Ratlines

One week and one day until Thanksgiving break!  We plan on going to Athens early on Saturday morning for mini-Thanksgiving and birthday party for Bambudder.

We had a pretty good weekend. Saturday we kind of puttered around the house. Mom worked on the closet in the master bedroom, while I did some straightening downstairs. I also did some work on "the ship".

We went to Buffalo Wild Wings for lunch. We were not impressed. The service was pretty good, and the food was okay. (We were not all that impressed with the teriyaki chicken sauce - too much ginger.) But what turned us off was the noise. This is definitely a sports grill, and they had twelve large screen TVs in the room all with a different sports events running. Just think Papa Joe not having to flip through the channels while watching a ballgame because all the channels are already up on their own separate TV!  The was loud music playing in the background, and there appeared to be nothing in the room to absorb the sound of the fairly large crowd they had in there. Talk about sensory overload. I won't say we would never go back, but it is pretty far down the list on restaurants we go to. (We can get pretty good wings at Applebees and be able to talk to each other over the table.) Just not our cup of Pepsi.

+Joanne Turek went to see Thor: The Dark World with one of her teacher friends. She really enjoyed it. I went home and worked on "the ship" and put away the few groceries we bought at Target (aka Nani's store.) Turns out that I should have gone to the movie. Everything I did on the ship looked bad, so I ended up cutting it out and doing it over again.

Sunday we had the sister missionaries over for lunch, and then went with them on an appointment to teach Pablo and Juan. As you can guess, they are hispanic, and the good news was that we had Sister Monterosso from Guatemala with us. The bad news was that most (but not all) of the discussion was in Spanish. They do have a return appointment, so I hope it will work out. Maybe they can get Bro Arce to go with them.

Constitution build log - ratlines 

Grandma Lola, Grandpa Ed
Matthew and Kira
Little Rock, ca 1983

Before I get started, I found a picture with the old model I built back in the late 70's. If you look at the upper righthand corner you will see the USS Constitution almost in the picture. (The ship in the upper left is the Cutty Sark.) Grandpa Ed and Grandma Lola are holding +Kira Turek   and Matt.

 So last update I had the shrouds installed. The shrouds are the mostly-vertical lines that keep the masts from falling over the side, or falling forward. Here is the foremast with the shrouds installed before the ratlines have been added.

Ratlines, pronounced "rattlin's", are lengths of thin line tied between the shrouds of a sailing ship to form a ladder. Here is a picture of the real thing, and you can see the shrouds and ratlines in the background.

Preformed ratlines and shrouds

Here are the shrouds and ratlines that came with the model. Everything is perfectly spaced, but the shrouds are the same size as the ratlines. On the real deal, the shrouds are 9" in diameter and ratlines are about 1". That is why I decided to make them myself.






To get them on the model evenly, you must create a template to go by. The real things are 13-15" apart, which comes out to about 0.014 inches on the model. Now you can get out a ruler and carfully measure out about 50 lines 0.014 inches apart on a piece of paper, OR go into MS Word, create a table with one column wide by 50 rows, with a custom row height of 0.014 inches, and print it out. Voila! instant template :-)

I tried to tie the individual ratlines to each stay, but ol' shaky hands did not cooperate, so I ended up just gluing each line on with Elmers glue. The other part of the project is to add the futtock shrouds. They can be seen on the real ship to the left. I had to create the rings at the bottom of the shrouds out of 26 gauge brass wire by wrapping it around a kabob skewer. They are a little larger than scale, but that is the way it goes. This is the piece I tried to do while Mom was at the movies and had to rip it back out. The second attempt came out better, but still isn't as clean as I would like it to be. I am going to try a slight variation on the install when I do the foremast.




So here is the mainmast with ratlines and futtock shrouds installed. Now I get to do the whole thing over again on the fore- and mizzenmast.