Guns finished and cleats in the waist
A few weeks on by now. The annual Christmas village building weeks, hence no progress for a while. In between, though, all the guns have finally been rigged for good, including the deck ropes. Now on to the next job. That would be the upper deck, but in one of the photos in Piet’s build log I saw something else in the waist, between the guns: two brown pieces of wood, one vertical and one almost horizontal.
What are they and what are they for? In Anatomy of the Ship I do see something like it, but there they are all vertical; in the book they are called riders. Google is not much help then, unless you are into horse riding. In zu Mondfeld there is something about cleats, but those seem to be mainly on the upper deck and not on the gun deck.
Stephan thought of tacks or braces; I had no idea what those are. Jaques remembered photos by Jan about cleats, and Stephan found the link (Henk’s log of the HMS Victory by Mantua, page 18). Jan confirmed: cleats for belaying tacks or braces, which come inboard through a block in the ship’s side. Piet explained it for those to whom that means nothing: with the braces you turn the yards in the horizontal plane, so that the sails can be trimmed to the wind; tacks are only on the courses (foresail and mainsail) and hold the clew forward on the windward side. Herby63 reached for his bible: Longridge describes riders in The Anatomy of Nelson’s Ships (page 24) as “interior ribs fayed upon the inside planking”, so something quite different. The pieces of wood in the photo look more like kevel blocks with a sheave and a diamond head. On the Victory they have the shape of horn cleats, but that was not always the case. Jan later added that the English rider is the Dutch wrang.
The horizontal cleats turn out to be in the kit, even. They are on the drawing, only of course they do not appear anywhere in the instructions. The supplied material does not look at all like Piet’s cleats, but it is a small detail. Good to know from Herby63 that they did not always look like a horn cleat, so this may well be correct after all.
