¹⁄700

Building the Admiral Nahkimov, 1889

At this point in the build, it was time to erect the upper masts and yards. Previous sail/steam transitional models that I have built have suffered, in my view, from having parallel wire yards; I wanted to avoid this at all costs for this model!! I therefore commissioned my friend Steve Foulkes to make a set of tapered stainless steel yards; I lacked the time, tools, know-how and patience! The results made his efforts, and my expense, definitely worthwhile!

The erecting of the masts was effected with a great deal of careful checking for alignment, as errors now would be impossible to correct later.
Admiral Nahkimov carried the sails on her yards furled in a (to my eyes) unconventional manner...The furled sail was packed very neatly indeed onto the yards, with the clews of the square sails being brailed to the centre-line. I made the stowed clews from a triangle of paper, glued to the centre of the yard and then backfilled these with white glue, and spread the white glue along the yard to simulate the very neatly and tightly packed sails.

The footropes along the yards were made of stretched sprue. First, a loop is spanned between the mast and the yard arm, being cemented with liquid poly cement (Revell professional). When the glue had set, I bi-sected the centre with a small vertical piece of thinner sprue, with liquid cement on the end. This causes the loop to 'kink', by melting a bond, thereby forming two smaller loops. The vertical is attached to the backside of the yard with liquid cement. The process is repeated until sufficient small loops have been formed. It is very fiddly and time-consuming! Once the footropes were in place I added the skysail booms.

Thereafter, I spent a very long time indeed adding as many halyards and other vertical hoist ropes, etc., as I could ; most are probably correct and functional; ..-I hope….

This process was followed by adding all the lower, mid and topmast shrouds, along with the upper ratlines. Lastly, the yard braces were added. These were all on a 2:1 purchase via a pulley. The pulley's were made of a small dollop of white glue, applied to the already installed piece of stretched sprue; when dry the second brace was attached carefully with liquid cement.--I broke a few...! The hardest part was to attempt to achieve a reasonable amount of 'sag' on the upper braces; the lower braces in photos were set up fairly taut.