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Cathead

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Everything posted by Cathead

  1. Cathead
    I suspect tie-downs matched the "whatever the builder/operator wanted" theme. I've also seen evidence of metal rods (like hog chains) and metal straps. Yours look great!
  2. Cathead
    Great choice of project! As an earth scientist and naturalist, I've read the accounts of Darwin's voyage several times and a model of the Beagle is on my life list. I'll be quite interested in following along with your build. I was in Chile in 2018, including a visit to the Nao Victoria museum in Punta Arenas, Patagonia, which includes a full-scale replica of the Beagle. See this post and the next one in my Chile thread for a series of photos; I can provide more if you're looking for details of a given area. Here's one photo for inspiration:
  3. Cathead
    Good question about pilot house tiedowns. These boats were often flimsiliy built and quite susceptible to high winds. This would be especially true for boats heading into the western Plains (e.g., up the Missouri), but severe storms could be encountered anywhere in the Mississippi drainage and the pilothouse is a high and vulnerable structure, often being 40-50 feet above water level where winds are quite a bit stronger (for example, a quick search for wind turbine design specs suggests that winds at 30' can be 1.5 times those at ground level and continue to rise with height). Also, even larger river valleys can funnel winds; the lower Missouri River valley is routinely far windier than the surrounding landscape despite being over a mile wide between bluffs several hundred feet high. Whereas further upriver, as the timber grew smaller and scarcer, the pilothouse could be the tallest thing for miles except the chimneys. I suppose the use or not depending on the quality of construction, owner's preference, and so on. From my reading, numerous boats were damaged or destroyed by storms. Think of the pilothouse like a little garden shed easily tipped over by strong winds. The Arabia's pilothouse is 35-45 feet above water level, roughly equivalent to the third or fourth storey of a building, and I suspect Chaperon is similar. So put that little garden shed on the roof of a 3-4 storey building and consider how much wind load it's recieving. Obviously it's structurally tied into the lower superstructure, but if you were up there in a cheap, lightweight pine box during a windy day (much less a real storm), how secure would you feel? As you noted, it's not the vessel's speed that's important (as this was usually fairly low), it's the atmosphere around it. Again, good question, it's all the little details that make this so much fun to learn about. And all of the above is just my amateur opinion.
  4. Cathead
    Finished the hurricane deck! Full masking-tape tarpaper prior to painting: After a coat of thinned black paint as a base layer After rubbing on dark pastel powder to soften the texture: I added some moulding along the skylights to hide the joints, and will likely to the same around the wheelboxes. In separate project, we rearranged our living room, allowing the model desk to rotate 90°. It used to face the wall with my back to the room, which I never liked. Now it faces into the rest of the room with a nice view out the window, which is much more pleasant. So this is where the magic happens... I'm starting to think about railings for the boiler deck. Handmaking all those railings won't be fun and I want to come up with a way that won't drive me crazy but still look ok. Thanks for reading
  5. Cathead
    Nice! The stained railing cap is a neat touch that helps make the model your own.
  6. Cathead
    It's neat to see the fun those kids are having. I still have family in Luzon.
  7. Cathead
    Cool! My mother grew up in Cebu and Mindanao. What brought you there with an RC boat?
  8. Cathead
    This is really exciting. Mrs. Cathead and I love the Channel Islands and have done some great multi-day hiking there in the past. We're strongly considering attending this year and combining the conference with a lots of time out on the islands. Also falls pretty close to our anniversary, all the better.
  9. Cathead
    Bob, good eye and good question. Just a personal preference. I think I used a very small overlap when I did the roofing of the Texas and pilothouse, but here decided to lay it flat. Kurt's way is probably more realistic given that there would need to be sealed seams. However, the longitudinal seams would need to be carefully placed so that they shed water downslope (like shingles on a roof). On my hurricane deck, I really wanted to work from the inside out to ensure a good fit (easier to trim at the outer edges of the deck than in a central strip), which meant that overlapping seams would be facing the wrong way. I don't think the effect will be very noticeable either way, though I supposed at the Chaperon's large scale (1:48 instead of my 1:64) it would be that much more noticeable. Again, wouldn't hurt to test both ways on scrap and see which you like better.
  10. Cathead
    Bob, I'd definitely recommend testing the method off-model first, to figure out the quirks. One thing to consider is that too much paint can loosen the glue, especially at the corners and edges, making annoying curls. That's one reason I like to finish with pastels, so I'm not tempted to overpaint. Of course, a few imperfections just help with the hard-used working boat effect. I bet the real tarpaper got scuffed and torn. I hope it works for you and will be interested to hear about your experience.
