Landrotten Highlander

Hello,
here is a short update:
It continues with threading the ropes for lateral securing hammocks.

 

Great advice Keith, will keep this in mind for when I start using a mill
Slainte
Peter

Great advice Keith, will keep this in mind for when I start using a mill
Slainte
Peter

Great advice Keith, will keep this in mind for when I start using a mill
Slainte
Peter

Ahoy Mates
 
To start with I am a now retired tool and diemaker who has been using mills of all types for the last 50+ years. What advice I would give all about milling is that,since you are not having to do it for a job with time being a large factor- Take your time milling. Small cuts do two things: 1- it saves wear on your cutters which are costly to replace and 2 nd  it reduces any deflection of either the cutting tool and reduces the over cutting of the mill cutter in your work piece.
 
The small milling machines are not built to handle deep cuts by the milling cutters. In size a standard Bridgeport milling machine handles cutters up to 1" dia. but even then they have a hard time with full cutter depth cutting.
If you kept the same size and capibility ratio of milling machine to cutter,the small mills would have only a cutter of 1/4" dia. with a cutting flute depth of only 1/8".
So take it easy.
 
And if you are burning wood,either your speed is too high,feed too fast clogging up the flutes of the cutters,or you have a cutter that doesn't have enough room for the chips created by you cutting speed and feed.
 
Mini mills  EQUAL MINI CHIPS!!!
 
Keith

Más

Work has started on the cat head.  This one piece has taken me over three hours to plan and fabricate.  I still have to install the sheaves and finish sand it.  I will show a few pictures today and will describe the steps of construction as I make the starboard one.
 

 

 

A small detail: square-head nails (at the moment, on the first wale).

Per, as it never was, the mill doesn't have a price-tag   ... unless you were indeed prepared to pay me at my commercial rates, which means that you would have to trade-in a decent car, may not quite an Aston Martin (but I would gladly exchange it for the mill, BTW)
 
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For the dial on the y-slide I had a piece of 21 mm diameter brass to hand. This was faced in the 3-jaw-chuck, drilled and reamed for the 5 mm spindle, and then bored out to fit over the spindle bearing-plate.
 

Preparing the blank for the dial
 
The blank was the mounted on an arbor with a 5 mm stem so that I could turn the outside shape. At one end there is the notorious convex knurled ring. For this, a ring of 1.2 mm width and 1 mm height was left standing with edges slightly chamfered.
 

Turning the blank for the dial
 
For the next machining step the knurling tool with the concave knurl was mounted to the cross-slide. The knurling tool was fed slowly into the slowly rotating blank. It catches quite quickly at the edges and the pattern evolves fast. As expected, the processes is both, a cutting as well as a shaping one – the relatively soft being squeezed into the indentations of the knurling wheel. While generously lubricating with WD40 the knurl was fed into the faster rotating blank until the pattern had developed fully.
 

Knurling the dial
 
To be continued ...

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Hello,
 
I just got my new serving machine from Domanoff (http://www.shipworkshop.com - thank you for the amazingly fast shipping) and after assembling it I give it a short trial run. I am quite pleased with the results. But I am not there yet so I continued the work on the deck section. First I started making belong pins on my lathe using a method seen here on MSW. I am very happy with how they came also. I still have to do another 6 or so to have them all.
 
Here are some pictures.

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Some more progress pictures for this project - some older some more recent.
Alexandru

A bit of progress today on this other project of mine: main topic metalworking.
 
Alexandru

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More progress

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Hello all, thank you for following my build, likes and comments.
 
Some more progress on the rigging - started to do the shrouds.
Alexandru
 

295 Hours into the Voyage...
 
As I approach the dead flat (midship frame) of the ship, beveling the frames has become less of an issue.  Each frame is just a fraction of the previous frame. 
 
Below are a few s/b shots of the ship with the new installment of frame 11F.

 

 
Below is frame 10f (forward) each frame section is composed of a fore and aft.  The main frame bends are the even number / lettered frames.  It is these frames that have the stretchers across the top.  I will be going back to reinstall some of the aft stretchers in my ongoing attempts to fair the top timbers.  The stretchers help keep the top timbers in alignment.  Without them, the ship wants to cave in on itself.  This will be easily rectified.  For those considering this build, keep the stretchers in as long as possible.  I removed a few to many, a little to early...

