Building the Peregrine Galley: Main Deck Details
At this stage, we have the basic hull form completed, but there are
lots of little details that need to go on the main deck, including
lots of cannons, ladders, capstan, bitts, and even furniture for the great
cabin. All of these need to be built before we proceed to the
quarterdeck and forecastle.
Harold Hahn in Ships of the American Revolution and Their
Models includes a nice drawing showing the scaling of
18th-century guns. He has given permission to post the drawing in the
Ship Modeling FAQ, found here.
Scale his drawing to match a 6pdr cannon and use it for patterns.
The gun carriage is constructed out of 2-ply cardstock. Since we are
working at a very small scale, you can simplify the plans somewhat.
You need the sides (including the stair-step sides) but you can leave
out the axle. You need the base and the front and back as well, but
you can leave out the quoin as it won't be visible anyway. I find it
faster to make them assembly-line style. Make 20 gun carriages and
paint them red.
The wheels are made from a tightly rolled section of bond paper cut
into discs and smoothed with glue. These can be natural wood color or
painted black. You will need to make 80 wheels, 4 for each carriage.
Glue them onto the carriages when done. After I built the cannons I
bought a rotary hole punch (like the kind they use to punch holes for
leather belts) and if you own such a thing I recommend punching the
wheels out of 4-ply card instead - it will go much faster and the
results will look better than my handcrafted effort.
The barrels are strips of paper rolled, glued, and cut to length.
Roll them at a slight angle so that they taper, and sand them smooth.
The breech end of the gun is made by rolling little glue-balls from
white glue with your fingers; this makes nice little hard spheres that
you can then glue onto the ends. Paint the guns black. I held them
on toothpicks and stuck them in styrofoam to dry; see the picture of
the forest of guns.
Glue the guns into place on the carriages. If your measurements and
tolerances are exact, they should fit snugly. Shown below are a bunch
of cannons mounted and lined up.
Rigging the guns is another challenge. At the time I thought that
blocks at this scale were too small to represent reasonably, so I
decided to simulate them with glue and paint. We need to make
the outhaul tackles (one on each side; these run the guns out for
firing) and the inhaul tackle (one at the rear, to pull the gun back
in for reloading), sixty in all for twenty carriages.
I set up a jig with two black threads to serve as reference. Tan
upholstery thread is used to simulate rope. To make the tackles, tie
a bit of thread to one rope. Tie it to the other. Run it back to the
first and tie it again. Now run it back to the second and tie it
again. Glue the knots on each side together with a dab of white
glue. We will paint the glue brown to simulate the blocks. The
result looks like a section with three ropes between the black
reference lines and one lin leading from each side. Leave about an
extra inch or two of thread on one side so that we can coil the
ropes. You can see the jig and some of the little tackles below.
Tying the knots can be a little tricky; I've found it easier to tie
the first two knots normally as overhand knots. Thread the first end
through the third knot and tie the fourth knot around the second.
This tangles the knots on each side together and prevents them from
moving apart. Practice until you can get this with a minimum of
deformation.
Once you have them all made and secured with glue, pull them off the
jig and paint the glue parts light brown to simulate the blocks.
Next, make rope coils on the long ends. Cut the end to something
reasonable (a little over an inch) and coil them in your fingers. Pur
a little glue between your thumb and index finger and rub it around.
Touch the end of the coil to your fingers and clamp shut. Now use
your free hand to "wind" the rope into a coil centered
around the glue in your fingers. This technique actually works pretty
well in producing reasonable looking coils; the result is shown
below.
Now it is time to rig the cannons. Secure the cannons to the deck
with a little bit of glue. One outhaul tackle goes on each side,
short end (first know) fastened to the rear of each side and the long
end to the bulwark, relatively low (below the level of the muzzle).
The inhaul tackle is secured with the short end on the deck, the
second know at the rear of the carriage, and the coil end behind the
carriage. It is easiest to approach this by doing, for example, all
the inhaul tackles at once, followed by all of the right side
outhauls, and so on. Also, you should sort the tackles by length
before starting (there will be slight variation) and ensure that the
inhaul tackles are similar in length and that the outhaul tackles on
each carriage match. The result with the tackles rigged should look
something like below:
We're not done yet. On the back of the cannon is the cascabel where
we secure the breech line to; you'll notice that we did not do this
while making the cannons themselves. The easy way to make the whole
assembly, with the breech line wrapped neatly around the end of the
cannon, is to make it separately and add them after the fact. Roll a
thin stick out of tissue paper and color it black; this will be the
cannon ends. Wrap a thicker stretch of rigging cord (sz 8 perle
cotton used here) around it and secure with glue. Once they are dry,
cut them off and trim them down. You can see the (before cutting)
cannon ends below:
Once these are separated, you can glue them individually on to the
ends of guns, and once that is secured, you can glue the ends of the
ropes to a point near the midpoint of the gunport, close to the
opening itself. See below.
