Mister Mojo Risin' . . .

 It's amazing what a little time away can do for one's creativity.  I didn't touch a sailing ship from March 17, 2020 to December 15, 2020.  Then, from 12/15/2020 to the time of this post, I completed X of them.  That's how I thought this post was going to go.

Instead, it has become a story about how your mojo can vanish and return.  I was working quickly and had 4 ships under construction, with 3 of them either ready to be, or in the process of being rigged.  Then, I walked in one morning and found a scene of partial despair.  Turns out that our 16-year-old cat had decided to hop up on my painting table during the night.  She hasn't done that in years, so why now?  No idea. 🤬 cat. . . . 

Of course, the most complete ship was the one that took the worst damage.  The Russian 46 gun ship had all the standing rigging and most of the running rigging done.  This turned out to be a good thing, as while the masts were all knocked askew, I was able to pull them back into line using the standing rigging.  The brass ratlines didn't come out anywhere near as well, though.  I wound up having to replace 3 of them, which meant I had to order a new set (they aren't something that I keep an excess stock of lying around).  

Starboard lower mainmast, starboard and port lower mizzen
ratlines. Clearly after being cat-ified.

The other two ships weren't as badly damaged, since they were sheltered behind the Russian.  Only one ratline went missing from them, and that was my fault.  I went to glue it back in place, dropped it, heard it hit the tile floor. . . and it vanished.  So, time to order TWO spare ratline sets.

Once those arrived, I was ready to get started again.  Then, the hospital called.  I've been needing some kidney surgery for a while but it had been delayed several times by COVID.  Now, they were ready for me on the 14th of April.  I'll spare you the gory details, since 1) nobody wants to hear them, and 2) I don't know any of them; I was unconscious for the bloody, cutting parts.  After an overnight stay for observation, I went home the next afternoon.  Oddly enough, the experience left me in NO mood to do any hobby type work.  Who could have guessed? 🤷‍♂️  Also, I realized that operating knives, scissors and glue might not be a good idea while under the influence of painkillers.  After all that drama, I was finally able to get back to work and get the three ships ready for their debut here on the blog.

Now, to be fair, they weren't all done from scratch.  Instead, along with working on my Trafalgar project, I decided to do some more unicorn hunting.  It's one thing for me to say that I finally finished up my Russian 46 gun frigate.  It's another thing altogether when I tell you that ship has been "under construction" since September of 2014!  In that time, the overall collection has gone from 86 ships total to 114 as of April 24.  So, even though he (Russians call their ships "he," not "she") was not the first one finished in this group, mere seniority gives him the first spot in this post.

Yes, I know the headsails are missing. That will be corrected.

The Quarter of Comparison hasn't made an appearance
in a while, so there it is.

Now, this is not his first appearance on the blog.  Back in January 2018 this ship was featured in a post called "Unicorn Hunting" (https://mymodelsailingships.blogspot.com/2018/01/unicorn-hunting.html).  I ended that post with the quote, "However, no matter what their future careers may take them, I'm determined to cut down on the size of the unicorn fleet."  So, just three short years later, here we are! 🙄

Remember, this is how the ship first appeared 
on the blog.

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that this ship isn't painted in the usual black/white scheme associated with Russian and American ships for this period.  There is, of course, a reason for that.  As I said in the earlier post, the Russian Navy didn't start painting their ships black and white until about 1802.  One of two of the 46 gun ships might have been around then, but they were all retired by the time the Russo/Ottoman War of 1806 broke out.  So, this ship gets an earlier style scheme.

Next up is a French 74.  She only had a furled sail knocked off during the Great Cat-astrophe (you know the puns here are bad; too late to complain now) so was easy to fix.  Truth be told, I got a little lazy with this ship.  The hull and masts are the same shade of yellow.  I doubt that they were ever this exact a match.  According to Boudriot's The 74-Gun Ship, French lower masts were usually black in home waters, and white in the tropics.  His information is for the the-Revolution navy of 1780.  I suspect the regulations stayed much the same, but the disorder of the Revolution made them much harder to obey.  Well, that's my justification for it anyway.

