Mainsail mast of the sailing ship San Giovanni Battista. History of the ship. – Where were galleons like yours used?

So, the first results of my sea epic. I already talked about how I wanted to make a model of a sailing ship and about my doubts about the “Large Sailboats” set. I decided to make the sailboat myself if possible. It looks like it's working.

So, the price seemed unfair to me. Both 35 hryvnia for two planks in a room (and in the future just a bunch of cut veneer or a handful of nails), and 600 dollars for a complete set. What the hell do you need - you can buy everything at once and not wait 2 years. And if the plant produces a keel, sells it, and uses the proceeds to cut out the frame, then clearly the model must be several times cheaper than a ready-made kit. In addition, according to reviews from Russians, the set is far from the declared perfection.

I downloaded the drawings from the Internet. The magazine has been on sale in Russia for a year now. There were kind people who posted scans of the parts. There are “rulers” in the frame, so it’s easy to check that the part is printed at a scale of 1:1. Printed from AutoCAD.

It would be possible to download some other model. But since this is a new matter for me, I decided to use screenshots of magazines with detailed instructions and video instructions. And if some parts turn out to be too complex to manufacture, you can always buy the corresponding edition.

So, what can I recommend:

There is no need to cut out the printed drawing and then trace it. It is better to transfer the contours from the drawing to the plywood using carbon paper. That's more accurate.

I found an old jigsaw at home. I've been looking for plywood for a long time. But when I bought a square meter everything went like clockwork. I don’t recommend cutting with a jigsaw (the kind that you move your hand along the intended line). It turns out to be very inaccurate. And it tears the edges of the veneer. With a jigsaw, if you have good files, it’s much neater and doesn’t take that long.

Accuracy within a millimeter is fine. All the same, in the original set the dimensions are different (despite the laser cutting). So you still have to finish the assembly with a file.

It is better to glue in blocks. The details “put” each other in the right place.

Assembled the first part of the ship. I thought it was the stern, but it turned out to be the nose. The parts that I cut first (with a jigsaw from old plywood) were used. Therefore, it was not easy to reduce the deck level on all three frames. But now I'm not afraid of anything!

The stain is a regular construction stain, like oak. Glue - included in the first issue of the magazine. Very similar to “liquid nails”. When I run out, I'll try them. The decks were covered with ordinary PVA (then pressed through the board with a dumbbell). Use paper clips as clothespins and a work stand. True, they cannot clamp something in the depths, so special clothespins for modeling are a useful thing. I'll probably buy a couple. I also used straps with fittings (like the one that regulates the length of the backpack straps) in order to tighten the parts when gluing.

I found a modeling shop that sold strips of veneer (simulating deck flooring) and masts and slats and beams and everything else. I think all these wooden lumber will cost around 100 hryvnia.

Guns in the store cost 15 UAH. Magazine ones will cost the same. But in the magazine they are cast from silumin (a cheap aluminum alloy). And in the store there is a brass barrel and a wooden carriage. True, the galleon has as much as 40 guns, so there is reason to think about casting it yourself. It seems that in my childhood I read in “Young Technician” the technology of making tin soldiers. Maybe I'll try.

I just bought a cutter for the engraving machine. I'm thinking of trying to make a mini sawing machine for cutting veneer into even strips. I would like to make the external cladding from natural oak. I have already bought a large piece of oak veneer (35 UAH - enough for a whole flotilla).

I'm starting to assemble the middle part.

We are already selecting new wallpaper for the galleon, we have ordered a shelf...

Do you love sailboats as much as I love them? :)

Remember, more than two years ago, the DeAgostini company published magazines from the “Great Sailboats” series with ship details? So, my talented and patient husband assembled one of these - the galleon "San Giovanni Batista". And now this beautiful wooden model sits on our shelf. And she probably dreams of the sound of waves and the creaking of gear.

Galleons are not only beautiful, but also large, well-armed, exclusively sailing ships. No more fun! The oarsmen would not have enough strength to move a large vessel, often with a displacement of more than a thousand tons.