Finally, note that there are 11 gunports per side (22 total) but only
20 cannons. Closer observation will reveal that the front pair of
gunports are for chase armament - there isn't enough space on deck for
two guns to fire out the sides without fouling each other. However,
we canot put guns in the second gunport without running into the chase
armament. My guess is that in the real ship, the guns that go in the
second gunport can be rerigged to serve as bow chasers, swapping roles
as needed. Thus, for this model, we will mount the guns out the side
of the second gunport and leave the chasers empty.
Anyhow, the cannons, once installed, sure make for an impressive view!
The great cabin in the stern will be visible through the windows. We
need to add any details here before attaching the
quarterdeck as we will no longer have access once the quarterdeck is
in place.
In the great cabin (the large room at the stern) we'll want a largeish
table as a chart table, a bunch of chairs, a map chest (perhaps with a
bottle of nice brandy on top) and a bookcase or two. Make these out
of little bits of card; all the structures are very simple and easy to
make on your own. The table legs are made from rolled sticks of
tissue and glue as it is difficult to roll even bond paper down this
thin.
Ordinarily the captain's cot goes in the starboard room and the port
side is a guest room, but when the quarterdeck goes on top and the
cannons are run out, you can't see any detail in these rooms
whatsoever, so there's no need to build these things.
After you rig the cannons in the great cabin (just the breech line;
you probably don't need to have the tackles set up), you can install
the furniture.
After you install the real stern, you can shine a flashlight through
the side windows and see the cabin interior through the stern.
Impressive stuff.
The ladders are very simple; just bits of double-ply card edge-glued
together. You should size the ladders to the actual hatches
themselves and ensure that they reach down to the orlop deck. Below
are a couple of ladders, one with glue still drying.
You should install the ladders before proceeding much further with the
fittings. I found it easiest to pass them under the nearby hatches
and then gluing them from beneath; this requires some skill with
tweezers but allows you to make the ladders their full and proper
width (which wouldn't fit down the ladderways themselves. The main
deck ladders are installed as below:
Note that the midships ladder doesn't run front to back; I thought
this was a more believable ladder arrangement given the size of the
ladderway.
The capstan is used for hauling big things like the anchor cables
(with anchor attached); it consists of a drum with holes where you can
insert bars. Men hold on to the bars and walk in circles to turn the
capstan, which pulls in whatever rope is wound around it (usually a
messenger cable that is then attached to the main anchor cable).
Constructing a capstan is pretty simple. The capstan is drawn on the
Chapelle plans, so you can use this as a guide. Make a tube out of bond
paper; this will be the central shaft. Make six whelps (the
protruding side parts) out of double ply card and make little
triangles to fill the space between them. On the top go two discs
(with holes for the shaft in the center). These disks sandwich six
little bits of card such that when fully assembled, there are little
holes where the bars would go (we won't actually make the bars as the
bars are installed immediately before using the capstan and are
removed immediately after, so the bars are never in unless the ship is
weighing anchor). Paint the whole thing red.
In my absent-mindedness I omitted the square platform that the capstan
sits on; this is not really visible in the finished model as the
capstan is mostly hidden by the quarterdeck, but you should add a
2-ply red disc at the bottom of the capstan and mount the whole thing
on a 2-ply square of brown card.
The riding bitts are the heavy timbers that the anchor cable is wound
around and consists of upright posts, knees that brace the posts, and
a horizontal bar. This is also depicted in the plans from the top and side and
is pretty easy to construct. I made the knee and the posts out of
4-ply card, cut to shape, and added two more pieces of 2-ply card on
each side of the post to simulate a joined post-knee construction.
The horizontal bar itself is constructed from a paper "box"
with cutouts to accomodate the posts. Paint the whole thing red. I
don't have pictures of the
construction process but it is all straightforward and intuitive for
anyone familiar with paper model making. The end result is shown below.
