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Erik W

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Everything posted by Erik W

  1. One last photo for the week. I drilled the interior scupper holes. This was a bit nerve wracking. I hadn't anticipated how easy it would be for the 1/32" x 1/32" waterway strip to split while being drilled. I wound up starting with a much smaller drill bit and then using three more progressively larger sizes to only take a slight bit of material off at a time. I made sure to turn the pin vice really slowly. If the waterway split, the split part was still attached at one end. I took a sharpened toothpick, applied a tiny amount of wood glue, and glued the fragmented sliver back down. I had to do that with three of the holes. The splits are invisible. Glad I'm done with that part! Also, I'm not sure of the properties of wood in general, but I'm curious if my boxwood, which I've had for 9 years in an inside climate that has a humidity of around 25% most of the year, splits easier because of that. Erik
  2. Thanks for the comments Glenn and Mike. My build is 100% boxwood. When I bought all the wood, and started the project back at the end of 2015, no one was really using Alaskan Yellow Cedar yet. As far as making the eye bolts, at least since I have a large amount of wire now, it's no big deal to discard the less-than-perfect ones as I get up to speed on how to make them. lol. Mike, I used a small round diamond file with the same technique you mention above. It seemed a pretty intuitive way to get the small notch filed from the hole. Erik
  3. This week I decided to mix things up a bit, taking a break between making the backstay plates and the chain plates. I made the 22 eye bolts for the hull exterior and cap rail top. While I have every manner of small diameter wire - lead, brass, copper, phosphor bronze, steel - down to .002" diameter, I didn't have the type of wire best used by ship modelers for these types of things. So after some research on this forum I ordered both 24 and 22 gauge Hillman Group dark annealed wire. I must say, trying to make 22 identical eye bolts was more of a challenge than I thought it would be! I never did get to a point where they were consistent. That said, I selected groups that were close to identical to one another to fasten in the same area. I figure if the port side eye bolts are slightly different than the starboard, a viewer would never know since you only see one side of the ship at a time. I followed what Mike (Stuntflyer) had done in his Cheerful build log, and filed a little channel around the holes so the eye bolts snug down a bit. I also drilled the scupper holes in the outside of the hull. This was pretty straight forward, other than when I went to photograph the model I could see the bright wood on the inside of the bulwark. I wound up taking a fine brush and painting the interior black, followed by running a pencil around the plank edge of the hole. My next step will be to drill the scupper holes on the interior bulwark/deck area. Does anyone have any advice or wisdom on that? Am I drilling all the way through the interior planking? I know I need to make the holes so they notch into the lip of the waterway at deck level. Erik
  4. Hey Allan, Thanks for the links to the McMaster site. I always appreciate good sources for materials. I did some testing with blackening the brass with Birchwood Casey blackening fluid on a scrap piece of brass. I'll most likely go with black paint and a weathering powder as Chuck did to give it that metal look. The copper/liver of sulfur you mentioned sounds intriguing. Erik
  5. A little bit of progress this week. I'm new at metal working, so it took some trial and error to figure out how I am going to make the backstay plates and chain plates. One of the main issues to getting the ball rolling was figuring out how I was going to make these without the availability of 1/64" x 3/32" brass strip. It would appear that K & S has discontinued nearly its entire line of brass strip, and I couldn't locate any of the size I needed in my internet search. Many years ago I had bought a package of various sizes of 6" x 12" brass shim stock (used to shim the plates when molding parts in plastic injection molding machines so that they align correctly) just in case I ever needed sheet brass. These sheets came in thickness of .001", .0015", .002", .003", .004", .005", .006", .007", .008", .010", .012", and .015". The .015" thickness is the decimal measurement of 1/64". So I have my material. I used a pair of ancient tin snips I have in my toolbox to cut 3/32" wide strips off the sheet. I then had to flatten the strips since they curled both along the face and the edge. Next I filed the sharp edges flat. Then used flat pliers to eliminate the lengthwise cupping caused in cutting the strips off the sheet. Now that I had my self-made strips ready, I then shaped the backstay plates following Chuck's instructions in his monograph. Since the strips I created were rough and with blemishes, I polished the finished backstay plates with a fine file after shaping was complete, just because I'm a perfectionist, and that's how I roll! Yes, I know they'll be painted black. Haha. Erik
  6. Wow! Thanks for the kind words guys. You are all phenomenal modelers. So that means a lot coming from you! Erik
