Pieter wrote:
This looks very nice. Any plans of sailing her somewhere? I'd love to take some pictures of her.
Sailing? No. Although the schooner-brig configuration would not be soooo hard to sail, I stay with the "steam"-drive. And - if the gods of weather are friendly - maybe tomorrow will be the maiden-voyage of the finally finished Arrogante on our club-lake in Wuppertal (see
http://www.smc-wuppertal.defur further details).
But to go further with the report:
The propellershafts are usual 2 mm shafts with 4 mm sterntubes. For the bearrings the end parts of Robbe sterntubes were cut off and soldered in a 4 mm brass tube on which the supprts were soldered. The rudder is made from 0,5 mm brass, soldered in a slit sawed in a 2 mm brass tube. On the outside the rudder was clad with 1 mm sheet-styrene.
The screws proved a little bit tricky. As there are no screws to buy, that look at least a little bit like the original ones, I had to make them by myself. Fortunally the design of the screw-blades was quite simple, they were just long tapezoids with no pitch, so they could be simply cut out from 0,5 mm brass. The only problem was the hub. As the hub of the Arrogante was flat with the shaft going not only in but through it, I bought two normal M2 plastic screws, burned the plastic away (CHILDREN: DON’T DO THIS AT HOME! GROWN UPS: OPEN ALL WINDOWS AROUND!) and Voila! got a perfect hub. On these I soldered the blades, each in a 45 degree angle (and this was the tricky part, as when you solder one blade the other tend to fall off. You really are tempted to convert to buddhism to stand this procedure.)
The efficiency of this little and simple screws showed up quite sufficient (after all the Arrogant is not a speed-boat).
The next big part was the main deck. Although this seemes quite simple it is curved length- and crosswise AND I wanted to be able to take it off as a whole to get to the interior, so I couldn’t simply glue it to the beams. The solution was to stick a 1 mm balsa-deck with tacks to the beams and than laminate a layer of another 1 mm fibreglass/epoxy on it. After drying the deck could be removed and the points of the tacks were cut off. To hold the deck in place two 6 mm brass tubes were embedded in the stringers under the main deck with corresponding 4 mm brass pins embedded in the deck, which fit close in the tubes.
The slit between the hull and the deck is covered by a 2,5 mm wide halfround styrene profile.
Than I made my first fault: I spray painted the underwatership red. Later, when doing the research for the Masséna, I found out, that the french navy in the second half of the 19th century used solely Prussian Green as anti-fouling colour, so I had to repaint it green.
According to some good pictures of the Embuscade-class ship Protectrice (a smaller Predecessor of the Arrogante) I plated the hull above the water line with 0.3 mm platic film. This part was than painted black.
The Decks were planked with cherry vermeer.
The gunports in the fore and after part of the batterie should be shown open to give sight to the big guns, so these were drilled out and sanded to shape. The inside of these parts of the batterie got a somewhat basic interieur with the guns, a wooden deck and the bronze-plate to move the guns on.
The gunport lips are resin castings. For the closed side ports these were simply glued to the hull.
Than the funnel was made from styrene tube and the rudder-podest from balsawood. The grating in the tower are of etched parts as are the gratings of the muzzle-loaders and the tops of the skylights. The lockers for the hammocks are made from styrene. The hammocks themself are small pieces of paper tissue, soaked in a mixture of water, glue and beige acrylic paint and than rolled, folded and stuck in the locker.
Than I made a second mistake. As usual I made most of the superstructures from sheet styrene and painted them buff. Later I learned, that most of them were of clear varnished wood and only the tops of the skylight, the rudder-tower and the funnel were painted buff. I first tried to repaint is brown but this didn’t gave the antique-sailing-ship-like look so I later did most of the superstructures again in vermeer.
The first sea-trials were quite sufficient although due to the low freeboard the ship tends to gat a very wet foredeck.
To be continued ...