The rudder bottom bracket if you want to have it copper colored too?
hawse bolsters if you include them. and the chesstrees but that looks like its about it.

Willyour quarter gallery have some rail, stanchions etc ?

Hi Meatbomber. For the quarter galleries I was thinking of basically just duplicating the 1 1/4 inch windows that I'll be attaching to the transom, but sticking them out a bit with some more diagonal pieces connecting them to the hull.

DOH did i write quarter gallery, i meant quarterdeck of course..

Paint day. After looking at a shiny fiberglass hull these many months I was happy to finally do some painting. I laid out masking tape above and below the 2nd to 5th plank lines and went to work with my white acrylic paint and brush. My shoddy, amateurish paint job seemed to inadvertently add some simulated wood grain details to the fiberglass hull. Works for me.

Two coats was enough to reveal that I hadn't scored the plank lines deep enough in several places to really stand out. Arg. So I took my scribing tool and retraced the lines freehand, a somewhat frustrating and time consuming enterprise. Then I applied a very light coat of paint. Much improved.

Next I taped over the white band and applied the black. Bye, bye shinny fiberglass hull look. Hello "it actually looks like wood" look. Happy days.

Before painting the port side I scored out the plank lines deeper. Much easier without paint already on them, but still took me about three hours. Painting was much quicker and more fun.

While I try to decide on the paint plan for the rest of the ship I started to prepare the bulwarks for their paint day.

Belaying pin racks. I made eight total to line up opposite the four channels. Seven holes per rack looked about right. I only bought 40 belaying pins from Model Expo so guess I'll need to re-up at some point.

I drilled two precariously thin holes per board for pinning directly under the inner rail trim. I used my leftover basswood plank wood so the pin racks are not going to be the most robust part of the ship. I'll wait to glue them in place once I decide on the bulwark's color scheme.

Andrew,
TM is really coming along fine. When you paint the bulwarks, be sure to coat and seal the waterways well. Mine have cracked and chipped a bit, and needed touch up to keep the wood from absorbing water. Maybe do the thinned epoxy coat before the paint?
Also, if you are concerned about fragility of the pinrails, an epoxy soak will stiffen them up really well.
I think your build concept will be a hit with the crowds. You do need a big pirates flag. Maybe have a contest for designs of a signature TM jolly roger?
And thanks for enlisting Lt Dan!

"... feel free to ponder how it might apply to a pair of bow chasers on a raised forecastle."

Andrew,
I have many firing gun barrels from past versions, design experiments, etc. I can select something that might work on bow chasers. But BP may not be worth the trrouble for the two guns. I'm thinking maybe a "smoke machine" approach. I have a bunch of that stuff laying around, too. Will see if I can come up with a workable system for you bow chasers - either BP or "smoke juice"
Advantage of smoke juicee - multiple firing. Advantage of BP - more smoke, but only one shot

Thanks Dan. Hadn't thought to epoxy coat the waterways. Will do.

Having some pirate flags would rule for when she's not sporting the stars and stripes. Btw, how did you make your awesome pennant?

I looked into getting some type of mini smoke machine but couldn't seem to decide what to do. I figured that combined with a speaker would be a bit safer for the kids and dogs that are going to be around the ship a lot. Will love to see what you might come up with.

Your TM will be a huge hit with the kids - so good point on no BP guns. Gives me an excuse to go back to working on the smoke juice system. I actually had a system installed in Syren during the early build, but it was too big and not enough smoke. But scaled down to two guns, I thnk it can work well. Some pics of the abandoned Syren system here:
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showp...&postcount=196
Sound - on board, I think it will be very hard to get enough volume from a speaker that will fit aboard. Again, I've tried, and in the house it sounded great. Ten feet out on the water, the sound just fades away. You might try an on- shore sound system with a big subwoofer. It can be triggered when the guns fire, and, being non-directional, I think it will seem the sound is echoing from the guns on the boat out on the water.
The pennant - pretty simple.... it's so long that it was hard to come up with material that would float and flutter in the wind. So I tried an opaque white plastic bag (one from Walmart I think, or you could use a garbage bag), using the SC&H approach of plastic for the banner.. Cut a band across the width of the bag so you have a continuous loop of plastic "ribbon" about 2" wide. Now cut that once so you have a continuous long ribbon.
Get out the permanent magic markers and draw your flag. Mine has lasted a few years and still looks fine. The plastic is really tough and takes the wind whipping very well.
I used a straight edge to make the red stripes. The white stripes are simply the white color of the plastic bag. To make the "stars", I first drew a circle with a blue marker for each star. Leave the circle hollow - that's the white "star". Now fill in the rest of the blue field around the stars with the blue marker. Repeat on the opposite side - easy cuz you can easily see the pattern thru the plastic. Even at the big 1/24 scale, the white circles have to be looked at closely to see that they are not really stars, and once fluttering in the wind from a few feet away, they look fine.

Dan. Thanks for the info.

More painting. Lots of painting this week: catheads, forecastle, swivel guns, knightheads, timberheads, main rail, inner rail, bulwarks, pin racks and poop. These models sure have a lot of terminology, but fun, fun, fun. I even had a couple of helpers to speed things along.

Bulwarks. Taking Dan's advice I coated the waterway strip with a 50/50 mix of clear epoxy and denatured alcohol, same as the channels. I ended up painting the bulwarks red (tapestry wine) and the inner rail trim brown (espresso). Looks like I'll need 72 screw eyes for the cannon tackle. Glad I pre-drilled all the holes.

