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Keith_W

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Everything posted by Keith_W

  1. Re: oarlocks. Take a look at @chris watton's ships boats of various types. I hope he doesn't mind me posting this photo: You can see that different oar locks were in use. This is from AOTS: Bounty The illustration depicts the "same" 23 foot launch used by Bligh. Note the square cutouts. Now take a look at the instructions for Model Shipways Bounty Launch. If you click on "Instructions and Parts List" you will be able to download the instructions. This gives you a very good look at their opinion of what the oarlocks should look like. In reality, ships boats were not standardized, and often changed during the course of duty of the ship. They came from different contractors. Bligh's Launch has not been preserved - if you recall, he sailed to Java and boarded a Dutch ship that took him back to England. Nobody knows what happened to the Launch after that. So in my opinion, do what you like and what you find aesthetically pleasing. Any of the choices you listed are historically plausible, and there is no evidence to suggest one way is more accurate than another. Just don't paint it pink and put Barbie and Ken in it.
  2. Just goes to show how good I am at hiding mistakes Don't worry, we all make them. But I make a deliberate choice where I am going to place difficult parts of my build. If I know I am going to hide it with paint, I will keep planking neat until it goes under paint. Not everyone on this forum builds like Chuck.
  3. Don't be too disheartened. When planking any boat, the planks at the top are the easiest to plank since they mostly go on without any taper. The planks near the keel are the most difficult, since by then all the errors from your tapering have compounded and you need some funny shaped planks to fill the holes. You can get around this by only painting below the waterline, leaving the wood above it unpainted to give the illusion that your planking is better than it is As for the view from the inside, what I do with all my models of open boats is to make sure the planking up to the level of the grates is neat. Anything below that level will be hidden by the grates from the inside, and paint on the outside, so it can be a complete dogs breakfast and nobody would be any wiser because it will be hidden with filler and paint. Yeah, you can tell I am not one of the more talented modellers on this forum. But I know how to hide my mistakes!
  4. Very good! The car usually rides higher when the engine is removed because the suspension is unsprung. Would you consider adding this?
  5. Great! That frees you up to choose a kit based on kit quality and not on whether the rigging instructions are adequate or not
  6. Almost all kits have inadequate instructions for rigging. Do you want this book? It has fairly detailed diagrams for the rigging, and it includes a chart of rope diameters which you will need to translate for your required scale. It is $613 on Amazon. I have completed my model and I don't need this book any more. I think $20 + shipping is fair. Inbox me if you want my copy.
  7. Artesania is definitely out, because it is single planked. The OP said he wanted a double planked kit. The Artesania does produce an interesting model though. It is the only open sided model of the Bounty in existence, perhaps the only open sided wooden ship model on the market. But there are many kit issues to overcome, e.g. exposed plywood beams, single planked, etc.
  8. Well the fallout from that movie continues. Second week and it's massively losing viewers at the box office. Ridley Scott has told historians to "get a life" because he is feeling the heat from all the historic inaccuracies in the film. A much better movie about Napoleon is Waterloo (1970) starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon, Christopher Plummer as Wellington, and Orson Welles as Louis XVIII. It is free to watch on Youtube!
  9. Copper is available, but it is expensive at the moment. What you could do is develop and release the kit without the copper bottom. Sell the coppering kit as an optional extra. If people want to swallow the cost, they can. If they want to save some money and go for an alternative (e.g. paint to simulate copper) they can.
  10. Chris, you need to press gang your kids to work for you so that you can free up some time to get back to what you are really good at, which is designing models! Are you working on anything new right now?
  11. I visited @BANYAN yesterday and I had a good look at this model. It is even more impressive in real life than in photos. Those parts that you see are tiny and perfectly formed. This is even more incredible when you remember that he suffers from essential tremor and his hands shake when he is modelling. My hands are perfectly steady and I can't do that. I guess it comes down to skill and determination. Totally inspiring to overcome a disability like that and produce the results that he does. Oh yes, his modelling room is so clean that you could probably eat out of every surface.
  12. You can use shellac, but I would not recommend it. You don't know how your paint is going to react to shellac. It is better to use a clear flat base from the same manufacturer as your paint.
  13. It will be almost impossible to fabricate a moulding out of wood. The grain will be running in different directions, and it would be incredibly fragile. This is what I did when I had to fabricate my own windows: I used a milling machine (Proxxon MF70) to mill a channel in a block of wood, then my Byrnes table saw to take off slices. The moulding was made with strip styrene glued to the curved edge, and the whole thing was painted. If you really want to make the moulding out of wood, you will need to carve it out with a suitable router bit that you may have to fabricate yourself. It will need to be supported by thick wood to stop it from breaking off. I would suggest a Proxxon MF70 with the CNC option but that is a lot of money to invest in only one part.
