Cap'n Rat Fink

Thanks, Mario. I think I'm inclined, like you suggest, to take material down from the top of the keel. Especially since it looks like the slot depth for the bulkheads brings the bottom of the bulkheads to the appropriate distance from the bottom of the keel according to the plans.

BTW, I've had your build log permanently open in my browser for the past 3 weeks!

Just a beautiful build Buck. You are a very good craftsman.
 
Mario

Just a beautiful build Buck. You are a very good craftsman.
 
Mario

Just a beautiful build Buck. You are a very good craftsman.
 
Mario

Hello all!
 
It seems I have been doing everything except boatbuilding lately, but the lantern keg is built now. It's a model of the one in Bob Hellman's collection that has the cleat on the big end:
 
 
Since both ends are closed, the keg was built using a dowel with the heads attached at the ends. Here the heads are still a bit oversized and they were fine tuned and tapered.

 
The cedar wood was stained using a Minwax Golden Oak stain pen.

 
A small parade. Here you can see the stained keg compared to the bare buckets which I figured would be a bit bleached from bailing salt water.

I finally got around to finishing the lantern. It's a little booger.

 
The base is 4.5mm x 4.5mm. This thing was a challenge for me because the 30 pieces that make it up are really small and tough to hold on to. There was actually quite a bit more than 30 pieces, but who knows where the heck those other pieces went to! The door handle is less than 1.5 mm long and it swivels. The macro shots are a bit cruel, but it looks pretty good in real life. It sort of has that used and scuffed look. The candle has some fake wax drips!  If I ever start something like this again, please be kind and tell me not to!


 
Hey, now that Lawrence's bucket is in Canada, there's all kinds of room on the penny!

 
 

I have not been able to get much boat time in lately but decided to push on with the lantern using the 26awg grille. I brush painted it with red enamel but it came out a bit heavy, so I brushed it all off with thinner. FYI - enamel thinner does not dissolve CA glue - yea!!   I have an airbrush that I bought a couple hundred years ago along with a tankless compressor. The tankless compressor pulses a bit when spraying, is loud as heck, and it runs continuously. I broke down and bought a $69 airbrush compressor with a tank from Harbor Freight and it works great. It's fairly quiet too. While I was breaking down and buying stuff, I followed the lead of Captain Steve and others, and bought some rope from Chuck ay Syren.  Oooh! Aaah! Very nice!
 
Anyway, here's where I'm at with the lantern. The door is off until I add "glass" panels and a candle inside. There will also be a knob added to the door.
 
 
 

After emailing a few places that sell antique nautical items, I was refered to Bob Hellman who I was told "has one of the best if not THE best whaling collection in the world". Wow, did I luck out! Bob's wife Nina runs Nina Hellman Antiques of Nantucket. If any of you get out that way, please send some business their way as these are some nice people.
 
Matt's excerpt from the story about busting the keg open seems to be how it's done, but it would only be opened in an emergency. I would guess that the hoops would be tapped loose to carefully dissasemble the keg to avoid busting the lantern and getting the food scattered everywhere. This brings up the question about building a lantern keg for my whaleboat. If I have a lantern out, the keg would already be disassembled. I may build a keg anyway though.
 
The following is the info from Bob's email which he said I could share with you here. Mystery solved. Thanks Bob!!
 
 
The lantern keg contained a lantern, candles, matches, tobacco, and lots of hard bread - strictly for emergencies.  I have two in my collection.  They are built like little tapering casks, with 3 metal hoops.  They are usually 18" or 2 feet tall with two heads 8" and about 12" across.  There often is a wooden cleat at one end to receive a light line so it can be tied to the whaleboat for safe keeping.  They never had latches for opening - one opened it by disassembling it - like a cask.  Sometimes the cleat  was at the small end as in Ronnberg's drawings end sometimes it was at the larger end - as one in my collection.  See photos below.
I hope this is helpful,   
 
Bob Hellman
 

 

Forgive me. It's been a while since my last confession... err post. It took a couple of weeks for the 1/32" angle to arrive and we had company the following weekend. I'm not too thrilled with how the lantern is looking and I may redo it. The 26awg grill work is looking too chunky. It should be .016" in diameter but it's measuring closer to .020". That doesn't seem like much, but it really is at this scale. Before I start the whole thing over, I'm going to start the grill over using a .013" guitar string. There's a little out of square wonkiness with the whole thing that I can't decide if it looks bad or makes it look used. Used being my way of justifying it. If I run with it, I'll paint it red and rub thru to brass in areas.