The last ship of the three is a Spanish 74.  As mentioned in an earlier post, my Spanish navy for Trafalgar is complete.  Instead, she will take the part of Intrepide in the French fleet, as that was a Spanish ship in French service.  I decided to try a slightly different shade of yellow for this ship's hull, and it was successful but not in the way I thought.  Instead of a weathered yellow, what I got was a look that I think is very similar to the varnished sides of the 1770s and earlier.  I don't think it dates the ship too terribly, and it is a different look than unending variations on yellow.

At this point, there are two ships left to do (an 80, and a British 74 Common) and the Combined Fleet will be complete.  That, to be honest, is an odd feeling.  I will still need to build some frigates for them, but all of the ships of the line will be done.  After that, just eight more British ships of the line will complete that fleet.  I owe the British one frigate, instead of the three for the French.  Still, the end is in sight at last!

For sticking this out until the end, here's some bonus content.  At the beginning of the post, I said there were four ships under construction.  Well, here's a sneak peek at number 4:

She's the USS Franklin, one of the 74s that the US Navy launched at the end of the War of 1812.  She's called a 74, but was actually pierced for 87 guns (DANFS says 63 x32 pounder long guns and 24 x 32 LB carronades).  You can do a plausible "what-if" breakout style scenario for her and a companion, but it's more likely that she'll spend most of her life under another flag as needed.

Finally, after reading my gripes about the cat, it seems that she deserves a picture here too.  So, without further ado:

The breaker of ships.

Climbed a mountain and I turned around . . . .

It's taken a little while to get this post up on the blog.  As my regular readers know, sometimes you just have to take a break from building sailing ships.  I have been putting ships on the Ironclads page, but apparently Blogger only tells people when I update the main page.  Oh, well . . . .

The title of the last post is a modification of the old sailor's song "Spanish Ladies."  Like I said, it's a slight modification as the original line went, "Farewell and adieu to you Spanish ladies."  I didn't think that fit too well into a post introducing two new Spanish ships, so I changed it.  Nonetheless, that song is the source for the title of the last post.  The song inspiration for this post is much newer, and probably won't be too hard for the readers to guess.

The two new ships in the post actually represent quite a milestone.  These are the last two ships needed to complete my Spanish Trafalgar fleet.  This is actually a bigger thing than you might think.  While I've been working on Spanish ships lately, this project has been (mostly) guiding my sailing ship building since about 2014 or so.  Consequently, I've worked on all three fleets, not just one.  There were 60 ships of the line at Trafalgar; right now I have 48 of them.  At this point, my fleet breakdowns are:
British: 19 of 27 SOL
French: 14 of 18 SOL
Spanish: 15 of 15 SOL.
I promise that there will be a post with all the Spanish Trafalgar ships together in the future.  

These two ships are from the 74/80 gun Montañes class.  According to Google Translate, the class name translates out as "Highlander," or "Mountain."  The first two ships (Montañes and Monarca) were built in 1794, the third (Neptuno) in 1795 and the last ship (Argonauta) was built in 1798.  They were well-designed ships, and Montañes was said to make 10 knots close-hauled and 14 knots running large in a fresh (force 5) wind.  All four ships served across the Spanish empire,with Montañes spending eight years in the Pacific and returning to Spain in 1803.  All four ships were at Trafalgar: Monarca and Neptuno were captured but sank in the storm that followed the battle.  Argonauta was also captured, but burned by the British after the battle.  Montañes  survived the battle but was out of service until February 1806 making repairs.  She remained in service until 1810, when she ran aground in Cadiz Bay during a storm.

So, with no further delay, here are the final two ships of my Spanish fleet at Trafalgar:

 And Now for the Brow Furrowing. . . .