The world owes the appearance of galleons, of course, to the Spaniards. In the 15th century, Spain began to transform into a world colonial empire. The possessions of the Iberian state began to appear in Africa, Asia, and the American continent. The need to maintain communications with new lands caused the rapid development of shipbuilding. And in the first half of the next century, references to a new type of sea vessels first appeared in the chronicles - galleons. The Spaniards required large seaworthy transport vessels capable of ensuring the delivery of valuable piles from the Philippine Islands and Malacca to the American colonies across the Pacific Ocean, as well as a stable connection between the metropolis and the viceroyalties of the New World.

However, the galleon San Giovanni Batista was not built by the Spaniards.

The main centers for the construction of galleons were the Basque coast in northern Spain, as well as the areas of Cadiz and Seville in the south. After Portugal was annexed to Spain in 1580, the construction of ships for the Spanish fleet was carried out in this country, mainly in the Lisbon area. Ships were also built in a number of other countries, including Italian shipyards.

The handsome "San Giovanni Batista" was built in the shipyards of the port of Livorno, which belonged to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, in 1598.

Under Grand Duke Ferdinand (Fernando), Livorno proved to be a symbol of tolerance, providing shelter to refugees persecuted for religious and political reasons. Thus, one of the first galleons built by Italian shipbuilders, the San Giovanni Batista, is perceived as the embodiment of the spirit of cosmopolitanism and enterprise of the rapidly growing and developing port city.

The famous galleon is no different in appearance from the Spanish galleons of the late 16th century: two decks with cannons, a pointed bow, a large bow superstructure and a high stern. It was envisaged that it could be used for various purposes: transporting goods, conducting research and military operations. They remained as such until the subsequent division into merchant ships for transporting goods along the Indian Sea Route and warships of the Invincible Armada.

After a break due to the summer holidays (we lived at the dacha all the time, and I didn’t take the ship with me because there are already enough worries in the summer), my child and I resumed building the galleon.

The first point of work was the windows in the aft superstructures that lead to the deck. I redid them. Now they look like this.

The next thing that held back the hull plating was the captain's cabin. I was going to do an interior in it because it is visible through the windows. Over the evening, I assembled a table, a chair, a chest and a bed from scraps of wood. I covered the bed with a blanket made from a white synthetic bag (I liked the pattern with squares), and the little one came up with the idea of ​​putting a card and a candle on the table. When all the furniture was ready, we secured all the partitions and glued the decks.
This photo was taken through the aft gallery window.

After this, we started covering the hull. Everything here is according to the instructions. The only thing is that they covered all the rough cladding boards with stain, so that the inside of the body would also be dark, just like the outer cladding is made of mahogany.
During the work, it was necessary to bend the strips to suit the curvature of the body. After looking at the photographs of imported plank benders, we, without hesitation, went a different route.

Since this layer is rough, the imprints of the pliers on the lath are not dangerous, but on the inside the imprint of the nail was covered behind the frames.
According to the instructions, the nails should remain in the sheathing, but they have a high semicircular head, which will get in the way when covering the body with veneer. Therefore, I drilled a hole for each nail so that it would go completely into the bar. And when sheathing the valance, I even used sewing pins (they are easy to pull out, and the sheathing will hold on anyway - there is a large surface area to be glued together).
I decided to make up the lining between the cannon ports from separate slats, because for some reason I didn’t want to cut holes in the sides for these same ports. It turned out okay.

The black cladding of the hull is not yet finished. I assemble Batista for two to three hours a day after work. But I had already reached the aft gallery. And now I’m wondering how many windows to put in the side at the stern. It doesn’t look very good with one, but if you put the second one, the railings of the aft balcony will rest against it. Those. The choice is like this: either one window, but not very beautiful, or two windows, but a balcony shortened by a centimeter.

Quite unexpectedly, I saw in one newsstand the first issue (as it turned out - widely advertised on television!) of the next project of the Deagostini publishing house - “Great Sailing Ships”. Everyone was offered construction within (attention!) - two years a fairly reliable copy of one of the famous sailing ships - the galleon "San Giovanni Batista".

