mort stoll

Very sorry to hear about your loss. My sincere condolences. 
  

All the best my friend, all the best.

All the best my friend, all the best.

Druxey
Please accept my sincere apologies for not having responded in a timely manner.
I have had a very busy few weeks.
 
First I thought I was having a stroke, but after the better part of a day in Emergency I found it was Bell's Palsy caused by a virus and treated with some heavy duty drugs. The right side of my face was paralyzed and I could not close my right eye so it needed to be taped shut to sleep at night. I still have not fully recovered, but my eye is fine and I do not dribble anymore when I have my tea. My lips feel normal but my tongue does not stick out mid face, still slight out to the right side.
Then my wife caught a virus (head cold - likely from the hospital) and passed it on to me, so we've both been suffering from that. My throat is still a bit sore but my head is no longer foggy. She is much better also.
 
I hope to be back in the shop later this week.
 
I managed to get the first piece bent, fitted, and glued before everything mentioned above happened. I figured out how to manage the others (a two stage bending process) but have had no progress since.
Laminating might have been a solution, but I'll stick to full thickness for now. Keep this idea in my back pocket!
Alan

I started with the lower most forward piece. Marked off the chamfer to fit to the stem post on both port and starboard pieces. Shaped the first one.... pretty good.
Shaped the second one... darn it, I did the inside rather than the outside. Made a new piece and did it correctly.
Tried to bend them with a new 30W large round head bender... wouldn't work.
Tried wetting it and then bending with the new tool... still wouldn't work.
My guess is 30W is inadequate heat for the thickness of the part.
I soaked them in boiling water and clamped them onto the frames.
I'll use my soldering iron barrel tomorrow to put that little bit more bend to them to seat properly.

 
A member of our club gifted me a Areopiccola bending head but it doesn't fit my irons.
The irons have a small threaded hole
The Areopiccola head is 10mm diameter and split to slide into a barrel with a 10mm hole.
I need to find a soldering iron that will accommodate it. With adequate heat it should work.
 

They look sharp! Should look amazing after sone fine fitting to the curved hull and finish sanding!  

After getting through a multitude of terribly sunny, warm and blue sky days where I just had to force myself to sit out on the back patio, then having yet another health issue I am dealing with, I finally got down to the shop today.

I have my lower guides spot glued and clamped so I’ll be ready to go.

I have all but one of the main wale pieces dry fitted on the bench. The one piece needs to be remade. It is not perfect, but I am aware of my capabilities/limitations and can recognize when my “good enough” has been reached.
 
Now to get that last set remade and start getting them on the model!

Next on my list are the Victory lantern. I found 3mm flickering LEDs that don't need a circuit and are extremely cheap ($10 for 100 LEDs on Amazon.
I used thin black paper that still does not let light through and cut it out on my laser. To prepare the LED, I sanded down the dome in the front and cut off the shoulder? by the pins.
The biggest challenge is not to glue the fingers to the LED, while applying the black paper.
With one or two exception, they all will be attached to the ceiling beams and I am not worried about the top of the lantern.
 

I added 2 of the riders. I did not like the looks of the individual pieces of plies showing and covered it with a 0.5mm veneer. Sanding the corners made the transition almost invisible. 
 

The first wood pieces of my first wooden ship are glued together and it went not bad.
I painted one thin side of the planks with black color and rounded the corners. The paint is barely visible but separates the planks enough for me. I don't know if it is intended by the manufacturer, but the individual strips were not exactly the same thickness, but I like the look for the floor boards.
 

 

 

Stern and quarter galleries complete. Not my best work but with the hand tremors it’s the best I can do. Am now working on the bow head rails. 

Stern and quarter galleries complete. Not my best work but with the hand tremors it’s the best I can do. Am now working on the bow head rails. 

Stern and quarter galleries complete. Not my best work but with the hand tremors it’s the best I can do. Am now working on the bow head rails. 

Stern and quarter galleries complete. Not my best work but with the hand tremors it’s the best I can do. Am now working on the bow head rails. 

Stern and quarter galleries complete. Not my best work but with the hand tremors it’s the best I can do. Am now working on the bow head rails. 

Stern and quarter galleries complete. Not my best work but with the hand tremors it’s the best I can do. Am now working on the bow head rails. 

Stern and quarter galleries complete. Not my best work but with the hand tremors it’s the best I can do. Am now working on the bow head rails. 

Stern and quarter galleries complete. Not my best work but with the hand tremors it’s the best I can do. Am now working on the bow head rails. 

Stern and quarter galleries complete. Not my best work but with the hand tremors it’s the best I can do. Am now working on the bow head rails. 

I think I might avoid doing trenails on the hull for the ‘74! (Next project - HMS Implacable which was originally a French ship so I can use Boudroit’s plans, and the rear and figurehead are on display near me for study). 
 