As I mentioned in the last post, these models have some differences from the generic Spanish 74's that make me furrow my brow a bit.  As has been made clear on other forums, the Langtons say that their ships are generic types other than the named models, which do represent specific ships.  With that in mind, let's take a look at the deck plan of a Montañes class ship:

Taken from: https://www.todoababor.es/historia/como-es-por-dentro-un-navio-de-linea-de-74-canones-el-montanes/

For our purposes, there are three main areas of interest.  Those are the solid square on the poop deck (officer's cabins), the grates along the side of the waist opening, and the large square with four smaller ones in front of the waist.  This is the chimney for the ship's stove.  Below is a picture of my two ships before the masts were put in.

Hmmmmm.  Clearly the cabin on the poop is not solid, there are no grates around the waist, and that is definitely not a set of chimneys for the ship's stove just forward of the waist.  To me, these don't look like a Montañes class ship.  Now, let's take a look at NS3, the generic 74 gun Spanish ship of the line.

Well, now that's more like it!  We have the solid cabins on the poop, the grates along the waist AND the stove just forward of the waist.  There's even the curved rail behind the main mast.  Clearly the NS3/4 is the Montañes class of 74/80s, and I suspect that NS 21/22 would actually be the generic 74.  The stern piece in NS 21/22 is much closer to correct for the Montañes class ships than the stern piece for NS 3/4 would be.  The pictures below should make that quite clear.

So, what does this all mean?  In a perfect world, I guess I would rebuild my Spanish fleet using the correct hulls and sterns so that both types of 74 are correct.  😂😂😂 Yeah, like that's gonna happen!  I have spent too much time and money to throw all those ships out and start again.  Also, I've never had anyone at one of my games notice what I've discussed here.  Truth be told, I guess it only affects sticklers such as myself and Vol Williams. (You were right Vol, this is exactly what I was going to talk about!)  

Anyone expecting me to say anything bad about the Langtons can just surf off to another website right now.  Even with what I've described, I still prefer them over other brands.  GHQ ships are truly generic amazingly specific to the prototypes, as Vol and AdmiralHawke over at TMP have pointed out to me.  For example, the GHQ model of HMS Boyne actually has the appropriate figurehead for the ship!  What this means is that my bias against GHQ is based on two touchingly petty personal preferences: the GHQ ships feel too small,  and I don't care for their masts (I told you they were petty reasons 🙄) .  As for other brands, Navwar ships were rough when I started with them back in the 1980s and don't appear to have changed any.  Skytrex/Red Eagle ships are also unchanged from the 1980s, but they were better than Navwar back then.  When Rod Langton started his business, he really elevated the market for 1/1200 scale naval gaming miniatures.  Even with my nitpicking, I still think they're the best and I will keep building them.

Hello to you, Spanish Ladies

Obviously, the title for the last post was a takeoff on the "Day-oh!" lyric from Harry Belafonte's famous Banana Boat Song.  For this post title though, I've gone a lot farther back than the 1950's.

This post is particularly exciting to me, as it means I am coming close to finishing part of the Trafalgar Project.  Now that these two are built,  I only need to finish two Montañes class ships of the line for  the Spanish fleet to be completed.  After those are done, I will wrap up the French fleet (4 ships to build) and then the British (8 left to build).

Like some of my other recent builds, there's not a lot to say about these ships.  Good old 74 gun ships of the line, the backbones of almost every fleet in the Age of Sail.  One ship of the two is "at quarters," so is a bit more bristly than its companion.  What really sets the two ships apart are their paint jobs, and I'll talk about that after the photos.

Like I said, the two ships are basically identical.  The ship at quarters is at fighting sail, but other than that and the upper stern decoration, they are the same.  In fact, their catalog numbers are NS3 and NS4.  What I find interesting is how much different they look due to the paint job.  The ship with the single yellow stripe appears to be smaller than the other one, even though this isn't so.  Given the side-by-side photos of these two paint schemes, it's easy to see how someone on another ship several miles away, looking through a telescope or the naked eye, might mistake the ship on the right of the photo as being all black.  I tried to take a picture from 15 feet away (3 scale miles), but my current phone camera isn't up to the task, unfortunately.

