What Is My Time Worth, Part 5: Standing Rigging

So with the masts in place, it's time to start doing the rigging.  This is the area where most gamers start saying things like, "Oh, I can't do that."  Truth be told, looking at a finished model without seeing how it was done can be a little intimidating.  There are, however, several guides available to the modeler that will walk them through the process.  Some of them are online, and a good one is at my buddy Vol's blog: http://volsminiatures.blogspot.com/ .  Look for "Rory's rigging guide", as it is in several entries, and some can be purchased.  Personally, I use Rod Langton's guide, which is pictured below:

They now cost $22 from Waterloo Miniatures here in the US,
but to me it's been worth every penny.

I will try to follow the rigging instructions step by step, as they are outlined in the manual.  That is probably the quickest way to see how we go from this:

Nice enough, but naked.

to this:

Now, she is starting to look like a sailing ship.

The first step is drilling the holes that will let us run the rigging.  Normally I would do this before the hull was painted, but decided to wait on this ship so that all the steps would be in a logical order.  If  you do this, you will have to touch up paint on the hull and possibly the deck when the drill bit goes through and scratches your work.  The picture below is from the rigging guide, and shows where the holes need to be:

Holes A, B and C are each .5 millimeters with hole D being .7 millimeters, but I drill A with a .7 millimeter drill bit as well.  That's because there will also be running rigging going through that hole.  You'll also see a handwritten note about an extra hole near the bow.  That's so the bowsprit can be rigged.  It's mentioned in the book, but not shown on the reference sheet.  There is also a .7 millimeter hole at E, which I should have mentioned in Part 4 but apparently didn't.  To give you an idea of how small these drill bits are, here's a picture of them:

.5mm on left, .7mm center.  The big one on the right is 1/16 of an inch.
I get my small bits from Micromark. https://www.micromark.com/

1. Here, we drill the holes at A, B, C and the one I have written in.
2. Next comes the .7mm hole at D.  The manual also says to drill the hole at E here, but I do that before the masts are installed.To drill the nine holes in the hull took me about 23 minutes, including touching up the paint where needed.  Next comes the stays, or the lines that run between the masts.
3. This runs from the bowsprit, around the left side of the foremast, over the main yardarm and through the hole drilled there earlier.  In the photos below, it's highlighted in orange and took 23 minutes to complete.  
4. This line runs from the foremast, over the main yardarm and through the hole where it's tied to the larger string.  It's highlighted in bright green. 
5. The gammoning of the bowsprit comes next, and it's done in purple.  This helps hold the bowsprit in place on the real ship, and does the same thing here by keeping it from bending up.  It's hard to see in the photo, but it's done in a figure 8 shape that also runs lines out to the spritsail yard.
6. After all that, the next line is pretty simple.  It runs from the mainmast over the crojack yard and secures the mizzenmast.  You'll see it in bright yellow.  Steps 4-6 took 44 minutes total.
7. Finally (for these threads) is what the manual calls "a long length of thread and it finishes off the lower stays.   It runs all over the ship, and you'll see it highlighted in pale blue.  It took 27 minutes to install.  The total for standing rigging to this point: 106 minutes, or 1.76 hours.

Highlighted lines are explained above.

Next up are the ratlines, and this is where I do things a bit differently from the Langton manual.  When it was written, When my copy was written, there were no photo-etched brass ratlines, with a mesh being used instead.  The manual recommends those mesh ones be put in after all the standing rigging is in place.  I find that's too hard to do with the brass ones, so I install them before I install the backstays.  They come in unpainted brass (as seen below), and I simply spray paint them black and then seal them with a spray of dullcoat.  After that's done, I cut them from the sprue, touch them up with a black Sharpie, and install them.  It's never an exact fit; you have to cut some off of the top to ensure that the bottom sits on the channels like they're supposed to.  It took 28 minutes to install the six lower ratlines, and 17 minutes to install the six upper ones.  It takes less than 5 minutes to paint and seal them, so I called it 3 to make this step an even 48 minutes.

I'm pretty sure this picture is larger than life-size.

After this is done, it's now time to do the backstays and remaining stays.  The manual says to start from the mizzenmast and work your way forward.  This makes senses, because it gives you more free space to work in.  You take another "long length of thread," and run it up and down the mast three times to give you the backstays.  After you tie that off to the mast, you use the remainder to make the other stays running towards the bowsprit.  I've tried to use different colors to show how the lines go up and down, but may not have been too successful.  Anyway, the times for each mast are:

      8.   Mizzenmast: 35 minutes
      9.   Mainmast:    28 minutes
      10. Foremast:     25 minutes

Lines from earlier steps have been erased (although not very well).

And that gives us a total of 88 minutes for the backstays.  Now, we're almost done with the standing rigging, with all that's left to do being rig the bowsprit.  Rather than take another picture of the ship and having to erase more lines, I'm going to be lazy and use a view from the manual.  

   

   11.  This is one line, tied in the center at X, then run in numerical order (number 2 are the holes we drilled back in step one) and tied off under the bowsprit at 3.  Time for finishing this line was 19 minutes. 

Total time for doing all of the standing rigging was 261 minutes, which works out to 4.35 hours.  When combined with the other times I've recorded so far, this gives us a total of 11 hours and 28 minutes, which we can round to 11 1/2 hours.  In the next "What Is My Time Worth" post, I will do the running rigging and bring this project to an end.