Having completed the rudder, next was the rudder chains. The kit supplied chain is 24 links per inch. Using photos (thank you @JSGerson) I calculate that the chain should be more like 36 LPI. I was able to find a chain that was 30 LPI and already blackened, so I ordered that and am still waiting for it to arrive. Meanwhile, I went ahead and installed the eyebolts on the hull. For this, I used #10 fish hooks. The eye on these hooks has an O.D. of 0.065" and a hole that is 0.023" and they come in a black nickel finish. My plan is to make some tiny jump rings from .02" wire that will be used to hang the chain from the eyebolts. Finally, there were the stern ports. I considered making these from scratch, but decided to use the gunport covers from the Revell model instead. These have excellent detail and made the task much easier. Using a very sharp chisel, I removed the planking from the hull to create the openings. The sharp edge of the chisel allowed me to make crisp edges and then carve the opening down to the appropriate depth. The plastic model has grooves on the gunports where the hinges would be. The straps on the covers stick out and would fit into these grooves. I didn't want to make these grooves, so I simply filed down the "tabs" leaving a little less than 1/64th of an inch. Once glued in place, they looked perfect (IMO).
 
Some of you may notice that the white trim line is missing from the bottom of the transom. I didn't really like my hand painted lines, so I painted over them and will go back and add the lines using the architectural tape I used for the bowhead trim.

OK, so I'm not totally recovered yet, but enough that I can get some things done. Prior to my surgery, I had not quite finished the rudder. It amazes me how every little part of this ship becomes a project in itself. Something as simple as the rudder has so many little pieces to it. When I left off, I had reshaped the gudgeons and pintles to fit properly. I'm not exactly sure what these are made of for real, but photos of the dry dock ship make them appear to be copper. The navy plans from the museum website simply say "Comp.", what ever that means, but definitely not steel. I decided to make mine copper. I didn't want to just paint them, because the paint would always stay shiny, whereas the copper plating would develop a patina with time. I first tried my hand at copper plating. This is a seemingly simple process, however, in practice not so. The parts have to be absolutely clean and preferably have a polished surface. I was able to get one piece that was acceptable, but nowhere near what I really wanted. The sharp edges don't take the copper very well and the curved surfaces where the actual hinge was were difficult to get really clean and polished, so they also did not take the copper very well. The flat surfaces of the straps looked very good, especially after a light polish. After many attempts, I came up with plan B. Using the same copper tape for making the plating on the hull and rudder, I covered the straps up to the point where the shoulders curved in toward the pintle/gudgeon. What I couldn't cover with tape, I just painted. This worked very well and the tape is so thin, it doesn't add hardly anything to the thickness. I first glued on the gudgeons to the hull using a thin wire to line up the holes. The pintles were just eyeballed and I simply tried to make sure they were centered and lined up with each other. After everything had dried, I was relieved to find that it all lined up and with a little filing on a couple of the pintles, I was able to get the rudder to slide into position and drop down perfectly. Once I was sure everything fit well, I took the rudder back off and drilled holes for the bolts using a #77 drill bit. The bolts were Tichy-Train rivets (0.02") that I painted copper. The final touch was the "monkey tail" for attaching the rudder chain. A while back, I had toyed with making my own eyebolts. At that time, I also came up with a pretty good way of making the "double" eyebolts that the gun tackle is attached to on the gun deck. I had made quite a few of these from 24 ga. wire and thought they would be perfect here. Using a strap from one of the broken pintles, I drilled a hole and inserted one of the double eyebolts. After gluing in place, this was then built up using a little  J-B Weld epoxy to give the shape of the monkey tail. Once that was shaped up and hardened, the strap was bent to fit around the rudder and after gluing in place, bolts were added similarly to the gudgeons/pintles
 

 
Here's the end result:
 

 
 

With  the rudder and stern completed, I wanted to tidy up the hull and finish the "outside" work before moving on to the gundeck. Until now, I have had the ship in a foam cradle so that I could easily pick it up,  move it around etc while working on the bow and everything else. With al that handling, I rubbed the paint of the sharp edges of the air ports, scuppers and the mooring staples. i was just going to repaint these and as I was looking, I really wasn't happy with the paint job I had done on the gun stripe or the inside of the gun ports, so decided to just repaint the whole outside. It was worth the effort and Im happy with how it looks now. The last detail was the rain gutters (eyebrows) over the gun ports. These are not supplied in the kit, so had to be fabricated. I used the same material I used for the false rail on the bow (pleather with the cotton backing removed) to simulate the canvas cover and fine wire to make the eyebrow part. I shaped a piece of wood with the correct width and just bent a piece of 20 ga. wire over it to give the proper curve. After glueing the wire to the fake canvas using CA glue, the whole thing as attached to hull also with CA and painted to match the hull. All in all, I was pretty pleased with the outcome.
 
       
 

 
I think at this point I'm ready to get started on the gun deck, where I plan to put alot of detail. Fun stuff for me.

Completed the main wale edition 3 layout with the slightly more complicated double hooks.
 
In the first photo you can see the tools used. Not so obvious is the straight pin used to hold a point of the printed sheet so it could be spun a little to help make it all follow the curve of the wales.
 
I have a flexible curve from my pencil and paper drafting days, works better in this instance than my French curves to make a long gentle curved line.
I copied (traced) my original boundaries (taken off the model and onto tracing paper) onto a new fresh set of overlapping tracing sheets.
I slide the printed layout of the wales under the blank sheets and went to work with a 2H pencil.
You can see the results in the second sheet.
On the third photo is the bow layout.
 
Now I have a dilemma. Do I head downstairs to the basement and start cutting and sanding to thickness new stock, and start tracing, cutting and sanding new pieces... or do I spend the last few sunny days of post summer (fall) outside. Tough one!