 
P.S. I'm not sure why this 2nd pic is rotating. You can click the pics to enlarge them.

Hey Buck- here's a hingeless lid.

OK, I was intending to hold out until I finished this lantern to post pictures, but I ran into a snag and need to order some K&S brass 1/32" angle. Nobody stocks that size around here, as apparently, nobody else around here is stubborn enough to try using it! The angle will be used as corners to connect the top and bottom plates of the lantern.
 
The top and bottom plates were made from .010 sheet brass. I used end cutters to trim the sheet metal and then folded the tabs while gripping them with the ground end cutters shown on page 1 (post 13) of this thread. The tabs were gripped and the plate folded over while tapping with my miniature Dremel hammer. The round cap was domed with a ball end on the little hammer while the brass was laying over a hole in a piece of wood.

 
Since I was unable to find any tiny brass angle here, I tried a couple of things. First I tried folding the .010 sheet into some angle pieces, but it ended up a bit wavy. I then tried cutting the corners from a 1/16" piece of square tubing. I wasn't satisfied with the results because when the 4 corners were cut loose, it was really hard to hang onto one side of the angle while trying to file the edge of the opposite side. I'll wait for some actual angle to continue.

 
The lantern has a round chimney on the top with little vent holes and a domed cap and handle. The chimney has a 1/8" outside diameter so I needed to rig a holder to drill a bunch of .028" holes in it. I sharpened the heck out of a steel brad nail and used it as a center punch. The holder is a small chunk of wood that has a 1/8" hole through it. A sloped reveal was chiseled out of the business side because it was too hard to see the tubing to drill it with it poking out of a square face. A kerf was cut down to the hole so a clamp could squeeze the tubing to keep it from rotating.

 
The pieces were soldered together and the square end of the wood holder was used to square up the top plate with the chimmney tube, which passes through a hole drilled through the top plate. The pieces are still a bit rough since there will be more soldering before I can start filing and sanding.


 
I now need some help figuring out the wooden lantern keg that holds the lantern. How would it open? The top has a lanyard cleat so I don't think the top would come off. Do you think that the top and sides would have been held to the base with latches? Because of the banding, I don't see that there could be a door in the side of it that would open. What do you folks think?? Any thoughts would be appreciated. I did try emiling the curator at the Mystic Seaport museum, but I think the address on the website is no longer a good one. 

 
Best wishes,
 

Haha! I've been wondering that too. I either need to win the lottery and give up my day job or stop sleeping!
 
Lawrence's 1:50 bucket is done. I'll have to look around for a box big enough to mail this to Canada in!
 

 

 
Best wishes,

Thanks for all the great comments Brian, Matt, Michael, Ferit, Lawrence and Augie. Very much appreciated.
 
You about made my beer come through my nose Matt!
I think your imaginitive and very technical work is spurring me on to up my game - thanks!!
 
Lawrence- It's my pleasure to be able to contribute a little bucket to your Annie M. Parker. That is such a graceful looking ship and you are doing her proud.The bucket is coming along well, but you'll have to wait a bit for more pics!
 
Augie - There's a bit more detail to come! I'm starting on another item that's proving to be the most difficult piece so far, but that will remain a secret for now in case I mess it up!   You're not getting too old to remember - I'm just so slow that some of my artifacts pre-date recorded history! Here's a group shot of some of the stuff. BTW, your ship is a joy to behold!
 

I started work on Lawrence's 1:50 bucket which will be half the size of the one with the rope handle on the penny above. This is pretty small and the hard part is hanging on to the stave pieces while shaving the tapers with the 1/8" chisel. No blood yet!  I can't imagine getting much smaller than this, so that Baumann fellow must be an alien!
 
The staves are about 1/2mm thick and the thin veneer stop fence that I had used before for planing the cedar to thickness was too thick. I adopted a different technique to plane the cedar to 1/2mm by flipping the plane upside down and using an eraser as a gripper/push block to run the cedar over the blade. Works good but a sharp blade and shallow depth of cut is needed.

 
 The stave's widths will taper from about 1.5mm to 1mm. The bottom of the bucket is 3.5mm in diameter.

 

 
Part of the preperation for even starting this little bucket was obtaining the correct beverage in my dry dock. With a name like Dry Dock and a picture of HMS Victory and a quote from Nelson on the can, this seemed like the right tool for the job!
 

 
I'll post more pictures when I git er done.
 
Best wishes,

The first full week back to work after the holidays was crazy for me too. I did get in some shipyard time today.
 