  7. Not a ton of progress this week. I did finish fashioning and installing the boarding ladders and channels though. I must say ripping the boards by hand out of sheet stock to make these parts is a bit of a pain in the rear. lol. Also, it was tough getting the pattern cut into the scraper to make the boarding ladder profile. I think my limitation there was my lack of precise small files. I deliberately made the filed notches in the channels that will house the chainplates narrower than they'll be. I just wanted to get the notches placed correctly and the angles in, according to the plans. I'll finish the notches up when I fit and attach the chainplates. And lastly, I'm patting myself on the back. My third photo below manages to capture the elusive and hard to photograph lower step of the Cheerful's boarding ladder (located on the wale and painted black). Haha! Erik
  8. Though I feel like I didn't get much done on the Cheerful over the last week, I do feel a sense of accomplishment. After about 9 hours of work total, I finished both boom crutches. These are easily the most complicated shapes on the build so far. I read and reread Chuck's instructions on how to get the angles correct many times before I started. I formed the first boom crutch and glued it on and painted it before I started the second one. It probably would have made more sense to make the second one before I glued on and painted the first. Doing it the way I did made it harder to get them the same size and symmetrical to one another. I wound up spending some time sanding the first to get it to look like the second, after it was already glued into place. A delicate task, to say the least. At any rate I'm happy with how they turned out, more or less the correct angles and the same as one another. While carving/cutting these out of single pieces of wood, I couldn't help but think of the guy who carved this out of a single piece of Carrara marble 500 years ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg/1024px-Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg Erik
  9. Thanks for the compliments Eric and druxey! And Eric, though I'm in an accounting role, these are definitely interesting times to be involved with the Earth system sciences. Erik
  10. Thanks for the kind words! Toni, as far as the photos go, your comment is worth an explanation of how I get my photos. I take the photos on my work space, which is pretty darn small. Especially for the last year or so since I've been working mostly from home (I'm an accountant for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, the next town over from mine). I threw in a photo of my work space too. Basically my work day, and hobby, all take place on different sides of my L-shaped desk. It means my commute from work to modeling at the end of my work day takes about one second. Haha. I have a large sheet of light blue construction paper for a photo background that I tape down to my work surface. For lighting, I always take the photos mid day in front of the window, which provides good area lighting, and use a halogen desk lamp with 700 lumen bulb as a spot light aligned with the lens of the camera. The camera I use is a 7 year old Olympus OM-D mirrorless camera with a 14-22mm lens mounted on my now 30 year old Gitzo tripod. I use the self timer so I'm not touching the camera when the shot is taken, this aids in crisp photos. For each shot I take a 3 photo bracket by 1/3 stops using aperture priority with an F stop of F22 (creates the greatest in-focus depth of field). The aspect ratio I prefer is 16:9 which gives a horizontal rectangle photo, rather than a square, so there is not too much dead space at the top and bottom of my photos. For size I select 1280 x 720. This is big enough to see details, but small enough to not use a lot of memory. Once I have all my photos I upload them into the Olympus photo software on my laptop. I delete 2 of the 3 photos taken in the bracket, selecting the one that is the best brightness wise. The only editing I do is making the crispness greater (not sure why the camera doesn't automatically do that itself with in-focus photos), and to get the boxwood to look the actual color/shade it is, I've been color correcting slightly by adding a small bit of blue hue and very slightly removing red hue. This has been an evolutionary process for me. I don't have any kind of formal training, and taking photos of something as large as Cheerful, the largest model I've ever built, has had it's own learning curve. I threw in a photo of my last ship build below, a 1/350 scale tugboat, for a comparison of the "normal" size I'm used to photographing! For me, presentation is a fun part of participating in forums, so I really strive to have good photo presentation for you wonderful folks! Hope this is useful for people. I encourage my fellow modelers here to play around with their photography. You'd be surprised at what you can come up with. Erik
