Ropework and knots: breeching ropes, gun tackles and coiled falls

Long before a mast goes up there is already rope on the model: 28 guns on the gun deck, ten 9-pounders and eight carronades on the upper deck, each with a breeching rope and two gun tackles, so 46 breechings and 92 tackles, plus a messenger across the gun deck. It was the training ground for everything still to come. The breechings are 1 mm cable-laid rope, because the kit only supplies hawser-laid; the tackle blocks are 2.3 mm and the small block is not knotted but closed with a seizing of 0.1 mm silk thread (the 2020 post still calls it a woolding), since a glued knot at this scale is bigger than the block. The messenger got a real eye splice at each end, and the falls of the tackles lie coiled on deck, neither too tidy nor too messy, or on the upper deck are frapped to the tackle. On the carronades the rope and blocks are by accident a size larger; the log says so.

Piet (pietsan) does a few things differently and I say so, because his way is the standard on the Dutch forum: stropping blocks without a bulky knot and coils of rope made on a piece of tape (‘Vaardigheden, tips en weetjes’, 2020). The knots for the shrouds, the ratlines and the belaying will come to these pages once there is work of my own to hang them on.