Dipping a Toe into Black Seas

I’ve never attempted to rig a model ship before, so I hunted out a few tutorials to get an idea of what I was supposed to be doing. The two most useful were:

• A guide written by Warlord Games (https://www.warlordgames.com/black-seas-rigging-your-ships/) (which I think is same as that printed in the Black Seas rulebook?)
• A tutorial on JJ’s Wargames (https://jjwargames.blogspot.com/?m=1), a great blog which also has fantastic tutorials on painting Napoleonic miniatures

Both guides are based on three masted vessels, so I needed to do a little bit of interpretation and muddling my way through to work out what should be included on the two masted brigs. However, I managed to muddle through it helped by some great images of a fully rigged brig on JJ’s blog.

Tools needed were very similar to tackling the sails – tweezers, superglue, sharp scissors to cut excess thread, cocktail sticks to apply the glue and a reel of fine black thread.

Both the guides linked above are very good at explaining the step by step process of getting the standing rigging wired up. Standing rigging is the set of lines that support the masts and bowspirit on a ship, and it is consistant in appearance whatever nationality a vessel hails from.

The process was a bit fiddly in places, mostly trying to get the lines on the bowspirit wrapped around the cats. To explain in layman’s terms, there’s a small grove just in front of where the anchors are attached for the lines to wrap around. Unfortunately, I had managed to clog them on one side of both ships with plastic glue when attaching the anchors. I cheated by wrapping the line around the anchor instead. Inelegant, but a passable bodge job.

Using superglue means that you don’t have to tie lines in place, you can just wrap a turn or two and stick it fast.

I’m undecided whether it would be easier to rig without sails in place, versus the difficulty of adding the sails once the rigging is done. It wasn’t too much effort to manipulate the thread around the sails, and I think trying to get the sails in place around set lines would be much more frustrating.

Amazingly, no bouts of naval-like cursing occurred whilst attempting the rigging. I suspect that it will come when I try to sort out the running rigging. Oh yes, I’m not done yet – I could stop here and have a pair of very nice ships, but there’s another set of rigging to add.