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I need to take a slight u-turn and cover the oar-effort. I skipped over this, partly because my photo numbering system was slightly out of order. The oar-effort was, without doubt the most tedious and difficult sub-assembly of the whole project. And in fact, due to a problem during painting, the oars of this build have continued to plague the model long after 'completion' (always an arbitrary concept). But I wanted to show you my methods, in the hopes that these will be useful to you.
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The oars for a Venetian Galley, or indeed, any Renaissance Era warship, whether Catholic or Muslim, differed considerably in shape from the oars used in subjects like the Greek pentaconter or the Phoenician trader/warship galley. Instead of a haft+paddle, what we have is an extremely elongated and very elegant wedge. The documentation I have for these oars indicates the oar was a continuous extremely fine wedge that began at or very near the working end of the haft. I don't have the precise engineering methods for these oars, but that seems to be the case. However, for the purposes of modeling, I decided to begin the wedge section about 60% down the haft. This creates a more discernible wedge that is easier to communicate to the eye in this scale, (and easier to model) and, in addition makes the haft-end of the oar thinner, for easier insertion into the rowing deck. Since the inner end of the oar is mostly obscured by the structure of the model, I felt justified in this approach.
I tried several different methods at the beginning, including taping a block of strips together in order to sand them en-masse in the interests of uniformity. But none of my other efforts worked. The method I finally hit on, similar to how I made the oars for the other galleys, involved shaping each oar individually and matching it against a prototype oar, making adjustments as necessary by eye and by hand. Time-consuming, but doable.
In the first photo above, you can see the initial blank which I created, which consists of a square rod @ 0.01 inches (Plastruct) and strip @ 0.02 X 0.o1 (Evergreen). Note that, although the wedge develops symmetrically from the center of the haft, I did not model it that way, instead adding material to one side. The next photo shows my sprue nippers having cut away the top end of the blade section, creating a rough wedge. Sanding one side only saves time, and the end result (with the edge of the oar trimmed to conform) is indistinguishable from a symmetrically prepared oar-blank. [Hope that makes sense.
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Having sanded that end of the oar with a light grit sanding stick, we then have a reasonably wedge-shaped renaissance oar in 1/700th Scale.
The problem is making more...
This ship would require 52 oars, which is without doubt, the most tedious process in this kind of modeling. I proceeded with the methods developed for the Phoenician Galley, that is, gluing a 'holotype' oar to a small piece of glass with plastic cement...resulting in a bond that can be easily broken later, and then adding a suite of oars next to the holotype one by one, using the holotype as a model for uniformity. As with the Phoenician, I made no measurements, but made sure to create the blank oversized, so that it could be trimmed after sanding. The idea is to trim the blade end very close to the end, to ensure full-width blades, and then trim the haft-end to match the holotype.
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In the third photo you can see one oar which has been sanded, but not yet cut to length, being compared with the batch of finished oars. In the fourth photo you can see that that oar, now trimmed and added to the batch. To the far right you can see an oar that was sufficiently different from the others that I excluded it from the batch. But I wanted to save it for later and not discard it, depending on how discernible irregularities appeared once the oars were mounted.
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And here you can see a problem with the oars that would persist through to the end of the build...warping. At the time, I thought bending them straight once they had cured would be a simple matter...
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Switching gears for a moment, I shifted my efforts to the sails. These Venetian Galleys are often depicted with bright red and white striped sails, something I thought I could tackle and was keen to try. Actually, modeling a galley with striped sails was one of my main motivations for this project, as I had never attempted this before, and I thought the end result would be quite striking.]
What are we looking at here? It's watered down modge-podge applied to a plastic lid, and then overlaid with cut up squares of white paper napkins. The napkin squares, each about 5mm square became very soft and fragile the moment they hit the solution, and could be pushed around and overlapped to create the sail material.
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Once it had dried, the sail material was so thin as to be translucent. So, I decided to paint it with some white and off-white acrylic.
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Concurrent with this effort, I spent some time painting a bit of decal paper with acrylic red. I believe it is Ferrari Red. Note the uneven 'brush-stroke' irregularities in the paint. This is intended and desirable.
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Once dried, the decal paper can be cut into stripes. The resulting stripe has an irregular quality to its color, which serves to weather the stripe and keep it from looking too much like a sticker.
The decal can then be applied to the sail material in the usual manner. Here you can see the first stripe applied to the sail material.