Flutterby™! : HMS Sultana 2011-08-07 17:05:59.651861+00

HMS Sultana

2011-08-07 17:05:59.651861+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

Given the broken rib, I've acknowledged that I'm not going to be doing anything physical for the next 6 weeks. At least.

The plan for the office involves a bookshelf in which we'll have an area for display of a model. Charlene and I have both said "It'd be cool to have a boat model". Because, of course, every cherry motif office has to have a ship model in it. Part of that "man cave" thing.

I sat down and started working on the Canon Creative Park papercraft model of the Esmerelda, but on Friday realized that I'd screwed something up, and to fix it I'd have to go back and rebuild large portions of the hull.

So I thought about how the papercraft thing was hedging my bets, how I really needed to stay the hell off these ribs for a month and a half, and yesterday we wandered over to Hobby Town and left with the Model Shipways schooner Sultana.

And that, of course, got me home and Googling and to the modern recreation of the topsail schooner Sultana, launched in 2001 and the book Schooner Sultana: Building a Chesapeake Legacy.

So a "open this box and you have everything you need to build this model" (which is already revealed to be a lie, but I'll go into that with the build notes) has turned into "and I need to spend a bunch more on getting references", 'cause although the plans are good it'd be really nice to have pictures of detail every time I get stuck.

Speaking of pictures: an April 2003 trip aboard the Sultana, an August 2003 longer cruise aboard the Sultana.

And a correction: Apparently boats of that era were routinely covered in beef tallow below the waterline, and were therefore off-white below the wales.

(Though I'm pretty sure that in the original period that this ship would have sailed, the section below the waterline was covered with pitch and dark brown, not white. Lead oxide in those quantities would have been moderately expensive, and I don't think provided any real protection...)

The kit box says "contains everything you need". Uh. Maybe. If, on the way out of the hobby shop, I hadn't run into the model shipbuilder's club who was meeting there yesterday morning, and in that club a guy who was rebuilding a recreation of a whaling vessel sunk somewhere up in Canada from archeological notes, nail and peg accurate. Including the adze marks, where he had that from his reference material.

Did a bunch of carving on the hull today, but I'm going to plank it, just for detail's sake.

Are you going to build it inside a bottle? I'm thinking a ship in big percodan bottle might look good. Of course, the ship might not get built after emptying the bottle.