Well, after a few weeks I had enough of the rigging of Sovereign of the Seas and I put her temporarily on ice. I will come back and finish her sometimes in the near future. So here is the opportunity to start the next project, which I have planned for a long time. This is a complete scratch build of the Le Soleil Royal (LSR) stern model. Having not too much information the first step is to make the plans and this is what I am doing now. I had the kit plans of LSR earlier (thanks, Zoli) and also a beautiful set of museum photographs (thanks, Gary, #garym) and a few dimensions (thanks, John) so I started designing, combining the museum photos and the kit plans. It turned out very quickly, that this is impossible (I have quite a recent identical experiment with the Sovereign and with Royal Caroline somewhat earlier). So I dropped the kit plans and decided to use the Museum photos only - and, by coincident, I found a drawing on the net which refers to the same pictures. I made a downscaled (about 1:160) Jelutong half-model of the stern, from which the lines are taken with a contour gage. These lines are then magnified to the scale of 1:60, which the Museum photos seem to match completely. So the stern model's scale is going to be 1:60. I plan to build the stern-model open from the front, showing some inside structure and furnishing. (French modelers use this technic often). It is virtually a POF build, similar to the Hahn-method, and the frames are going to be fully planked from inside and outside too. The frames (8 of them) are going to be made of Costelo Boxwood, the carvings from European Boxwood. Every other material will be decided on the run. I am going to use Hornbeam, River Birch, and different other materials, all purchased from the Lumberyard. A few pictures, hopefully, self-explanatory, follow.
Janos
Janos