The project that wouldn’t die! I finally found something to rig this model with that is only about a scale 3/4" to 1" in diameter. The problem is that’s light red, and darned nearly transparent. Any reseblence to the hair on the head of my lovely daughter is purely… umm… very observant. It comes in about 12" lengths, and there’s enough of it around to knit another kid. It takes coloring fairly well. Paint just beads up on it, but I have some white india ink that works great, giving a very stark white. I also have an ink marker in brown which, if applied after the ink, gives produces what I’d call a “dark hempen tan.” The tan is not quite as easy to see as the white.
Never having seen any rope from the 1850’s, I’m wondering how light it would be bleached by the sun. Would that stark white be too light for running rigging in such a small scale? I remember that John said you should err on the side of too light.
Whaddya think?
There’s plenty of room for discussion about the colors of rigging line. One point that needs to be born in mind is that such colors undoubtedly varied a lot - from time to time, nation to nation, and ship to ship.
The running rigging of a mid-nineteenth-century American merchant ship probably would be a dull, rather dark, greyish tan - about the color we normally associate with hemp rope. (If you’ve got a dark hempen tan, you’re probably on target.) The standing rigging was normally coated with a concoction containing tar and lamp black, which, if it wasn’t pure black, must have come pretty close.
The two Golden Rules of Rigging are: (1) When in doubt as to thickness, err on the light side; and (2) When in doubt as to color, err on the dark side. (With apologies to Darth Vader.)
One other point: lots of people over the years have tried human hair as a rigging material. It has one big problem: it’s hydroscopic. It tends to shrink and expand with changes in the humidity. How serious a problem that is seems to vary. I’ve read horror stories from people who’ve spent hours rigging a ship with hair and watched it all go terribly slack within a few days. I’ve also read accounts by people who say they’ve had good luck with it, and don’t know what the fuss is all about. The old “prisoner of war” models from the Napoleonic Wars usually were rigged with hair. Most of them no longer have their original rigging (asking any kind of fiber to last for 200 years is asking a lot), but some of them have survived in pretty good shape. I suspect lots of variables are involved in determining the lifespan of a hair sample: the climate in which it’s displayed, the treatment (dye, paint, adhesive, etc.) it’s been given, and even, I suppose, the dietary habits and DNA of the original owner. (It’s well known that hair samples vary a great deal from person to person.) You might want to do a test run of some sort before commiting yourself to that material.
Good luck.
Thanks, John. I’ve thought about the absorption bit, and here’s what I’m hoping: The longest running line on this model will be about 3", and I’m coating the hair with two shades of dye, so I’m hoping it will hold up for a few years, at least. I think I’ll go with the brown-over-white.
OT Trivia about hair: in '87 we exhumed the bodies of 33 Confederate soldiers who’d been killed in the battle of Glorieta Pass, NM. About a half-dozen of the skulls had nearly full heads of hair; the rest had no hair, at all. Genetics? Their diets were pretty similar.