The single-striper will stand in for the San Justo, as I think she was one of the ships mentioned as being "black" by some British observers.  I remember reading it somewhere, but can't find the source now.  There is, however, a model at the Greenwich museum that support the idea that she was all black.  It comes from a diorama of the battle that was originally built in the 1840's.  The diorama was disassembled in 1978 and all that is left are the model ships.  The models are not on display in the museum, but there are pictures of them on the museum website.  This is the San Justo:

You can find this photo online at: https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/539417.html

This was not a standard paint job for the models, as this photo of San Ildefonso shows:

This photo is located at: https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/539239.html

Pictures of the diorama taken before its disassembly are at: https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/68704.html .  Overall, I'm pretty confident that the paint scheme on my San Justo will pass inspection.

This is the last post for 2019.  When I post the finished Montañes ships we will be in a new decade!  In that post, I'll point out some interesting differences between those ships and these.  Those differences are a cause of some brow furrowing for me where Langton miniatures are concerned.  What is it, you ask?  Well, I will only drop you a hint by saying that Vol Williams already knows what I'm going to talk about. 🤔  Tune in next time!

Ray-o, Ray-ay-ay-o!

The last two posts shared a title, since both of them were about the Texas Broadside convention.  In case you didn't recognize the line, it's from a Jimmy Buffett song entitled, "A Pirate Looks at Forty."  Since my main game was about capturing prizes in the Age of Sail, I thought the lyrics of the chorus fit pretty well:

Yes I am a pirate

Two hundred years too late

The cannons don't thunder, there's nothing to plunder

I'm an over forty victim of fate

  For the title of this post, I've gone a little farther back in time than 1974.  Even with that, for those of us who are "of a certain age," this one should be an easy guess as well.  Just as with the previous title, this one is modified but only very slightly.

Our subject this time is the Spanish 100-gun ship Rayo, which according to Google Translate means "Thunderbolt" or "Lightning" in English.  Yes, I skipped the obvious Bohemian Rhapsody jokes, and yes, you're welcome.  The history of the real ship is pretty interesting, which is why there's a brief history lesson before we get to the usual pictures.

She was originally launched in 1749 as an 80-gun ship of the line named San Pedro, and was commissioned into the Spanish Navy in 1751.  She had the usual spells of activity and idleness during her career, and was laid up from 1798 to 1803.  She was thought to be in poor shape by 1803, but her construction from tropical hardwoods (she was built in Havana) meant that she was still mostly sound.  She was taken and converted into a 100-gun ship in 1803 by enclosing her upper deck, similar to how Santisima Trinidad went from 112 to 136 guns in 1795-96.  By January of 1805, Rayo was in Cadiz.  Later that year, she joined the Combined Fleet after it returned from the West Indies.  She fought at Trafalgar, returned to Cadiz, and sortied again on October 23 to help recover the ships Santa Ana and Neptune.  She was then driven ashore and shipwrecked in the storm following the battle.  She was the oldest ship at the battle, being about 14 years older than HMS Victory.

This particular model turned out to be a learning experience in more ways than one.  Langton has begun casting its larger hulls in resin instead of metal, and this was my first experience working with one.  Overall, the detail is every bit as good as the white metal hulls.  Unfortunately, this model had damage to the starboard quarterdeck bulwark that would have made it impossible to run rigging lines.  It looked like it had been broken instead of not having enough resin in the mold.  Fortunately, I had some .010 plastic sheet, and a couple layers of that, combined with a bit of carving to shape,
made for a fairly quick repair.

It's easy to see the difference between resin and metal detail in this photo.
Also, you can see the repairs to the quarterdeck bulwark.

