Friday 26 March 2021

All at Sea - Trafalgar Project Update, The Last Six, Plus the Royal Armouries Model of Agincourt

The work has been busy, busy, busy, in JJ's shipyard as the last six ships in the Trafalgar collection rolled down the slips this weekend ready to be fitted out with rigging and sails prior to sea trials.

Needless to say, the proverbial bunting is out and the band of the Royal Marines is busy practicing by the hard as the project moves into the next stage of planning and preparation with game plans, table designs and rules well into the pre-playing stages as the club prepares to resume normal service hopefully later in the year.


Yesterday, I took a slight break from work on the collection to celebrate a family birthday and to enjoy an hour on Zoom watching a presentation from the Royal Armouries team in Leeds and the team, including the Perry twins, involved in the production of the Agincourt model produced in 2015 as part of the 600th anniversary commemorations.


The model is a truly stunning piece of work and the chaps went through the process of pulling a static model like this together, including the latest historical research that underpinned the final look, ranging from how many men took part, how many fought on foot, the best understanding of the choreography of the events, to how to capture the look of tens of thousands of medieval fighting men closely bunched together on terrain that even used soil samples from the actual battlefield to better inform the colours used for the ground work of the chewed up ploughed fields.

If you missed this presentation the chaps at the Royal Armouries recorded it for YouTube and you catch it here in the link below;

 

Anyway after that pleasant distraction from all things nautical, it was back to work, putting in the finishing touches to the last Spanish, and three British three-deckers and the smallest vessels present at Trafalgar, HM Cutter Entreprenant, and HM Schooner Pickle which will go through the rigging process this weekend and into next week.


Once these last models are finished, I will showcase them with a bit of history behind the final look before showcasing the total collection that started to come together in October 2019.

More anon 
JJ

2 comments:

  1. You just amaze me how you can build so many ships so quickly JJ. I can sit anout an hour max before I have to get up and do something else. My growing 1/700 pile is beginning to rival my 1/1200 lead pile!

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    Replies
    1. Hi Vol,
      I saw your recent post showing off you new 3D printer which all sounds very exciting, but also likely to increase your to-do list.

      I guess I have a regular work routine, which requires me to do something each day to move a particular project along and leaves me with a feeling of not having made the best use of my time if I can't do something with whatever it is I'm working on.

      Of course if I am away from home, holidays, trips etc then I'm off duty, but now I'm retired and my time is my own, I have kept my work habit of working a routine that I developed in my professional life and have simply transferred across to my personal time, doing something that is just as rewarding if not more so and completely my choice, which is a really nice feeling, particularly getting to the end of a project or a particular stage in it, with the sense of having done a good job that it brings.

      The final pay-off is that I get to spend other time with like-minded friends playing with the fruits of my labours which, at the end of the day, is what all the effort, if you can call it that, is all about.

      I think the most important part of human anatomy is what goes on in the few inches between the ears and once you can get your thinking sorted out, the motivation to do stuff follows, and the more I do stuff the better I get at it and the more fun I have!

      That said, once this ship thing is done I have a rather large collection of 28mm Wars of the Roses, not started yet, plus my Romano-Dacian and AWI collections still to finish, so we all have a pile of stuff to complete and the trick is to live long enough to enjoy them and to have fun along the way.

      I've just got to keep on resisting getting distracted by Footsore Miniatures and their new Baron's War range!!

      All the best

      JJ

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