Welcome to part 4 of the model making of the french fishing boat “La Provencale”.
The longest part of this construction phase was the rigging of the mainsail.
Remarks on these construction phases
The degree of staining of wood, in this case the mast and spars, is certainly a matter of personal taste. I stained both in two coats because I wanted the wood to be a bit darker.
Artesania Latina recommends weathering the sails with paint. However, I remembered an old tip from a book by Wolfram zu Mondfeld weathering the sails with tea. I brewed black tea and, once cooled, dipped both sails in it twice for a few minutes each. In my opinion, the result is even more authentic.
In this video, I paint the ship’s nameplate almost entirely black, but I will show in another video how I carefully scrape off the paint with a blade, leaving only the recessed areas black and the raised areas shiny with metal.
Before I connected the two spars at both overlapping ends using rope, I glued them together at these overlaps with wood glue.
Hauling the mainsail to the spars proved more difficult than initially anticipated. This was especially true since I’m not very experienced with a sewing needle, and tying the knots on this small scale is a real challenge for me.
Further remarks
What I’ve learned overall while rigging is to secure all sorts of knots, etc., with superglue.
To counteract the natural fraying of the ropes, I pulled each rope completely over a real beeswax candle. This causes the protruding fibers to be “glued” to the rope. If this weren’t done and these frayed edges were scaled up to the actual size of the boat, the real rope would be very “prickly”.
As with all cast metal parts, the production of the white metal parts inevitably results in flash of varying sizes. It’s pleasing that this is comparatively very small on this Artesania Latina kit. I have older, unbuilt metal car kits here where these flash marks are truly enormous in comparison. This might be due to different casting techniques or mold quality in these kits, which are several decades apart.
The next major challenge was the rigging, for example, the tiny rope blocks. Making loops and knotting them took quite a bit of effort.
I documented the model making of the “La Provencale” part 4 also in a gallery and on video and show the work steps in detail.
Part 4 covers the following topics:
– Staining the mast and spars
– Preparing to dye the sails
– Painting the masthead and spar tips
– Painting the boat’s nameplate
– Connecting the two spars
– Installing the mast
– Mainsail attachment to the spars
– Deburring of the white metal parts
– Preparing the rigging
– Attaching the rigging
Part 1 of this project you can find here and part 2 here and part 3 here.
