in that way.
I think they know more in these day that you aware of. The same reason why Hemp rope is turned right-handed for more then 2000 years. It gives stronger rope, what we now these days can explain why. So the author you mentioned was maybe mistaken and wanted to be important to do something what was done never before. But we also know that the church don't supported science. So we can say that more scientist in older period used mathematics before (Rome, Greece, the pyramids etc.).
Or was it intuition? Who knows... or will ever know. For me not interesting to investigate, I build ships and just want to know how they did it. Not where the wisdom came from.
 
Until today I did not know there was any kind of mathematics or physics in mast making mind blowing.
 
Sutty said:
Until today I did not know there was any kind of mathematics or physics in mast making mind blowing.
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Without mathematics, physics and dynamics a ship wont sail and sink with the first storm. There is more necessary to get a ship that is stable on the sea.
 
I was under the impression that shipbuilders were like Floki in the vikings. Lol
 
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