The sharp-eyed among you have already noticed other pieces of black plastic as well.  Another problem with this hull is that some of the channels for the ratlines seem to be positioned incorrectly.  Instead of ending in line with the hole for the mast, they end before the hole.  Consequently, the brass ratlines should not align properly with the masts.  The next picture will give a better idea of what I mean:

It is kind of a big deal.  As the plan of HMS Serapis below shows, the ratlines have to line up with the mast.

In fairness though, the Spanish 80 gun hull from Langton has the same problem, so I should have expected it.  Unlike the metal hull, this resin one made a repair much easier.  Take a piece of the .010 plastic sheet mentioned earlier, cut to roughly the right size, and glue them on.  I had thought that I might have to support them from below, but once the glue dried they were remarkably sturdy.  I won't say it's a perfect solution, but once paint is applied you can't tell the extensions are there.  I should probably have trimmed the back of the channels to make them a bit smaller, but didn't want to run the risk of damaging them.

Other than that, painting and basing went mostly as expected.  I decided to paint the ship based on some pictures I found on a website called Todo A Babor:  https://www.todoababor.es/  .  If you're interested in the Spanish navy, then put this website in your bookmarks!  There are articles, paintings and information on the Real Armada that I've not seen anywhere else.  There is a definite shortage of English language information sources on the Spanish navy out there, and this is a useful corrective.  The website itself is in Spanish, but Google Translate handles this quite well.  Some of the more specific nautical terms may be mistranslated, but you can still figure out what they mean.  Todo A Babor has a couple of different color paintings of Rayo, but I decided to go with this one:

Another painting shows the ship with the third gun deck painted yellow (which would be in line with regulations), but I decided that I liked the look of this interpretation better.  I decided to drill all the holes after the painting was done, and it was here that I discovered an odd problem.  In a couple of places, the outer layer of paint flaked away from the primer when I drilled the hole.  As you'll see from these photos, it looks like a bad problem:

No need for a circle here; the gray against black is very visible.

All the above photos are at 3X zoom, so obviously these are very small spots that should touch up easily enough.  I mention it only because I've never had it happen to a metal model before.  Also, I prime my ships in black, so I'm not sure why it showed up gray after the paint flaked away.

With the running rigging in place as seen above, the running rigging was going quickly and I was feeling good about finishing this ship quickly.  As I should know by now, that feeling is a prelude to something going wrong.  It started when I cut a line on the running rigging and cut into the knot, so it came loose from the sail.  In taking off the other end of that line, I accidentally cut the main mast standing rigging by mistake.  Annoying, but not disastrous.  While re-running the main mast standing rigging, I realized that the fragments from the old lines were making it impossible to get all the new ones through the hole.  So I decided to enlarge the hole from .5 to .7 millimeters.  After all, what could go wrong?  This could:

AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!

Yes, the bulwark broke into pieces.  Fortunately, I was able to find the largest pieces and glue them back into place.  What I couldn't find I was able to replace with some of that .010 plastic I mentioned before.  I covered everything with super glue gel and waited for it to dry.  What I got was this:

I re-threaded the mainmast rigging very gently, as I wasn't sure about the strength of my repairs.  I wound up having to re-rig the mainmast a third time, as a rough spot on the hole cut the string during the first re-rigggng.  A quick BUT CAREFUL re-drilling of the hole solved that problem and let me re-finish the standing rigging.  After this three hour delay (I told you I was being careful), everything else went off without a hitch.

Well, that's enough grousing and extreme close-ups of ship damage.  Below are the usual beauty shots of the finished vessel:

Obviously the camera angle is a little off on this one.
I assure you, Rayo is not skidding through the sea at an angle!

And since the Quarter of Comparison (TM) hasn't been seen in a while, here's a size comparison shot:

As a closing thought, this ship is also an example of the "check twice, paint once" adage.  If you look at the drawing from the Todo a Babor website, you'll notice that the ship is NOT painted in the Nelson Checker pattern; instead, the gunports are open.  I didn't notice this until after the ship was painted and partially rigged.  I could have gone back and painted her properly, but it would have been fairly difficult.  At that point, I decided it was just too late.