The belfry on deck, with a clapper that moves

The bell has arrived in the meantime, so the belfry now stands on deck, painted black. The whole thing doesn’t quite fit with its feet: that is why I had to notch the grating, and it overhangs the forecastle a little. In hindsight I should perhaps have taken the scale a touch smaller still. But this was already pretty small, and from a little distance you don’t notice a thing.

Inside the bell I also made a clapper that really moves. It doesn’t make much sound. Next to nothing, really.

Fore and aft, or athwartships?

Jan asked a good question: does the beam the bell hangs from really run fore and aft? On the Victory it is turned through 90 degrees, with a rope from the projection above the bell hanging down into the forecastle, so that the bell can be rung from there. On mine you really have to go up to the forecastle deck to ring it.

I had noticed that too. I based mine on the illustration in the Anatomy of the Ship, and there the beam runs fore and aft. But that could of course be for drawing reasons. The main consideration was actually that this way the belfry had the shortest footprint in the fore-and-aft direction; otherwise it would have stuck out even further over the forecastle. So it ended up just short of square.

Incidentally, that same picture did lead me astray. I thought the overhang as I now have it was part of the design. But the overhang in the drawing is of course simply because the roof is a bit larger than the footprint. Oh well, it is what it is.