  11. As always, thanks for the likes folks. I finished a few different things over the last week. I spent time shaping the rudder. Using the plans I drew the lines that I would sand down to on the rudder faces and sides. Doing this gave me the visual cue to not over or under sand. Once the rudder was done I cut out the rudder port. I made a paper template from the plans that I used to get the shape correct. Next I made the top of the rudder post. This took way more time than it should have. I accidentally removed too much material from the laser cut piece. So I would up gluing on a chunk of scrap wood to that piece and then shaping the whole thing again. Sometimes it's the one little piece of wood that is the biggest pain! The last thing I did was shape the 6 timber heads. This was a bit nerve wracking as a newbie, but they turned out OK. The photo below shows the tools that wound up working best for me (as well as a rough cut timber head before clean up). For some reason, on any model I build, I'm most comfortable using either a #17 or #18 X-Acto chisel blade with no handle (rather than a #11 blade w/handle). I know it's weird, but it gives me more control by holding the blade directly. The overall height of the timber heads match the plans, but my angled faces are not as tall as the plans. No big deal really since all 6 look the same. The next thing I'll be working on is the boom crutches. Wish me luck! Haha. Erik
  12. I spent the week building the windlass mini-kit. Hats off to Chuck for the engineering of this little thing! It goes together easily, with the biggest challenge being beveling the edges of the windlass faces. These didn't all turn out perfectly symmetrical, so I test fit the sub assemblies on the center strip in a bunch of different combinations. I settled on what looks symmetrical when viewed from the top, and put the best sides facing up. To get the windlass to snug down on the deck I taped a piece of sandpaper to a 1/16" thick wood sheet and then sanded each of the supports with one side on my cutting mat while the other side was being sanded on the 1/16" sheet with sandpaper. Since the deck is angled towards the scuppers from the center line, sanding the windlass support bottoms like this allows them both to sit flat on the angled deck. As far as getting the windlass positioned correctly on the deck in relation to where the bowsprit will go, I put a straight wooden dowel where the bowsprit will be and then marked the center line on the stern cap rail and top of the stem. I positioned a steel yardstick on the center line and adjusted the dowel parallel to that. Everything measured out and looked correct. The proof will be down the road on the build when I'm installing the bowsprit step and bowsprit though! Erik
  13. Thanks for all the likes and nice words everyone! Rick, the things that didn't turn out the way I would have liked are just small things. Once a little time passes I know from experience I won't even remember what those little nits were! Erik
  14. Pop the champagne, I'm finished with the deck planking! While a challenging and rewarding experience, I'm happy to be finished with planking. Like everything else with this build, planking the deck didn't quite go as planned, even with the tick marks and planks drawn out beforehand. And as you other perfectionists out there can sympathize with, there are a bunch of things that didn't turn out the way I would have liked. That said, I'm happy with the results, and the quality of the deck planking is in line with the rest of the build. Which is all I can really ask for as someone being new to this wooden ship building thing. After thoroughly cleaning my hobby area of sawdust, which is also my home office, I'm happy to be moving on to less dusty parts of the build! I plan on starting Chuck's mini-kit of the windlass this weekend. Erik
  15. Thanks for the likes and the encouraging comments. I finished more of the deck planking this week. I did my first scarph joints on the deck. The remaining planking will be more time consuming since it involves cutting the planks out of wood sheet. One note on planking color. Since I have 2 different batches of 3/16" wide wood for the main planking I used, which are both different from 7/32" wide planking I used, which is different again from the wood sheet, I decided to deliberately mix up the planks of different shades from the beginning. The plank color would vary anyway, and this kept it varied throughout the deck, rather than having bands of different shades as I transitioned from the planking stock to sheet stock. The photos were taken after a quick first sanding. Erik
  16. It's been a couple of weeks since my last post. I'm taking my time planking the deck. Like everything on this build, it's more complicated and challenging than I had initially thought it would be. Haha. I've managed to get eight more rows of planks down since my last post. I only did a rough sanding, which is why it still looks a bit crude. I'll do a final sanding once the entire deck is planked. Even though I have tick marks on the deck and the planks drawn in, it still takes some effort to get the planks a uniform width, and the run of each plank to flow smoothly when viewed down the length of the hull. At any rate, for a first deck planking job, I'm happy with the results so far. Erik
  17. Fred, I'm not sure how I missed your Cheerful build. As others have said, you did a great job! I'm part way through planking my Cheerful's deck now. Your build is an inspiration. Erik