  14. I was told that the movie is a hot mess. Apparently they tried to rewrite the story so that it's all about Napoleon's love for Josephine and how she motivated him to conquer most of Europe. Too much screen time devoted to those two and major battles and strategic planning is glossed over or skimmed. Apparently the acting isn't great either, as if everybody "turned up and did the bare minimum to avoid getting fired" and so they all look oddly indifferent. What a way to ruin what could be an interesting movie by injecting a love story that nobody cares about. We turn up to watch Napoleon, not Josephine.
  15. I believe there are two reasons for wales: 1. It provides additional protection to the side of the ship 2. It strengthens and stiffens the hull And maybe a third reason: 3. It looks nice!
  16. Darn, these Hollywood product placement deals are going to a whole new level! First it was fast food, soft drinks, and cars ... and now ship models! I'll bet Artesania is green with envy that they chose Syren and not Artesania as a subject. To make it extra realistic, you should tell Ed Harris to crawl around looking for a tiny part he dropped on the floor ...
  17. I considered sculpting my own display base with Sculpey and went as far as making one prototype (I need 4). But I decided against it for a few reasons - (1) the model sits too close to the base, I prefer it to look more elevated, (2) I was concerned about the structural integrity of the base and whether it would adequately hold up a model ship without tipping over, and (3) the sheer amount of work required to sculpt 4 stands out of Sculpey. I suppose that 3D printing would solve the problem. In the end I bent some thick brass rod and soldered it together to support the hull, and drove a hefty bolt into the keel to secure the ship to the base and lock the model to the brass rod support. It is rock solid and does not move.
  18. @Louie da fly is correct. Wales are essentially very thick strakes. Look at this diagram: And md1400cs build log of his Santissima Trinidad cross section.
  19. There may be many Victory kits on the market, but at the moment there is only one kit worth considering - the Caldercraft. Having seen the prototype pictures on MSW many years ago I have been anticipating this kit for a long time. Anyway, we'll wait and see.
  20. I own everything that Jim made except for the ropewalk. This means that I have corresponded with him and Donna many times. I have always found them to be prompt and courteous, but there was also something else ... they were such warm people! I didn't know that Jim was only 64 (meaning he was my age when I bought my table saw from him). That is much too young. I think as we can see here, his loss was felt not only by his friends and family, but also by people who have never met him, like myself. Rest in peace.
  21. Best to think about what instructions ask you to do, and ask yourself if it's the right thing. If in doubt, run an experiment or ask in this thread. I have run several experiments over the course of making model boats, including whether any glue allows you to stain wood post installation. Answer is: none of them. Also, some stains inhibit some types of glues from working (which may be where that advice to glue before staining comes from!). I have found that oil based stains severely decrease the strength of CA glue and PVA glue, and will form a weak bond unless you let the oil fully cure, at least 1 week. Any alcohol based stain will inhibit CA glue from working until all the alcohol is gassed off. The best are water based stains, but then these tend to raise the grain and you will have to sand it to get it off, thus removing some of the stain. Even different stains made from the same company might affect glue differently. Not to mention, some alcohol based stains can also dissolve or weaken glue! None of these solutions are perfect, and you need to know whether what you have in front of you will work or not. For me, best practice is stain first, then wait for the stain to fully cure. You can stain some scrap at the same time. When the scrap timber holds a glue joint, proceed to install. Then sand and stain again.
  22. It's not only the tediousness that bothers me. What really bothers me is the potential for inaccuracy, which means that guns might foul hull features such as channels, fenders, wales, guns might be at different heights, etc. Some of these mistakes are unrecoverable if discovered too late in the build, and your model will forever have shrouds that block gunports if you get it wrong! I have examined every Royal William build log on MSW, and all of them have mistakes when it comes to gunport positioning, including mine. It literally costs them an extra sheet or two of laser cut wood and a quick design change of the frames to lock it in. It saves so much time for the modeller and removes the potential for inaccuracy.
  23. Yes, I think it's a strange decision by Artesania to do that. Surely it would make more sense to double plank it. Also, I don't think that a model released in 2023 should be making you cut out your own gunports. Yes, the template makes it easier. I had to cut out 80 gunports (maybe more?) on my Royal William, and that was an anxiety filled experience given that you don't know whether parts that have not yet been fitted (like wales, fenders, channels) will fit later on. It turned out that I made a dozen mistakes and had to go back and reposition gunports, which I was able to do because the model was double planked. But companies like Caldercraft and Vanguard mean that expectations are different these days. I shudder at the thought of having to cut out 200 gunports.
  24. Single plank model with 2mm thick planks is a recipe for disaster. You have to become very very good at bevelling planks and use a lot of filler. Given my modelling skills, it would probably be the latter! Good thing that the entire hull will be painted! My first kit was an Artesania as well. I never finished it.
  25. I would suggest that rather than pruning those threads, just close them with the reason being: "too many posts in this thread were infringing copyright, and it would take too long for admin/mods to go through the thread and delete them. 150,000 posts in total across multiple threads. Please refrain from posting copyrighted images in the future". It would save you a lot of time and take the tediousness out of it. Speaking of tedious ... back to rigging for me.
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