The fact that the very first advertising issue of this magazine with the very initial set of REAL parts of the future model caught my eye seemed to Dreamer to be a kind of good omen. Although, to be honest, even the recommended selling price for the first issue, multiplied by 100, was not I came across as TOO modest... But let's not talk about sad things!

Despite the fact that from the place of the happy (or maybe fatal?) purchase to my house is a couple of hundred meters, this path has never seemed so long! My soul was literally bursting with the desire to open the package, look inside and, most importantly, start assembling!!! Apparently, the construction of “a certain number” of REAL sailing yachts was making itself felt, which was reported by visitors to the project PhotoDreamStudio can read this site. Here I will post material related to this new hobby of mine - ship modeling.

By the way, on the way home, as it turned out later, a very wonderful idea occurred to me - along with assembling a real sailboat model, make a “virtual” copy of it on a computer.

So, the first set of parts has been unpacked, the MOST DETAILED assembly instructions, illustrated with magnificent color photographs, have been studied...

Before gluing began, all included parts were carefully measured and scanned for subsequent modeling in the three-dimensional computer graphics program 3D Max. I don’t know how everything will work out in the future, but for now I intend to accurately reproduce on the computer all the parts from which the model is assembled - including hull structural elements, slats for lining the sides, sailing parts, etc.

Upon completion of the work provided for in the fourth issue of the magazine "Great Sailboats", the final design acquired a more or less "showable to guests" appearance - an idea began to form, if not about the appearance, then at least about the dimensions of the future ship. Connection to 3D Max" from the famous DreamScape plugin and the first steps in texturing details also contributed to the expressiveness of the rendered image.

All these vicissitudes of real and computer shipbuilding did not go unnoticed by my students at Children's Art School No. 2, where I teach computer graphics. The desire to model something like this in 3D has taken possession of some, apparently, the most fragile children's minds! I had to urgently find more or less intelligible drawings of the ships on the Internet (can’t wait two years until all the details of the San Giovanni Batista are purchased and scanned?!)

As a result, several sailing ships were laid down on virtual slipways, in particular, one of the “trinity” of Christopher Columbus - the caravel "Pinta" and the flagship of the famous corsair and navigator Francis Drake - the galleon "Golden Hind".

It should be noted that the very idea of ​​​​creating a three-dimensional model of a sailboat turned out to be very beneficial in methodological terms. The variety of object forms of a ship opens up wide opportunities in mastering various modeling techniques. And in combination with texturing, creating a realistic environment - water and sky, we can safely say that a sailboat is almost an ideal educational project for 3D computer graphics!

By far the biggest challenge was the cladding. In a relatively short period of time, several alternative options were tried until the choice settled on the optimal one, as it seems to me, from the point of view of the combination of labor intensity and reliability of appearance: sections of “sheathing boards” are placed on the side surface of each frame. Then all splines belonging to one “board” are combined (Attach), and a three-dimensional surface is built on their basis (modifiers Cross Section, and then Surface). After assigning materials, additional coordinate reference of the texture maps used (UVW Mapping) will be required.

Of course, none of the images presented here claim to be of any artistic quality or even completeness. All this is a working process that still goes on and on...

As kit parts were added to the real model, the need for a comfortable organization of the assembly process gradually became apparent. In particular, it is quite obvious that installation of frames on the keel is best done on some kind of slipway - the so-called. work stand. I would like to note with pleasure that the stand design I independently came up with turned out to be practically a twin of the one shown in the educational film on assembling a sailboat attached to the second issue! It's a small thing, but it's nice!

Along the way, we managed to select paint and varnish materials that were suitable in color and type. Now all the parts, as described in the manual, before assembly are carefully sanded with fine sandpaper, tinted with stain of different colors ("oak" - for frames and "pine" - for decks, which, after gluing the flooring from 5 mm strips of the finest veneer, are covered twice with artistic acrylic varnish.). A month and a half is behind...

