Many thanks for the encouraging feedback people!
Mr Schönfeld: I see your first picture comes from Australian War Memorial; a most excellent database and one of my main sources for reference material today.
About your final question: that sounded a bit like a test.
-Feasability: I’d say go for it if it’s the subject you’re dreaming about for most of your life, and if you’re willing to commit many years to it. Don’t know how much time and/or effort you want to put in your undertaking. I do some intermittent kitbuilding in between long periods of research or tedious serial building, just to exercise and try out new techniques.
-Preparation/Research: Your subject demands a whole other level of historical research than is required for mine: there are no photographs, no living witnesses and minimal surviving artifacts. Archival resources will be present but this would be professional level archival research, quite different from a hobbyist’s picture browsing and asking around on social media groups. This seems to me to be the biggest hurdle, unless you're a (naval) historian.
I have some experience with heritage research in and around Antwerp: For an ongoing damage report on the carillon of the Antwerp cathedral we found a few scale models in the collection of Vleeshuis Museum. It was useful to extrapolate renewed versus older design of the bell support construction (nowadays it’s mainly housed in a steel reinforced concrete cage with Australian hardwood beams that turn out to be quite susceptible to frost-dawn erosion)
To get into the practice and theoretical mindset of the period shipbuilder I’d recommend Roubo’s L’Art du Menuisier, Diderot & D’Alembert, Encyclopédie (…) Charpenterie. and
Pierre Bougeur, Traité du Navire, de sa Construction, et de ses Mouvements.
Normally you can find all this as pdf’s on Gallica France. Thorough study of these works can take some time, unless you’re familiar with ancien régime French print of course. These are great resources for general construction principles, but not for cutting edge designs of the period you described. I can’t help you with that.
-Execution: If you’ve drawn your conclusions on the research and didn’t get stalled on the many, many gaps in information you’ll encounter, this will be the more relaxing part I guess. For practical things like the look of period shipyards I would refer to engravings and paintings of period construction sites and compare them to current wooden shipbuilding practice: wooden ladders are like modern ladders: not magical 10m solo long ones; same for scaffolding: every 2m per level because it requires human height to put the walking planks down. Builders get messy, resources get piled up around and stuff will be dropped everywhere. Don’t be too clean and certainly don’t be too symmetrical in the composition of your scene.
I know a few experts in historical woodworking in Europe who could undoubtedly give you much better resources about historical shipbuilding around Antwerp for your subject. Give me a pm and I’ll bring them along for your ride.
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