After the disappointment I experienced with my 160 feet VOC vessel (see
http://www.papermodelers.com/forum/w...oc-vessel.html), I decided to finish a small ship, called a `smalschip`in Dutch. It was a freighter, used to load and unload bigger ships on the Roadstead of the isles of Texel and Terschelling to transport their cargo to and from Amsterdam. Big ships could only reach Amsterdam after a sometimes several weeks lasting journey across the shallows of the Zuiderzee (an inlet of the North Sea, today closed off by a dyke and called IJsselmeer). This fact was a source of income for a large numbers of `smalschip` skippers.
The source was another drawing by Nicolaes Witsen (1641-1717), the writing lord-mayor of Amsterdam and some paintings, amongst others the one by Lieve Verschuier I used for my fluit reconstruction.
The build of the model started as a test, to see wether the technique I tested for bigger ships (`borrowed` from our East-European friends) was also applicable for smaller models. It worked.
Building was straight forward, but as I am an absent-minded man I forgot to spray the white plastic strips I use for planking with a primer, which caused the paint to wear off a little during handling the model.
The model is not flawless anyway, but I like the atmosphere it shows. These vessels were no pleasure yachts. They were workhorses, built as cheap as possible, sailed by two or three men, mistreated, battered and bruised. And still they showed some modest decorations at the stern.
I promise I will show better pictures once my son has some spare time left.
One day I will build a `wijdschip` (literally a wide ship), which had almost the same dimensions, but was just so much wider that it could not make the inland north-south passage through Holland, because of the lock at the city of Gouda. Therefore it had to take the route `outside the dunes`, which caused it to carry another rig.
Perhaps more of that another time.