I have been reading through a number of threads regarding shrouds and dead eyes and from what I have read here on the forum and in my modeling books the dead eye distance is between 4 and 5 diameters of the dead eye. Is there a way to know for sure what the distance should be? :coffee:

Don:
I've read somewhere "3 to 5 dead eye diameters". I think it was one of those "generally" propositions that allowed the shrouds to be loosened or tightened as needed .
I would guess that as the ship "worked" in the seas that the dead eyes wouldn't be all in a row as generally shown on models and pictures.
When the ship came into port and everything was "squared away" the dead eyes were aligned to look good.

According to my understanding, the space between 2 dead eyes is not depending of the size of each dead eyes, but must be in proportion with the height of the sailor who must tightened the lanyards. Standing on the channel, the top dead eye must be at a good level to pull the lanyard. So, I think that all spacing was the same. This spacing is obviously not quite exact, depending the way the lanyard is tightened.
According to “Dictionaire de marine” written in 1830 by the frensh vice-admiral Willaumez, this distance was about 2 to 3 feed…..But those were French old measure “pied du Roy”. One “Pied du Roy” is 1/3 of a meter. So 3 ‘ is about 1 meter or 3.28 today US feed. You can now convert this distance with the scale of your model. According to this, I usually use a distance of 2 cm at a scale of 1:48…..