USS Constitution - Mounting the Anchors

This post covers the assembly and rigging of the anchors. At the end I put some (I hope) nice pictures on the final assembly of the ship, at this stage.

Preparing the Anchors

There are two large anchors, each consisting of three parts: the anchor, the anchor stocks and the anchor shackles:

Lucky me, I didn't needed too much cleaning of the pieces, so I after small work I proceeded to painting

... and then to assembling

Mounting Boomkins

Before assembling the anchors, I glued the boomkins in their place.

Anchor Rigging

In an earlier phase, while assembling the hull, I left an anchor rope loose, to be used in later stages. It is now time to use it. First, I made a loop through the anchor shackle, and then I secured it using a small size thread:

Once the knots and loops were secured with glue, I could cut off the excess threads and finalize the link to the anchor rope.

The anchor has two additional points where it should be rigged: one on the cathead, and one on the hull, under the rails. I focused first on the cathead. For this, I made a knot at the middle of the thread, tying it to the anchor shackle

I tied the thread then to the cathead, and secured the knot with glue.

Same procedure on the other side of the ship:

Finally, I could make the rigging of the anchor to the hull. For this, I tied one end of the thread

... and then the other end taking care the anchor is in the proper position

... and doing the same on the other side

The Final Look