Viking Ship (Sail) - Revell 1:60

[Jhoanor]

On the box it says 1:50, but measuring it will Reveall it is really 1:60. That will later turn out to be very convenient by the way!
This thread won't be a complete build log. This is where I am at the moment:


I wasn't planning to do this ship at all, but I wanted to do a better modelling of a sail, because I was happy, but not completely so with what I had made in this respect:
Vasa
Therefore I bought a very cheap kit, the (fantasy) Viking Drakkar from Směr to experiment with.
I didn't want to use paper again so I tried a cotton handkerchief, but it was not elastic enough.
Therefore I could not get the sails to be neatly filled with the wind.


However, thanks to the red/ochre banding of the sail I could correct it without it being too conspicuous. Making incisions and glueing them together again gave me nearly the sought after shape.
(With hindsight, I should have made five bands to begin with and glue them together over the whole length, then it would be even better)

It is not completely faultless, but I can live with it. The sheets have the same direction as the sails at its lower corners.
Overall the shape is good, but the painted cotton material is too coarse for me.

 

[Jhoanor]

The instruction had made me attach the one standing rigging line to the foremost cleat, but that cannot be true. I think you cannot wrap tarred lines around a cleat like that. And there are always lines more vertical like on the Bayeux tapestry.
So after a lot of searching I came to the conclusion that the rigging should be attached to either the frames or the gunwale. I can no longer make holes in the spars, and there seems to be none in the real Gokstad as well, so to the gunwale it is then. Chatgpt says 3 lines a side is appropiate for this size ship, so 3 it is.

I haven't cut the loose lines yet because I might want to make it look like this eventually:

 

[Jhoanor]

And I made the deadeyes. The idea is that if you take the top of the horn out of the rope-ring, you can turn it down, and the lower rope glides of. So the shrouds can be detached in seconds.
However, I don't see the added value of doing all the rope work again so I simulate it by de-tarring the lower rope with paint.

 

[Jhoanor]

I discovered that the oarsman didn't have benches, but had each their own chest to sit on.
Probably the Oseberg Chest 178
I made some on scale and I planned to put in the oarsman of the Směr ship.

However, to my dismay I turned out that the chests should be placed lengthwise.
Logical of course, because else the chest would flip out from under you.

Now I have to separate their legs with a fine saw, and reposition them under heat.
But I dont think that will turn out great.
Or I could just put them down being happy. Doing some prehistoric wave-like thing. But happy about what?

Oh wait, I know!

So that settles it. No oars. Well, they shouldn't be used with the sail anyway.
But before glueing them all in, I will first do that sail.

 

[Jhoanor]

I am going to use a 3D printed parral (or parrel) to attach the yard to the mast.

The idea comes from an excavated parral out of the Viking village in Dublin.

(Source) :
Finds both in the ninth-century Oseberg ship and at the early thirteenth-century Wood Quay excavation in Dublin have produced virtually identical parrels consisting of a flat semi-circle of wood with a single hole on each end.
These parrels were designed to sit on the aft side of the mast with ropes passed through each eye lashed to the yard. This created a closed loop to hold the yard in to the mast.
Binns experimented with another method on his boat Odin’s Raven in which he seized one end of the parrel rope to the yard, but led the other end over the yard from aft to fore, and then down to deck between the sail and the yard. By slacking this running end, he was able to open up the parrel when lowering the yard to keep it from binding.

That is what I am doing in the pictures (except that I didn't bind one end to the yard) and I can say it works. When under tension, the yard doesn't come down!