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Sovereign of the Seas - Mantua by Brian

Lees wrote about English ships. Regarding the model at Annapolis, we discussed this in February, 2011, during a tour of the museum with the model curator Grant Walker and he commented the SoS was a "modern" (20th century) model, not contemporary, and not especially accurate. Hope this helps.
Allan
 
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AllanKP69 said:
Lees wrote about English ships. Regarding the model at Annapolis, we discussed this in February, 2011, during a tour of the museum with the model curator Grant Walker and he commented the SoS was a "modern" (20th century) model, not contemporary, and not especially accurate. Hope this helps.
Allan
Click to expand...
There's another model at the Naval Academy museum, the St. George of 1701, that they claim is contemporary and that has its original rigging. It has pins on the fife rail above the beakhead bulkhead. I'm not saying the Sovereign of the Seas had belaying pins, but I think there may be enough evidence to question Lees date for adoption of belaying pins.
 
Thanks Ben!
There seems to be no end of exceptions. :( Looking now at photos of the St. George model and there are definitely belaying pins on the bitt cross pieces at the foremast in my photos. Dopey me for not seeing this a long time ago!
This may be an exception, but as the saying goes... never say never!
Thanks again.
Allan
 
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Ben Gilbert said:
There's another model at the Naval Academy museum, the St. George of 1701, that they claim is contemporary and that has its original rigging.
Click to expand...
I wrote a note and got a reply from USNA that it is indeed original except for a couple lines.

St. George was an exception but there were a lot of those back in the day. Apparently, she was used to experiment with pins at the foremast which makes sense as the Admiralty often tested new rigging layouts on specific first rates or second rates before rolling them out to the rest of the fleet. But then the Admiralty often waited decades to make pins a standard feature across all ships for various reasons, especially added cost and training in using new things.

One can argue either way, but maybe having pins would be the exception, not the norm for SoS. In the end it is good to have ammunition for both sides if anyone questions it :)

Allan
 
Going to change the deck planking to a shift 4 planking after some research. for ease of use 10cm, followed by 2.5cm, 5cm, 7.5cm. Typically the planks were 25 feet long so 1/78 = 9.77cm.

Brian
 
GrantTyler said:
3mm is very small to achieve scale size nails
Click to expand...
Sometimes it is best to leave them off. They were just small pieces of diamond shaped or round piece of wood covering the spikes that held the planks to the beams. Even hull treenails at this scale can wind up looking like a case of the measles if not done very subtly. Less is more in some things at these small scales.
Allan
 
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