  18. Glenn, Thanks for the feedback. I used photos of Chuck's deck as my main reference, so in person the deck has the same flowing curves as his. I located the separation between the two planking belts in the same places as he did, and the scarph joints are located in the same spots (using the deck fittings and gun ports as reference in where to locate). Also, I used Mike's (Stuntflyer) overhead photos for reference. The curve is understated in my photos compared to how it looks in person for some reason. Also, the main reason I drew in all the planking was as a double check of my tick marks. I'm glad I did since by doing so I caught a couple of places I had misaligned them. Erik
  19. I thought drawing in the tick marks and drawing the placement of the hook scarph joints wouldn't take too long. Well, after about 12 hours over the last week, I'm finally happy with the way everything looks on the deck, and I'm ready to proceed with the deck planking. Getting the drawn-in planking to look and flow the way I wanted it took so many adjustments and needed to be redone so many times I actually had to go out and buy more erasers! The last redo was actually after these photos were taken. I moved the rear of the aft scarph joints back a bit after viewing the photos, in order to have the taper of the outer 4 planks better match the inner 6 planks aft of the skylight. I also tweaked a couple of other areas after viewing these photos. Since I've never planked a deck before, my goal was to spend as much time as necessary to get the planking drawn in on the deck. Sort of the planking version of adding training wheels to a kids bike, or having bumpers in the gutters when kids bowl at a bowling alley. I'm trying to minimize my chances of screwing the deck planking up since it will be a very visible part of the build. The saying, proper planning prevents poor performance, comes to mind. One note when looking at the photos - since the plank lines were drawn in straight lines between the tick marks, it doesn't flow as smoothly visually as the actual curved planks will. Erik
  20. Here's my latest progress. I have the five center deck planks installed. These were straight forward since they're not edge bent or tapered, but they took time none the less. As always, the process is going slow and test fitting, then sanding a bit, then test fitting, then sanding a bit, and repeating over and over again until a tight fit is achieved. I'm looking forward to planking the rest of the deck . . . but I'm also looking forward to having all the planking finished and behind me! I did a first sanding after getting these planks down. So if they look rough, that's why. I'll do the final sanding when the planking is finished. Erik
  21. Thanks for all the 'likes" folks. I spent the last week building the companionway, so I'm now finished with the deck fittings that will be placed along the center line before planking the deck. For the companionway I used pencil to darken the board seams. I also slightly beveled the edges of where the companionway lid and doors are hinged. I applied several layers of much thinned red paint that allowed the board seams to show through. After painting was complete, I used a pin wash made of black oil paint thinned with Turpenoid that I applied to the hinged joints in the lid and doors, as well as around the bottom and side edges of the doors. Annnnnnd . . . . you can't really see any of all that effort in the photos. Super frustrating! I must've taken 30 photos of the finished companionway, with different background colors, and lighting and lighting angles, trying to show the board seams showing through the semi-opaque red paint. What you see is the best I could come up with. The funny thing is the board seams are so pronounced when viewing in person that I had seriously considered painting one more coat of red over the whole thing, particularly on the lid (which you don't see any seams at all in these photos). And I was worried the black wash was too pronounced. None of which you can see in the photos. Can you tell I'm still annoyed? Haha. At any rate, the next step is gluing all these deck fitting on to the deck. Some other Cheerful build logs have good advice on getting these aligned correctly. After that, it's on to deck planking. Erik
  22. Mike, My plan is once I fasten the skylight in place and begin the planking around it, I'll make the final call at that point. Obviously, if I chose to, repainting the corners will only take a few seconds. Erik
  23. Over the last week I finished the larger grating, the small coaming for the galley stack, and built the skylight mini kit. I got the idea to paint the inside of the skylight black, as well as the framing underneath the skylight below the false deck. Once complete, I didn't like the completely blacked out interior though. It made the skylight look like the glass panels were painted gloss black rather than being clear, since there was absolutely nothing visible inside. So . . . I painted the interior of the skylight wood color and will put a small planked section low down in the framing underneath the skylight. It's a subtle thing that no one will consciously notice when viewing the ship, but by having something visible inside the skylight area it hints at an interior, rather than a completely black void. Live and learn. Also, I test fit planking around the skylight and didn't like the look of the 90 degree red corners at deck level after rounding off the coaming corners, so I carefully scraped the red paint off. It looks a little funny now, but will look sharp and clean when the decking is complete. Erik
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