What's on your workbench for March 2023

[ShadowDragon]

I am with you shipmates. The starboard ship as you look at the picture is the right one for me too, for much the same reasons.

Bligh.

Thanks, for the "vote", Rob. One thing to add is that the thread running rigging makes the Ark Royal ships fit in better with the Langton's. With the fiber RR the Ark Royals look clunkier. For sure the Langton's are a top class product but they are also priced accordingly. There's not so much difference on a 1st rate ship with the Ark Royals being about 90% of the price of a Langton but when you get to the smaller ships the Ark Royals are only a third the price of a Langton. The reason for that is you'll pay about 11.25/11.75 for a Langton 1st rate or a rather modest Dutch fluyt. The Ark Royals are priced 19.5 GBP per package but the number of ships changes with 2 1st rate ships in a package and, for example, 5 fluyts.

There's a key difference in rigging the two ship types due to the construction. The Langton ships have separate pieces for the hull, stern, bow-sprit and all masts plus all sails are separate pieces. The Ark Royals typically have 4 pieces - hull with bow-sprit and sprit mizzenmast cast on, fore and main masts and sprit-sail - all with the sails cast on. So it's more work to build a Langton ship but the rigging is a straight forward task of anchoring one end of a thread and threading it up and down a mast and back and forth to appropriate spots - the sails have eyelets to facilitate this. If you've built a Langton you'll know what I mean. The Ark Royals with their one piece mast and sails don't easily allow this without a lot of work drilling and cutting away metal. That's the key reason the ship on the left was done with fiber. I will change the colour of the RR; I just haven't yet.

The fiber works well for the fixed rigging on the Ark Royals as it would be difficult to get thread taut and fixed rigging should be thicker anyway. I tried initially at the front of the Leopard with creating anchor points for the RR but I wasn't that happy with it. At the stern I went with a method of cutting thread to an appropriate length, fixing one end to sail or spar, waiting (my biggest challenge) for the glue to set and the then fixing the other end to a tie-down spot on the hull or other appropriate spot. I bit of slight sag in the thread looks - at least to me - which is do-able by ensuring the natural curl in the thread is aligned when initially fixing the thread.

Here's the Ark Royal Leopard with thread ahead of the Langton Wassenaar. The thread on the Leopard helps bring the Ark Royal up to the Langton class - and the Langton's are definitely little beauties. Either way it takes a few ships of each type to develop a technique that works for one.