Claas Van Der Linde sent us this drawing from the May 1920 Rudder Magazine comparing the size of RELIANCE to the Clipper Ship Flying Cloud. As you can see dainty RELIANCE stood taller!! Flying Cloud was built to round Cape Horn, though, and RELIANCE was only built for fair summer days off Sandy Hook.
We’ve been sprucing up our Building 28 work area with displays and a bit of paint. We’re looking forward to seeing you and showing you what we’ve done! I enclose a picture of one of our displays in which we are storing our spars to keep them from getting dinged. Since this picture we’ve added the boom, topmast, and mast to our collection!
As mentioned before, we have student neighbors in building 28. Two of them are making display spars for the Museum in which one side will be cut-away to show the interior bulkheads, guttering, and walls. Pretty neat stuff! I’ll keep you posted with pictures as they progress. In the enclosed picture you’ll note that Ben, a Hendricken Senior who’ll attend Kings Point Maritime Academy next year is applying geometry and algebra. (Also asked him to calculate mast rake- he then started talking cosigns etc so I knew I’d asked the right person!)
Ben lays out his topsail Club Spar
We just received our miniature bronze cleat castings from J.M. Reineck and Sons, and we’re so excited to show them off to you! Shown are 19 scale 12″ cleats, 22 scale 15″ cleats and four scale 19″ cleats. In the background is one of Jim’s “real” cleats! Jim makes bronze castings for many Herreshoff boats and you can see his beautiful work at bronzeblocks.com.
Every once in a awhile, great publicity seems to come your way unbeknownst! I enclose a Bristol Phoenix article about the RELIANCE and the wonderful work of Mike Mirman. I must also say that Mike is just one of the wonderful craftsmen working on RELIANCE that you can meet when you visit us at building 28 on the Museum campus. (I must correct one data point in the article, our model has ~0.6 of a mile of rigging. The original had ~18,000 feet of wire rope and manila lines) To show you the quality and quantity of Mike’s work, I also enclose a picture of some of Mike’s work that we’ve been tagging and kitting.
The RELIANCE Project 