Yup, another bucket does fit on the penny!

 
For the latest bucket, I tried pulling out the big guns, well maybe the little gun. I used a 1/8" Japanese chisel I got years ago to help when cleaning up corners in inlay cavities on ebony guitar fingerboards. The heft of a "real" chisel made cutting the ebony end grain much easier than an Xacto knife. For the bucket staves, shaving the edges for a nice fit was a breeze with this chisel, and the bevels were much more precise than sandpaper.
 


 
The problem with scratch building these buckets is now the kit supplied line buckets look pretty bad. Dang! I may set a record for the longest time to finish a boat that was nearly done.
 

 
Best wishes,

I think another bucket might fit on this penny...

Hello eveyone!
 
I worked on the compass box today and was trying to make a "glass" lens for it. Once again, I found use for a plastic jar (this time one that sunflower seeds had come in). The curvature of the jar adds to the look and actually appears to maginify a little. Making the lens proved really difficult and resulted in plenty of failed attempts.
 

 
Here's what I learned when shaping the plastic from jars.
1) Do not shape it with sandpaper or a double-cut file. The plastic actually seems to be a 3-layer lamination and I'm guessing the heat from coarser shaping methods causes a de-lamination that clouds up the edge of the lens. It actually swells up too.
 
2) When using a single cut file, don't file too much in the same place for the same reason.
 
3) Use scissors to cut the plastic as close to the final shape as possible so you don't have to file very much. Don't try to cut curves with scissors or it will cloud up. Cut straight litle segments instead of curves, and then file to a smooth curve.
 
4) It's really hard to file a perfect circle. I wasn't able to. 
 
 
 
Here's the pieces ready to assemble. The housing is a short piece of brass tubing. The rose compass was from Google Images, and I found that if I put the image into a Word document, I could shrink it way down with decent resolution by grabbing the corner of the image and making it tiny on the document before printing. I shaped a piece of cedar to almost fit inside the tubing and then pressed it in and the tubing shaved it to shape. Note that the end of the cedar that the compass rose is attached to is at a slight angle. I was after the effect of the compass tilting on its mouting giblets....mounting gimlets?...mounting gimbals? Anyway, whatever those mounting thingies are that alows a compass to self-level.
 

 
The finished compass box.
 

 

 
Best wishes,
 

We have 4 sides to the compass box now.

 

Hi Jon!
I've found the nut slotting files to be useful for quite a few things. You will want to look for the flat, double-edged type instead of the newer wedge- shaped ones that make more of a V- shaped notch.

Merry Christmas everyone!
 
Got in a little boat time late this morning and decided to take a break from the mini coopering. I started working on the compass box and decided it needed to be put together with box joints. Sounded logical being a box and all...
 


 
The joints were filed using guitar nut slotting files working from .010" up to .032". I still have a little fine tuning to do on this corner, and then do 3 more corners. Maybe this isn't very logical at all...

Here's some info on the making of the tiny staves for the piggin using simple tools. The same method will be used for the bucket and lantern case. If you are a serious scratch builder, you would just use your Jim saw and thicknesser instead to make the custom size strips, and skip ahead to the tapering step. For a kit builder just needing a few custom sized strips of wood to bash a kit or scratch some items like these, this is an inexpensive solution to keep you going. You wouldn't want to make a ship's worth of planks this way.
 
The wood I used was cedar because it has a warm color that looks right for buckets, is easy to work, and best of all, it was free. There were some odd pieces of wood left in the garage by the previous owner of my house, and an old fence picket that had split was one of them. No doubt, the previous owner never got around to making buckets with it.
 
1) The first step was to whack off a length of the picket and cut that into rough strips. I whacked off a 15" piece just so I could have longer strips for stuff should I ever need them in the future. If you don't have a motorized saw of some sort, you could just cut off a 3" piece with a handsaw and then use a little razor saw to make some oversized strips. I used a bandsaw and a fence to cut longer oversized strips. I cut the strips so the grain would be quartersawn (the dark thin grain lines are perpendicular to the face of the strips). This was more for the looks than anything else. The dark rough piece was the face of the fence picket. The strips cut from this small cut-off of scrap wood is good for a dozen buckets or more!

