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Finishing the DelPrado Bounty Options
Plymouth57
#1 Posted : 17 August 2024 23:23:10

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A long story! (A VERY long story!)
The DelPrado partworks kit of the Bounty was (I think) first produced back around 1996 – and I only think that because some other contributor mentioned that he was building his back then.Blink Anyway, my younger brother got this kit at the same time that he convinced me to buy a second or third hand Honda Spacy scooter off him. The deal was that I should build the model for him and he, being the mechanical one in the family would service and maintain the scooter for me.LOL
I got on with building the kit (this being my second wooden ship after the Constructo Grimsby and before my own DelPrado Victory). Long story short, the Spacy eventually went off in the back of a skip still waiting for the replacement exhaust which he had at his home but ‘forgot all about’.
At that point in a brotherly dispute I thought “Why should I?” and the poor Bounty was consigned to the attic where she remained all complete except for the second half of the sails to be finished and the corresponding rigging and crew figures.Flapper
Present day, twenty six years later, (there were one hundred parts in the collection so lets say it took about two years to build). My brother has been in hospital for some months. Soon after the New Year he began to have trouble swallowing food and drink and eventually was admitted for tests on the growing blockage in his throat, the result unfortunately was the C word. He’s now undergone a first course of radiotherapy which we all hope will be successful but we won’t know for a few weeks yet. He’s actually feeling a little more like his old self now that they have got his feeding regime correct (he’s suffered with Crohn’s disease for decades too) and his usual greeting is “Have you done my boat yet?” so to cheer him up a little more that’s what I’ve been working on these last few months.
The photo below is of my attic (the bit that isn’t my workbench that is), and this shows an approximation of where the Bounty has been for those twenty six years! This is actually a ‘sanitised’ pic – I thought I’d taken one of the actual conditions but can’t find it on the SD card so I couldn’t have. She was actually in a much more precarious balancing act than this and didn’t have any sails on the mainmast either. This was relatively OK until we had solar panels installed back in December when the cables and electrical gubbins were installed in the attic during which the poor Bounty suffered some damage, nothing too major but some broken rigging and missing window frames on one of the quarter-badges together with the stern decoration.
So this short(ish) diary will be a record of how I managed to repair and complete this model for my brother and mainly how I overcame the awfully vague kit instructions with some help from the web. I’m beginning to think this thing has got more rigging on her than the ruddy Victory!Blink
Hopefully some of what I’ve discovered will be of use to others who might still have this same kit hanging around – when it was released it was billed as a beginners kit that anyone could create – yeah right!Crying
See you all soon.

Robin.
Plymouth57 attached the following image(s):
Bounty pic1.JPG
First wooden ship: The Grimsby 12 Gun 'Frigate' by Constructo Second: Bounty DelPrado Part Works Third: HMS Victory DelPrado Part Works 1/100 scale
Diorama of the Battle of the Brandywine from the American Revolutionary War Diorama of the Battle of New Falkland (unfinished sci-fi), Great War Centenary Diorama of the Messines Ridge Assault
Index for the Victory diary is on page 1
Markwarren
#2 Posted : 18 August 2024 10:55:57

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Great background story to a build. I’m very surprised the damage was so little especially after all those years.
Looking forward to the restoration and I’m sure your brother will be thrilled with it, as it sounds like he going through a rough time.

Mark
Plymouth57
#3 Posted : 19 September 2024 23:22:12

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Many thanks for those kind words Mark. We are hoping for the best although the treatment so far is not proving as successful as we would have liked. It's an even bigger impetus for me to make this model as special as I can!

