Bow Decoration

The headrails totaly finished along with the cat head and support bracket, the head rails turned out a lot better then I thought they might, but as with most things the only way to get something looking nice is to have plenty of patience !

The cat heads were held in position with 2mm x 0.3mm copper strip.

This is also a good view of the triangular brackets that I fabricated to support the figure head deck, it also shows the gammoning (decorative moulding that runs up the stem)

Here are the 3 finished headrails in place on the portside, I am really pleased with how they turned out, although to get to this stage on both sides I estimate that the headrails alone took me about 30 hours.

That was the easy bit, it now had to be bent in the other direction, I found it also had a twist at either end. This really was trial and error to get it looking right. After about 2 evenings worth of work 1 was finally ready to fix to the hull, just 5 more to do then !

When I was happy that the cuvature followed my drawing I then filed the end to form a flat area that will be used to fix the head rails into place, (you can see that I have this also drawn this on my template)

The method of bending brass in this direction is explained earlier in my blog (Ballustrading And Side Rails)

The next stage was to attempt the head rails; this was always going to be very difficult having to bend the brass in 2 directions. I took a tracing from the plan and offered it to the hull. It was about 17mm short this was because the plan does not show the 2 dimensional aspect of the curvature so when you start to apply curves the opposite way to the drawing above it starts to lose length.

After I had worked out the correct length that was required I drew the 3 head rails on a drawing program (Autosketch) they could then be printed out at a scale of 1:1 and used to check the bending process of the brass. It could also be flipped for the opposite side very easily by the press of one button.