 
2) The strips were brought to a 1mm thickness with a hand plane. Instead of trying to plane the 15" long pieces, shorter 3" long pieces were planed. It is really easy to snap a longer piece of a wood like cedar when planing this thin, and I can manage the short ones easily at my drydock work station. When you are planing this thin, you need something thinner but strong to hold the piece against, Don't use sheet metal! If you plane too thin, that could damage your plane blade. A thin piece of hardwood works great. This is a little veneer of Indian Rosewood that's about 40 thousands thick (.040") and is very tough.  I just butt the end of the strip against the veneer, hold the veneer with my left hand and plane with the right. Pretty easy and not much workspace is needed.


 
There are all kinds of small modeler's hand planes out there and I have an assortment, but I swear by my Stanley 12-960 low angle block plane.

 
My 2 cents on hand planes: Although the 12-960 dwarfs the little planes, it's features and adjustability make it much easier to use with very controllable, precise results. First off, the mouth (where the blade pokes through the bottom) is adjustable in width. You need a very fine opening to take the tiny shavings we will be making (about .0015"). If you look in the picture above, the 12-960 has been adjusted way tighter than the smaller planes without adjustable openings. The 12-960 has an easy adjustment (the big knob on the back) to control the depth of the cut. The others have a single set screw that you loosen to reposition the blade, and you may or may not end up with the ajustment being better once you re-tighten it. It takes a lot of practice to get a set screw holder type plane adjusted to within .001" tolerance, which is what is really needed for precision small scale stuff. The blade can also get rotated a little crooked when re-tightening set screws. With the 12-960, there's another adjustment that can correct a crooked blade. Once you are all finely adjusted, if you catch a gnarly change of grain in hardwood, a set screw holder can slip and mess up your adjustment. The 12-960 has an indexed holder that positively locks into a notch in the blade. Speaking of the blade, the 12-960's blade is about twice as thick as the others and is made of better steel that holds a sharp edge longer. I find this plane a joy to use. I bought mine about 15 years ago and it was made in Sheffield England then. I think they are now made in Mexico and hopefully they are still the nice tool that mine is. There are more expensive versions of this plane from L.N. and Veritas. but it's hard to beat this one at about $35. You can actually plane end grain with this low-angle version.
 
Once the strips were planed to thickness, the edges were trued up and planed to 3mm wide. I did this by simply holding the strip in my left hand and planing with the right. Sounds iffy when you say it, but it's actually very easy. You don't bear down on the wood, you just slide the plane past the strip and it scares the wood off the edge! No blood lost.
 
3) The 3mm x 1mm x 3" long strips were cut into lengths a little longer than the staves needed to be (about 9mm long for 1/25 scale). I then tapered the staves with the plane so the narrow end was 2mm wide. In hindsight, the fit would have been better if they had been a bit under 2.5mm. This was done by taking a short cut off the end to be the narrow end, followed by slightly longer strokes until the whole 9mm length is one continuous cut. Very little pressure was applied and it worked out to about 6 passes on each side. This looks scary, but I did it by holding the little stave in my left hand and planing with the right. Keep in mind that the blade is set for a .0015" shaving, so your fingers would pretty much have to touch the bottom of the plane to get cut! No blood in my bucket!


 
I back-beveled the edges of the staves with 220 grit sandpaper glued to a flat piece of hardwood. I have a courser grit at the other end. These sanding sticks are really handy and don't load up as bad as a small file. The bottom of the bucket was shaped from a wider 1mm thick piece of cedar. The bucket bottom (about 8mm dia.) was glued to the end of a dowel, it's edge beveled, and the bucket assembly continues as was shown in the earlier posts. The beveled notches on the inside stave bottoms were cut with a #11 Xacto blade to receive the bucket bottom. The tape around the dowel flares the staves out. It was necessary to adjust the stave tapers with the sanding stick because they were a bit over-tapered. The bands were cut from a thin plastic container's label (like the label on a plastic bottle of soda) and blackened with a Sharpie and stuck on with white glue. Geez, I guess I wrote another small book.



 
Best wishes
 

Well Ferit, as you can see here, I get paid big money!

 
JSGerson- I'll try to post the steps with pictures when I get home this evening.

Hi Lawrence!
 
I am in my new shipyard right now trying to turn a piece of an old cedar fence picket into staves to make 1:25 scale piggins, buckets and lantern cases! Having a blast and I'll post pictures when I get further along.
 
The new shipyard:


 
Thanks for stopping by!

Woo-hoo!! We have a house in Colorado now! It will probably take a month to unpack the 3 pods and get a dry dock established, but that's ok.
The view from the deck:

Hi everybody. Sorry for the really long delay in posting. I haven't been doing much modeling for some time now. Still working in Colorado waiting for the house to sell in Kansas so my wife and dogs can join me here. We looked into places to rent or lease-to-purchase here, but having 3 dogs puts a big limit on what is available. It's been nearly half a year now but we're very hopeful that next month our house will sell there and we can then buy here.
 
