About this site

A nine-year build log, reordered so that the next builder can actually use it.

The model

The Caldercraft kit of HMS Diana (Jotika, scale 1:64) has been on Eduard Renger’s workbench since 10 March 2017. The finished model will be 118 cm long including bowsprit and jib boom; the hull itself is about 70 cm on the gun deck. By September 2025 the hammock cranes were fitted; masts and rigging are still to come. The build log appeared from day one on the Dutch forum modelbouwforum.nl: 66 pages and 1,319 posts, 546 of them by the builder.

What this site adds

The forum is chronological and full of conversation. This site turns the same build into something you can look things up in: 0 log posts in thirteen phases, 48 how-tos, 134 problems with their fixes, 86 errors in the kit, materials, sources and a list of Dutch and English terms. The clickable Admiralty draught shows per part what was built when, and the time machine shows the model growing out of the builder’s own photos.

How the site was made

The text was rewritten from the forum posts, in the first person and without the surrounding chat. Tips from forum members are credited by name. The English version was translated in advance with a fixed terminology list, not on the fly. The site is static (Hugo), has no database, and runs on Dutch hosting. AI (Claude) was used for ordering, rewriting, translating and building, edited by the builder.

Rights

Own photos and text: CC BY-NC 4.0, Eduard Renger. The Admiralty draughts of the Artois class (1793) are public domain, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, via Wikimedia Commons. Kit drawings, the kit manual and book pages are not reproduced in full; where an old forum photo next to an explanation shows a small part of a book page or a kit sheet, the source is given, as it is wherever a dimension comes from a book. Photos and texts by other forum members have not been used.

Contact

Email . You can also reply in the build log on modelbouwforum.nl (in Dutch, but English is understood), although a message about this site gets buried between the build posts there. Errors on this site: please report them and they will be fixed.