The bowsprit is not stepped on the keel but is instead held by bitts.
This is a simple construction where the heel of the bowsprit goes
through the gap between the timbers and are thus secured above the
deck. I recommend using a stick or something so you can measure
exactly where the bowsprit will end up to ensure that the gap between
the timbers is where it needs to be.
This is the "chimney" that leads the the galley below decks
where the ship's cook works. Note that on the plans it is rectangular
when it goes through the main deck, but flues are usually circular at
the top. This is easy enough to construct. Roll a tapered cone out
of bond paper and cut to the appropriate size. Cut a large V-shaped
chunk out of the cone near the top so that the top can come down 90
degrees. Finally, to get the rectangular bottom, pinch the cone to
make two pairs of creases in the appropriate location and mount on a
rectangular piece of card. Paint the assembly black and mount on a
slightly larger brown piece of card (representing the reinforced area
around the hole. The result is below.
Hang on to this piece; we will install it much later, after the
forecastle goes on.
The pumps are shown on the plans near the mainmast. These are also
simple to construct, consisting of a cylinder of bond paper, two
"sticks" made of rolled tissue (representing the pump shaft
and the lever mount) and a piece of 2-ply card for the pump handle
itself. Everything should be black. The finished pumps appear below:
These are pretty easy; make the grating itself from 1mm strips of card
colored as the deck.
Make the trim from darker bits of card. Finally, use a 2mm strip
around the entire edge to raise it a bit. The finished gratings
appear below.
Do not install the gratings quite yet; we will do that in a moment as we install
the anchor cables (which go down the hatch into the hold).
Hawse holes are the holes the anchor cables pass through. The outside
end of the holes is shown on the plans. First, glue a bit of card
over the point where the hawse hole will be to reinforce it. Paint it
to match. Take a pin vise and drill a hole at that point going
straight back. Clean up and repaint as needed, making sure the hole
is clear and wide enough for the anchor cables to go through.
I use the drawings of anchors from the Anatomy of the Ship book on the
Royal Caroline. You can probably use any appropriate period anchor as
long as it is more or less the right size.
The anchors themselves are 4-ply card cut out to an anchor shape with
a sharp knife. Add two little triangles on the ends of the hooks and
paint the whole thing black.
The anchor stock is carefully made out of paper to match the drawing.
From the top, the anchor stock should taper in a bit; from the side,
the top should be flat while the bottom tapers up. Also, make sure
you cut two appropriately sized holes so the "metal" part of
the anchor can go through the stock (and also remember that they are
not in the same plane but are off by 90 degrees). Color the anchor
stock brown and edge-glue the parts together. When dry, use thin card
to make the metal bindings that go around and install.
Finally, make a paper loop out of card, glue it on the end, and paint
it black. The finished pair of anchors are pictured below.
Now we need to attach the anchor cables. Get embroidery floss from a
craft store in the tan color and cut some cord with it. What we want
to do is to form a loop at one end and secure the loop with thread
wrapped in two places. This is what they did on real ships. Thus,
step one is to make a loop and tie it together with black thread at
the join. Wrap it around a few times and tie it off.
Next, we tie and wrap the end on the other side of the loop, forming a
nice circle. After that end has been tied down, cut off the excess.
We thread the loose end through the ring in the anchor and then pass
it through the eye of the loop we've just created. Bring the loop
down to the ring and we've secured the anchor to the cable.
The anchors, riding bitts, and bowsprit bitts have to go in a certain
order. Let's show that here.
First, we need to thread the anchor cables through the hawse holes.
You'll need the assistance of needle and thread to do this.
Next, we install the bowsprit bitts and the riding bitts. These have
to go in after threading the anchor cables as it is much harder to
thread the cables after these pieces are in the way. After gluing
down the bitts, wrap the anchor cables around them as shown and secure
the cables with glue. Also, thread the anchor cables through the
front corner holes of the forward hatch, as shown.
Form coils out of the remaining ends of the anchor cables and glue
them to the orlop deck. Glue the hatch in place afterwards. If you
look very carefully down the stairs (not shown in the picture below)
you can even see the coils...
Cannons
Great Cabin Furniture
Ladders
Capstan
Riding Bitts
Bowsprit Bitts
Galley Flue
Pumps
Gratings
Hawse Holes
Anchors
Installing the Forward Fittings