It is with great pleasure and even (I won’t hide it!) with some pride that I publish this composition literally yesterday “baked” on a shipbuilding theme. The author is one of the students of Children's Art School No. 2 Ilya Lushnikov.

By the way, Ilya came to our computer class in mid-January 2010, and before that he had never studied 3D graphics at all. These are the students in our Art School!

Nostalgie... I will not hide that what first of all prompted me to start assembling the “San Giovanni Batista” model was nostalgia for those times when my introduction to the world of sails had just begun. And our first family yacht was the trimaran "Allegro" - a rebuilt rowing boat "Mullet", equipped for stability with retractable beams with foam floats and two sprint sails.

It was at Alfer’s suggestion that I, who had never picked up anything heavier than a landing craft, in a relatively short period of time built a completely comfortable and seaworthy compromise, Theophilus North, based on a design taken from the Boats and Yachts magazine.

Alfer and I worked in the same organization at that time. However, before that, too, in the department of the chief architect of KamAZ, from where they quit almost at the same time, but for various reasons. And they met again in the KamAZ Young Technician Club, where Alfer created a phenomenon that was most interesting in every sense - the Children and Youth Shipyard. Well, your humble servant “accompanied by the roar of a circular saw from the next office” taught schoolchildren the basics of design. And, in particular, he also taught a rather interesting author’s course “layout from paper and cardboard”, based mainly on the production of various puzzles.

As an illustration, I will say that the final work of fifth- and sixth-graders after the end of the second year of study was an ACTUAL model of a Rubik's cube, consisting exclusively of paper and glue! And in addition, there were large-scale models of sailing yachts (how could we live without them?!), the Nikolai Ostrovsky tank for the museum of a Chelny school, all kinds of decorative compositions, boxes with a combination lock, and so on. Truly, the possibilities of paper are endless, as I could see while still studying at the Sverdlovsk Architectural Institute.

And so fate would have it, that when Alfer Yagudin left the Club a couple of years later, it was completely logical for me to take his place and continue the work he had started. In addition, my “puzzlers” somehow suddenly grew up and, instead of making paper boats and boxes with secrets, they began to seriously think about the endless expanses of Kama...

And so, the very next year we safely and with great fanfare launched our cruising 6-meter catamaran, all the hull parts of which were manufactured on a turnkey basis on the third floor of the residential building 25/12, where the Youth Club was located at that time KamAZ equipment...

All summer we went on multi-day hikes, experienced storms, suffered from boredom in the calm, repaired “on the fly” after unexpected breakdowns, swam, chattered our teeth from the cold in bad weather... But that’s a completely different story...

On the first day of spring, the mood is frankly yachting. In the sense that it is already convincingly felt that the next navigation is just around the corner... And therefore I decided to please (or vice versa!) the visitors of the project PhotoDreamStudio a story about how I designed and built my trimaran "Pun".

First, a little theory.

Every boatbuilder knows that when building a boat, two types of drawings are used: theoretical and structural. The theoretical describes the external geometry of the housing. To do this, imaginary (and therefore called theoretical) sections are drawn across the entire length of the boat at equal intervals, called spacing, and coordinates are given for all hull lines on these sections - height from the so-called. The main horizontal plane (OP), and half-latitude - the distance from the central Diametrical Plane (DP). All these numbers are combined into one Plasma Ordinate Table, which is the basis for the actual design of the vessel.

And then the fun begins! The placement of actual frames, bulkheads, and indeed all structural elements of the vessel, as a rule, is subject to various “external requirements”, primarily the tasks of ensuring seaworthiness, strength, general layout, layout of the main elements of equipment, ergonomics, etc. And therefore the problem arises of obtaining the exact dimensions of the hull section not in the place where some theoretical frame passes, but, say, 200 millimeters aft of it.

For this purpose, shipbuilders of “all times and peoples” use the so-called plaza - a drawing of the ship in NATURE size, or, in extreme cases, on a very large scale. On it, first, with the help of flexible slats and other devices, all the lines of the theoretical drawing are drawn, and then, as accurate as possible, the dimensions are taken in the places where the real frames are installed. If you are planning to build, say, a 9-meter cruising yacht, and for design you have, even with a creaking heart, the “hall” of an ordinary panel high-rise building vacated for you by your household, then this method is simply created for you! Shyutka.