Photo 1 was again taken ‘after the fact’ so to speak as I didn’t take any specific photos of the actual damage incurred during the Bounty’s long exile to the attic! There were a few broken rigging threads around the masts, more than likely caused not by her movement during the solar panel installation but due to twenty six years of summer heat (the attic gets well over 100F during a heatwave) to almost freezing in the depths of winter – this plays havoc with tight rigging especially when the knots have been super glued to prevent them coming loose! The Mizzen Boom tackle shown by the two arrows top left was hanging over the stern as the ropes up to the boom had broken off, the cast metal stern decoration shown at bottom left was not only missing, including the two metal ‘swirls’ at both corners, but when I eventually found it, it was snapped in half and the Quarter Badge window frames shown here on the starboard side were missing completely from the port. This of course was all discovered after a long and very careful dusting of the decks and masts/spars with a selection of very soft paintbrushes (not quite careful enough for a couple more of the rigging threads!)Blushing
After removing the model from her dangerous balancing act and over to the workbench, a meticulous search down through the many boxes she had been sitting on revealed the two bits of the stern decoration and a single window frame from the Badge. The metal decoration was repaired by gluing the two parts back to the wooden stern, not with super glue as before but with a two part epoxy for extra strength. Of the swirls – no sign of them (yet) but I do have a Victory based contingency plan for those!Cool
After repairing what I could I made up two new wooden window frames using the one I’d found as a template and routering the windows out of some scrap plywood which I suspect actually came from either the Bounty or my Victory (being the ‘sprue’ from the parts in the kit). It wasn’t perfect but didn’t look too bad compared to the other side of the ship. I then needed to correct an unfortunate mistake I’d made all those years ago. To try and get some details on the Bounty’s rigging I went looking on the internet and came across a website called Academia.edu. This was an educational resource containing a vast collection of downloadable books in pdf. Among them I found just what I had been looking at on ebay but wasn’t going to pay ridiculous prices for: The Anatomy of the Ship: The Armed Transport Vessel Bounty! I wasn’t actually going to download it as I was asked to register my details and didn’t want to bother with all that so I backed out of the site to look elsewhere. The following day I was very surprised to not only find an email from the site welcoming me, but also the downloaded pdf of the book as well! The entire book was there apart that is for one page that would have been very useful – the index page for all the rigging ropes that appear on the main drawing. Without that index I could at least work out roughly where the various running rigging went to and from where, but not necessarily the exact belaying pin where it was tied off. That said, it was a whole lot more info than I’d had before. The rigging instructions in the DelPrado magazines have three ‘slight’ problems – one, the instructions are more often than not very vague, two, after perusing the anatomy of the ship book they are often actually inaccurate and three, in some cases they are physically impossible to follow! An example is the fore and aft sails between the fore mast and main mast – these are suspended from the standing rigging stays which is fair enough but the bottom corners of the sails are tied directly to the fore mast and main mast. In the case of the fore mast again, fair enough but the ropes going to the rearward main mast would have to pass through the mainsails to get there!Blink
As for that unfortunate mistake from all those years back, Photo 2 is a simplified rendering of part of the rigging instructions. It shows a pair of thin ropes coming from the main sail to the fore mast. I assumed that this was from the centre of the sail so that’s what I did as seen in Photo 3 (although I did wonder why they went to a double block and not a single at the time!) Once I had those drawings from the pdf it was obvious that those ropes actually came from the side edges of the sails and not from the centre at all! In fact, checking out the instruction photos under a magnifier, they did show the correct arrangement – in my defence, those photos are about two and a half inches by two inches in size, show most of the entire ship against a light back ground and I didn’t have reading glasses back then!Blushing These ropes are actually called the “Bowlines” (as they run from the sails towards the bows) and are used to keep the forward face of the square sails taut when the ship is sailing into the wind (presumably as opposed to letting the sails billow backwards into the shrouds and knocking some poor sailor overboard?)
Anyway, after some snipping off and some new threads put in, the first of the foresails was corrected as shown in Photos 4 and 5.
In the next instalment, making those bowlines and taking the corrected ropes to their proper destination (along with a lot of their mates!)
Until then Happy Modelling again!