 
Here is where I have ended up as of last night. Frame 9f.  All my little friends are shown.  Clamps, single cut curved file, a razor blade, and miniature cabinet scraper. I have stayed far away from sandpaper up to this point and plan to do so until I go into final finishing.  Even then, sandpaper will be a secondary tool to the finished product. This is a major departure from how I used to build ships.

 
A few more thoughts:
Consider building this ship in 1:48 scale to take full advantage of all the scale drawings - they are truly impressive works in their own right. Obvioulsy, space will be an issue.
 
Consider building a few sample frames, such as the mid-ship frames, prior to embarking on the beveled frames like 24a/f.  Even with previous experience in POF and lofting, this is a new challenge.  Its a totally different kind of build that a sistered piece POF or Hahn style build.
 
I am planning to submit this ship to the NRG to share at the conference this fall.  I think more poeple should consider this style build.  Its what I call Extreme Plank on Frame Building "EPOF".
 
As an EPOF, I plan to fully detail the interior.  It would be ashame to cut corners now...
 
More next week.
Gary
 

Cathead, thanks for the information, I've just started to read up on these ships and have a lot to learn.
 
Roger, thank you for the reference.
 
Kurt, I appreciate your help and just let me know what the fee is. 
 
John, funny you should ask, the wife and I were up there last weekend.  Took lots of pictures. 
 

First, second ant third wales installed and gunports of the first deck too. I've applied a first layer of shellac under the first wale, as a test (it's not definitive; more sanding and polished treatment is needed).
Cheers.

Thanks Pat and I hope you have enough Kleenex around
 
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After some disruptions due to travelling (spent inter alia a couple of days in Pisa for work ) I tackled a job I had never done before:
 
Digression: making a concave knurling wheel
 
Today, concave knurls to produce the convex knurling seen on many older high-end precision machines are obtainable only at prohibitive costs. Therefore, I embarked on making my own knurl, encouraged by a few examples on the Internet. Knurling wheels normally have to have a certain diameter in order to prevent their bore from being distorted under the stress of the knurling process. I choose a blank of only 10 mm diameter for a bore of 6 mm in order to reduce the mass to be heated, when attempting to harden the knurl with my rather limited heating capabilities. I also had a cut-off from a Schaublin collet-blank available, which I assumed would harden nicely.
 

Hobbing the knurl on the milling machine
 
The proposed process of creating the knurling wheel employs an ordinary threading tap as an improvised hob. This, stricly speaking, would result in a 'rope' knurl, but the helical angle of a, say, 0.4 mm pitch tap is barely perceptible. The easiest way to hold the blank for cutting seemed to hold it in the knurling-holder for the watchmakers lathe that I made a few years ago. This means, however, that the process could not be done on the lathe, because it would have been not so easy to mount the holder on its side. Cutting the knurl on the lathe would have been better, as the end of the tap could have been supported in the tailstock in order to eliminate flexing. Unfortunaly, the DIXI horizontal mill does not have an overarm, which then would make it the ideal machine for the job. So the job was done on the vertical mill.
 

Hobbing process in detail
 
The blank was drilled and reamed for the arbor of the knurling tool holder. Some polishing ensured that it spun freely. A M2 tap was chucked in a collet as short as possible and offered to the blank with its uppermost end in order to keep flexing to a minimum. Initially, the mill was run at slow speed and with a small feed. After each incremental feed, the blank was allowed to make several revolutions until no chips were produced anymore. Once the pattern was created, the mill was run at a somewhat higher speed and the amount of incremental feed increased from around 0.03 mm to 0.05 mm. Every time blank and tap were flooded with WD40 in order to wash out the chips that then were wiped off. A first failed trial showed, how important it is to wash-out chips. The second attempt was successful.
 

The finished concave knurl
 
After the machining, the knurl was hardened by heating it to a cherry-red colour and quenching it in ice-cold water. As I don't have a very strong torch, the knurl was pre-heated to 450°C using the hot-air soldering gun and then brought to temperature with the gas-torch. The knurl was also rubbed in soap to prevent scaling. After some cleaning, the hardened knurl was tempered to a straw-yellow colour using the the hot-air gun. A test with a file showed that the hardening was successful.
The knurl in the tool-holder for the watchmakers’ lathe
 
... well, it actually worked as you will see in the next contribution
 
To be continued ...