....It smells of ....shipbuilding!'
The Rayleigh shipyards resumed the ACW ship building in earnest yesterday with the first of the projected 14 models underway. These are another three City class gunboats - 'Pook's Turtles' - and I need to merely add the front and rear panels to the casemates prior to fitting out with the gunports, hatches, pilot houses and funnels. It does mean I will have the seven vessels in the class which will be useful when I consider any campaign activity. As ever, pictures will follow in due course although as these ships have been seen before that may be considered to be a little bit of a cheat on my part!
I have been giving some thought to the 'walking beam' ships and will probably tackle the first of them once the city class and the final three Union ships are built - the three timberclads: Lexington, Tyler and Conestoga with the former featuring in the picture above.
The final point of modelling note is that I been experimenting with masts and spars using that old standby of wooden cocktail sticks. The ones I have been using are made from bamboo and area little on the thick side but the early signs are very encouraging. I made a lateen rig - for those not of a naval persuasion that is a triangle shaped sail normally associated with such things as 16th century galleys (I cannot for the life of me think why I should have picked such a subject which coincidentally features the Ottoman Turks and the Barbary Corsairs to a large degree.....) - and thus far it looks pretty robust and certainly has a lot of potential. I will try a similar approach for a square rig and see how that turns out and in the meantime will see if I can source a better make of cocktail stick.
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