Robin.
Plymouth57 attached the following image(s):
Bounty pic2.JPG
Bounty pic3.JPG
First wooden ship: The Grimsby 12 Gun 'Frigate' by Constructo Second: Bounty DelPrado Part Works Third: HMS Victory DelPrado Part Works 1/100 scale
Diorama of the Battle of the Brandywine from the American Revolutionary War Diorama of the Battle of New Falkland (unfinished sci-fi), Great War Centenary Diorama of the Messines Ridge Assault
Index for the Victory diary is on page 1
Plymouth57
#4 Posted : 26 October 2024 18:17:34

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Publisher Medal: Featured Build of the MonthActive Service Medal: 500 post active service MedalPurple Medal: Super active service medal for 1000 postsTurquoise Medal: Turquoise Medal for model making know-how contributionOutstanding Build: An award for an outstanding buildBuild-Diary Medal: Build-Diary Medal of HonourRed Medal: Red Medal
Groups: Registered

Joined: 03/10/2012
Posts: 2,065
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Location: Plympton
If I remember correctly, when I fitted the (incorrect) bowlines all those years ago I made a small hole in the sailcloth and after stiffening the end of the rigging rope with super glue, I pushed the thread through. This time around I found a much easier method – I simply threaded a suitable needle with the thread and pushed that through instead!Blushing Starting at the top rear and looping back and through again, this time from the front as shown in Photo 6. Then it was just a case of tying off a knot behind the top thread and another loose knot behind the bottom before deciding how far forward the ‘triangle’ had to be and then sliding the loose knot up to the back of the sail and tightening it off. The long rigging line was then tied on to the triangle leaving a long enough length to reach wherever it had to go. With both Bowlines tied on to the Fore Top Sail it looked as shown in Photo 7. In the case of the Fore Topgallant Sail, the bowlines come down to a double block already rigged onto the tip of the bowsprit as seen in Photo 8 – in this photo, that is actually the old single line that came from the middle of the sail! (I said I wondered why the blocks were double!) With both the bowlines correctly fitted on, both of the block’s pulleys were now used of course. This is where the kit instructions became a little vague again – the diagram shows the bowline coming from the sail down to that block (all well and good) but it doesn’t go anywhere else from there! The running rigging diagram from the “Anatomy of the Ship” downloaded pdf shows the rope running from the sail down to the block and then back along the bowsprit to the deck close to the bowsprit base. Just where it terminates on the kit photos is anyone’s guess but there were a pair of metal deck cleats just in that area so that’s what I used. As shown by the arrows in Photo 9, the two cleats are below the bowsprit on either side, apologies for the focus – this photo was actually taken much later for the anchor rigging, I didn’t take one at the time for the bowlines!Blink
With the Fore Topgallant sail completed it was time to move down the Foremast to the Foretopsail and the Foresail below it. Photo 10 shows both those sails fitted with their bowlines. The Foretopsail ropes come down to another double block, again attached to the Bowsprit but this time just aft of the block which joins the bowsprit and jib boom together. This is shown by the yellow arrow in Photo 11. From this block the two bowlines run back along the bowsprit to the side pillars or stanchions of the small belaying rack which stands just behind the base of the bowsprit shown by another yellow arrow in Photo 12. The lowest pair of bowlines from the Foresail run down to yet another double block tied on to the bowsprit, this one about half way back towards the hull where it sits suspended just above the figurehead. From there they run back to the bow and are tied off around the post (Timberhead?) beside each of the anchor Catheads, shown in the same photo by the red arrow.
That concluded the additional running rigging for the Foremast except that is, for the actual ropes which hold the yardarms up and the dangling blocks from the ends of those yardarms! Those I got to much later on when I could do all the masts together. Until then, the next task was to make the actual sails for the Mainmast and that comes next!
Until then, Happy Modelling to you all!


Robin.
Plymouth57 attached the following image(s):
Bounty pic4.JPG
Bounty pic5.JPG
First wooden ship: The Grimsby 12 Gun 'Frigate' by Constructo Second: Bounty DelPrado Part Works Third: HMS Victory DelPrado Part Works 1/100 scale
Diorama of the Battle of the Brandywine from the American Revolutionary War Diorama of the Battle of New Falkland (unfinished sci-fi), Great War Centenary Diorama of the Messines Ridge Assault
Index for the Victory diary is on page 1
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