Well, the author of these lines, who was then not a Dreamer, but the simplest Soviet Dreamer, since he had no idea about the Internet, and even knew about computers only that they were “very big”, went, as the FOUNDER bequeathed, to others way. I delved into the literature, revived the quite strong mathematical education I had once received (they say it was one of the best in the Union) (at one time I had the opportunity to study a little at a COMPLEX military school...), and as a result, showed it to the world and even published it in the mentioned previously in the magazine "Boats and Yachts" a method for designing the hulls of small ships, based on the Lagrange interpolation polynomial. (There is a five-minute silent pause in the hall. Everyone stands up...)

I will not bore the reader with boring details. I will only note that the smoothness of all lines, without local deflections (and for the performance of a vessel this is one of the main requirements), is controlled in my method by studying derivatives. In addition, the method allows you to calculate changes in the dimensions of the frame taking into account the thickness of the material from which it will be made, that is, immediately include the so-called in the project. malku. I implemented this method on a regular calculator. By the way, the opinion of the magazine’s editors was that despite its novelty and originality, its practical application is difficult due to the high complexity of calculations. The irony of fate is that while the publication was being prepared, I quite unexpectedly acquired a then popular programmable calculator and, thanks to it, a complete calculation of the hull of a ship with any reasonable spacing began to take only a few hours! But that was LATER... But there’s no need to get ahead of your time, that’s it!

Everyone who saw our “team of professionals” unanimously told me: this idea is doomed to failure, because “they don’t build yachts with a kindergarten!” To which I replied, “I’m building a yacht for a family, and therefore I will do it with my family. What’s important is the process itself, that we do it TOGETHER.” Who was right - judge for yourself!

And at the end of this block, which also turned out to be somewhat nostalgic, I am publishing several computer pictures to give an idea of ​​what we “built and built, and finally built!”

The last of the images presented here belongs to the “new” time - the other day, during classes at Khudozhka, we studied DreamScape with children, with all that it implies...

Well, for those who are not impressed by computer-virtual pictures, I suggest visiting the gallery of our website, dedicated to REAL ones on our REAL yacht!

First of all, congratulations to all visitors to the project PhotoDreamStudio Happy March 8th! On this spring day I wish you happiness, beauty, and all the best!

In anticipation of the 7th issue, ship modeling work was mainly carried out in the virtual space. To match the real one, a working stand was made, and texturing of the deck was continued.

After a number of attempts, which were considered somewhat unsuccessful by professional ship modellers on the forum dedicated to the assembly of this model, the final (hopefully!) version of the deck flooring was developed and translated into 3D.

The deck work coincided with a visit to our shipyard by a commission from the Ministry of Virtual Shipbuilding. We walked around and climbed everywhere...

Brief results of the inspection:
1. The scale of the structure is impressive.
2. No safety violations were identified. Almost.

After discussing the presented pictures on the mentioned forum, large-scale adjustments were made to the created model. The main starting point was that, as it became known from informed circles, the model of our sailing ship is being made on a scale of 1:50 in relation to the real ship.

In the images below, the Man in the Yellow Helmet and the construction site itself against the background of a modern multi-story building are depicted in relative sizes more or less close to reality.

And when assembling the real model, the first problems began to appear. With great surprise and disappointment, I discovered serious discrepancies in the sizes of the next batch of frames, in particular, the levels of the below-deck beams “dance” greatly. Despite the Publisher's repeated assurances, further shipbuilding work will be carried out with the most active use of files, hacksaws and other carpentry tools. And this is provided that all supplied parts are designed on a computer and cut by laser! Damn high technology...

The work provided for in the 7th issue was completed late at night. In the light of the dying fires, the traditional “memory” photography took place.

The virtual builder didn’t stand out with his final picture either...

We are waiting for the 8th issue!