Nameplate. I found some 1/2 inch wooden letters I liked at Woodenletters.biz. I was concerned about them falling off so I made an attachable nameplate with a border to actually wedge the letters in place. It adds some extra detail to the transom so double bonus.

Three pins and some wood glue/epoxy later... it was nice to finally see THERESA MARIE on the ship.

Quarter galleries? Thinking about it so I didn't paint the stern end. I'd probably make a match for the transom windows with a slanting roof, sides and bottom. We'll see.

I can't believe its been 25 weeks. its been a blur with your build. but I have to think its getting to the point in the build where its getting really exciting in that everything now is getting attached and taking shape. Very nice work and your lucky to have a nice crew to help.

Reading back a few posts I see that sound was brought up. I have a buddy here that came up with taking parts off eBay to get his sound system going. he did not like the ones from the hobby arena. I have to look it up and ill add it at the end here. it has built in 10w amp for speaker's and on his tug boat when he hits the horn it vibrates the water away from his hull. very realistic. He uses a nice pair of desktop speakers and cuts them apart for the smaller parts and then hides them on model. However Dans base speaker at shoreline does have the ability to use 15" base speakers and making for a real experience. Thanks for sharing your build.

G


Item: dc 12v Amplifier Board MP3 decoder board Dual-channel stereo 10W + 10W + Remote

URL: http://pages.ebay.com/link/?nav=item...d=181004140316

Alt URL: http://www.ebay.com/itm/dc-12v-Ampli...-/181004140316

Question. Is there any merit to putting a 2 1/2 inch or so protective ramrod near the waterline? Something like a 3/16 inch drill bit that would stick out past the figurehead to take any impact that might have missed the bowsprit? Would that have prevented damage to anyone's ship in the past?

Gary. Thanks for all the info and happy comments. Seems like having the ability to broadcast different sounds files could be a lot of fun, even if they can only be heard close to shore.

Andrew,
I'm thinking a ram would not be advisable - it would likely do pretty tremendous damage to another boat in case of collision. And if you hit a solid object, all that force on a ram would likely break it and the hull sideways or jam it straight back into the hull.
I hit a concrete wall on the pond where our club sails, and simply broke the bowsprit - a simple repair compared to fixing hull damage. (Note - make an extra one or two bowsprits when you have the original in-hand for comparison and have them on hand)

Having sailed in a small pond for club events where there were many boats and high maneuverability was needed (you can't sail a big square rigger in that environment - not enough "sea-room'), I used an external drive. I furled most sails (because gusts can easily overpower the external drive if sails are up) and used the drive to cruise around.

Seems your build will be very popular with the crowd, and yuo will want to sail near shore and probably other boats will be around too. I think you ought to consider adding an external drive to your rudder.

Dan

Yeah, I guess a protruding rod with a rubber bulb would have to be pretty thick to really protect the ship without causing more damage.

One of the things I did while I waited for the brig kit to arrive was have Rick at scalemodelcastings.com make me a drive pod. Here it is listed on his site now:

http://www.scalemodelcastings.com/Po...otor_p_87.html

First thing I'll need to do is figure out who can help me drill a hole through the rudder's metal axel for attaching the rudder servo. No way can I do that with the tools I have. Then I need to figure out how I'm going to attach the drive pod to the rudder without destroying the rudder. I hope to have that done by the time the weather warms up.

New figurehead. Alas, while I liked the way my combo mermaid and water dragon figurehead turned out, I couldn't get over the idea that it was just too small for the ship. So after a lot of searching I came across a 5 inch mermaid figure from an artist called Amy Brown. The polystone figure has a nice body arch that compliments the curve of the bow pretty well.

So I painfully pried off Tessie the mermaid and carved down Nessie the water dragon. Sigh. I might try adding Tessie to the transom or possible galleries along with another Netsuke carving later.

I had to cut the mermaid's twisting tail off but other than that she was good to go. Three pins looked to be good for securing her in place. I suspect I'll be replacing the leading arm at some point, but boy does she look beautiful right now.

Not sure if I want to try adding a split tail on either side, like the Starbucks siren has, or make a single tail hanging straight down to where the bowsprit lines are suppose to connect. Either way I think it's a big visual improvement from a distance from what I had before.

Transom windows. About half a year after making them... I finally got to the point of installing the transom windows. After scribing some transom plank lines and prepping the surfaces with lots of little holes I glued them in place.

The plan was to drill a hole and secure an L screw under each window, the closest thing I could really do to pinning. But once I had the windows on, I realized their bottoms were actually lined up with the deck. Not a good place to drill four holes. So I made a bottom shelf out of epoxy to hopefully give the windows a little more support.

Now that the windows are in place they look a little too big and not very well crafted. I did some touch-up with my X-acto knife to get them as good as I could. I think my "it looks good from X feet away" number keeps getting larger lol.

(Is there a cartoonist in the house. Here's my idea: I man with an r/c transmitter and a skipper hat is yelling at people at the shore next to his model ship. "Stand back! Stand back!" When someone asks why, he says "Cause my boat only looks good from a distance.")

So I decided to put making quarter galleries on hold for now and finish painting the hull. I really want to get the Theresa Marie water tested and figure out the rudder and propeller soon so I can actually get her in the water by spring.

Andrew,
She looks very good! A lot of progress.
For the rudder post, you don't need to drill through it. Just file a "flat" on the shaft and tighten the setscrew onto the flat. Dab the setscrew with some threadlock to hold fast.
Whoa...your figurehead is a real babe!