But let's get back to the boat! With all of my tools in storage I decided to work on the sail. I figured all I would need is some thread and a needle. No sweat, a couple of dollars tops. Umm. The cloth that came with my whaleboat kit was way too coarse. At scale it was more like a net than sail cloth! So I found some nice cloth that is about 72 threads per inch and bought a spool of thread. Less than 5 bucks - no biggie. In Model Expo's "To Build A Whaleboat" book, they show a method of making a sail where you simulate seams by folding a zig-zag pattern in the fabric. This is done by making closely spaced parallel lines at the sail's 'seams' and folding the fabric along the first line and then positioning the edge of that fold on top of the second line and then pressing it flat. This creates an overlap that looks pretty convincing. The book says to make the parallel lines 1/4" apart which results in a 1/8" overlap, but since that is for the New Bedford Whaleboat kit that is nearly twice the size as my kit, I made the lines 1/8" apart for overlaps that are 1/16" wide. A little white glue was put into the overlap with a toothpick before the final pressing to help hold it together for a very flat look. I have a little steel bar that I used as an 'iron' to press the creases and overlaps nice and crisp (no heat used).
 
Lines marked out and starting the 1st crease

 
Pressing the 1st crease

 
Folding the 1st crease to the 2nd line and gluing the overlap shut

 
Finished seam creases

 
 
So with all the seams pressed, I was ready to start stitching the seams. The book shows 2 parallel rows of stitches; one along each edge of the overlap. I made an extra practice seam on the opposite end of my sail cloth to try to get the hang of using a needle and thread. My wife is kind of excited that we may actually sit together and stitch some day! This is pretty tiny work and it needs to look good on both sides of the sail. My Optivisor sure would be handy for this, but it's in storage somewhere. My boss at work has let me borrow his magnifying head band that he uses for changing batteries in his watch collection. They really do help and I'm thankful.  Using the plastic lenses makes me appreciate even more the clarity of the optical glass lenses in the Optivisor. Can't recommend those enough!
 
So my sorry little practice sewing began and I quickly found out several things:
1) It's hard to make tiny stitches that look good on both sides.
2) Regular sewing thread is too big to look right at this scale.
3) Cheap household scissors do not cut thread very well.
4) Small thread that looks dark enough on a spool looks much lighter when used in small stitches.
5) You can spend a lot of money in a stitchery store, but they have some cool tools for this sort of work!
 
So here's part of my $40 haul at the stitchery store. The Inspira micro-tip embroidery scissors are a joy to use. The finger loops easily accommodate my Sasquatch fingers and they snip thread more cleanly than the cataract scissors from Model Expo. The Inspira scissors were only a little over $9 and you really need these! The special pencil allows you to mark fabric and the marks disappear after a few days. They can also be erased if you make a mistake. Regular pencil lead is hard to erase from fabric- I am going to have to do some careful washing once I finish stitching to get rid of some of my initial pencil markings. This marking pencil leaves a fat mark and I'm not sure how much I'll be using it. It's a bit pricey at about $20, but it comes with extra "lead" and a very cool twist to extend eraser. The folding stitch puller is handy for removing stitch mistakes, but is a tad large for the size stitches I'm making. I have mostly been using the tip of my needle to loosen and remove mistakes. It is a bit comforting to know that stitching mistakes are common enough that tools have been made to remove them!
 

 

 
So, here's some practice stitches. The stitches closest to the edge are done with regular sewing thread and they look very bulky to me. This polyester thread looked very thin on the spool, and I'm surprised how huge it looks on the sail. The next bit of stitches is still a bit bulky to my eye and the color disappears into to sail's color. I was surprised by that since the thread color has a nice contrast with the sail when its on the spool. This is Mettler brand No. 50 "silk finish" embroidery thread from the stitchery shop. The 3rd bit of stitches is using Mettler No. 60 "fine embroidery" thread and its size looks good to me. I'm thinking that the color is a tad too dark, but the next lighter color in brownish earthy tones that the store I got it from has is much lighter. In this thread size, most of the colors are very bright vibrant colors. I am going to look around a little more to see if I can find another color in that size of thread. This stitching is going to take a long time so I want to find a color I won't have 2nd thoughts about.
 
Three different thread sizes and colors.

 

 
Sorry for writing a book. Hope everyone is doing well. 
 
Best wishes,