[Michael Mash]

Thank you Ab, Wireandpaper and David.
And thanks Maurice . . . for the clever humor!

In my introduction to this project (Nov 2020) I wrote the following:

Compared to past projects, I have much less information to rely on. . . . A few drawings and several foggy photos. That forms a large part of my attraction and motivation for this project.

Well . . . that has all changed.

Renaud has been busy digging and excavating the old bones of this ship. I am happy to say he has managed to discover a wealth of material about Neptune, and many other French vessels from this era. As a result of his discovery, he sent to me enough information to fill a small museum. The “archeological” phase of this project has come to a successful conclusion. Many many thanks Renaud! I sincerely appreciate your work.

So I began work with the funnel. I now have numerous photos to show various angles of the funnel and its details. It has a base that sits on the main deck, then it pokes through the upper deck above. The first two photos show some progress with that. However, in the meantime I began to get some ideas about creating the davits. So I went to work on them while the ideas were fresh.

Neptune’s main davits are unusually tall, to facilitate lifting the boats from their storage location inside the sheltered area, below the top deck. Then they are swung out over the side for deployment. So the aft davits measure about 36 feet (10.97 meters) and the forward davits measure about 34 feet (10.46 meters). Very tall davits. Ever since beginning this project, I have had a variety of ideas come and go about how to create them.

In photo number 068 one can see the series of openings running up and down the davits.
The first prototype was done the standard way. It is card, laminated to double thickness. The openings are represented as artwork . . . dark shaded areas to give the “appearance” of openings. It looks fine, and will serve well if no other method works.

The next attempt was to cut the openings by hand. At 1:250 scale, the openings are tiny. This method did not pass inspection . . . too sloppy. I attempted to cut them using my smallest paper punch, but it was too large for the task.

The third idea was to “build” the openings into the davits. The davit on card is designed to fold over on itself, for laminating and to provide detail on both sides. Before folding, the area representing the openings was cut out from top to bottom. Then a finely cut piece of paper, representing the cross pieces in the openings was inserted. The card was then glued and folded over on itself.

I was surprised to see that the davit with the cut-out openings (image 71 right) didn’t have a better appearance than the one with the openings represented as artwork (image 71 left) .

I’ll need more time to experiment with the davits.

Warm Regards,
Mike