  11. Cathead
    The last three weeks have been very stressful and time-consuming for a bunch of reasons I don't need to go into here. This morning was the first time I've felt focused and sane enough to return to the model. The next step involves laying out the tarpaper covering of the hurricane deck. Kurt's digital book on building the Chaperon has some very good advice for simulating this material (see p. 55 and onward), but I adapted this to use a method I like that worked well on my Bertrand. While Kurt used silkspan and matte medium (two things I don't otherwise have on hand), I used masking tape and wood glue (which I have in abundance). I had to determine a proper scale width for the tarpaper, which would have been applied from rolls. Kurt suggests 3 feet. My roll of masking tape meaures a scale 5 feet wide, so cutting this in half produces a reasonable 2.5 foot strip. I used the grid on my cutting mat as a guide for this. First, I laid a strip of tape on the mat, aligned with its grid, then carefully sliced it in half lengthwise using a knife and metal straightedge: I then made a test roof using scrap wood and multiple tape strips, then painted it with diluted black and rubbed dark grey pastel over it. The result looked as I wanted. It's hard to see in photos, but the tape has a really nice rough texture that I think looks really good in person. So I started on the model, working from the stern. I used a brush of roughly the same width as the tape strips to lay glue, then pressed each strip into place. I used pencil to make guiding marks as needed. I cut the strips to create a staggered pattern, just like planking. Here's how far I've gotten. As with planking, the staggering means that you have to work forward over the whole model, so that's what I'm doing. I'll let this batch dry before doing more. Thanks for reading.
  12. Cathead
    The phrasing used doesn't clarify that for the kind of person who already doesn't understand how this works. Just using a phrase like "your own photos" could make this clearer.
  13. Cathead
    Great to have you back, nice work! Flooding is certainly a pain, though parts of the Plains and Midwest are as susceptible to damaging bouts of heavy rain as the PNW. For example, the record 24-hour rainfall for Washington and Oregon is only ~14" and ~11", compared to ~18" for Missouri. Texas actually holds the lower 48 record at ~42", but that's because of the Gulf Coast exposure to hurricanes. Oklahome and Arkansas, more your climate, are ~16" and ~14". So, you know, could be worse.
  14. Cathead
    James, would it be helpful to clarify MSW's expectations for three types of images: (1) your own, (2) not your own but public domain or you have right of use, and (3) not your own and you don't have right of use? This post seems aimed at (1), i.e. not using something like Photobucket to link your own photos into MSW. But many people may confuse this with (2) and (3), thinking that they can download some image from the internet and then upload it onto MSW. For (2), does MSW want that to happen or should people still link to the original photo's source. For (3), this should not be done but that isn't stated clearly here. Maybe this is pedantic, but given the confusion out there about copyright and related issues, it would seem useful to be as clear as possible.
  15. Cathead
    This is very true. A good builder can make a bad model look good, but a bad model can frustrate a less experienced builder. For example, I think my version of the Corel Ranger came out looking pretty nice, but I wouldn't recommend that kit to anyone as it was of poor quality and wildly frustrating to build. Since the core purpose of this thread is to help less experienced builders understand their choices, it's important to consider the kit rather than the finished product.
  16. Cathead
    John, your comment reminded me of a Mark Twain quote about being in a steamboat pilot house, which I looked up to ensure I got it right. This refers to one of the big, fancy, Mississippi riverboats, but the concept applies to the Arabia as well.
  17. Cathead
    Nah, if I'd been that upset I'd have jammed a broken branch through the bow, installed some broken stacks and tangled rigging, buried it at an angle in brown-tinted epoxy, and called it a wreck model. Or given it the fate of the Saluda, which blew up near Lexington, MO with such force that the boat's safe landed on the river bluffs.
  18. Cathead
    Nicely put! It's impressive how much a few supportive comments can change one's perspective.
  19. Cathead
    So I made another big mistake. Afterward, I realized that it's become a pattern lately, I think because life has gotten really stressful and I was using modelling as an outlet but this also meant I wasn't focused on what I was doing. So I started laying out the forward part of the hurricane deck. Below, the starboard side is being glued down. Notice any problem? That's right, I forgot to measure and cut the hole for the chimney or even install the chimney. I also didn't fully color the underside with pastel, used too much glue (causing an ugly color smear underneath) and didn't hold the part over the heads (by the wheel) down long enough, so the glue expanded and peeled it back up. I was so upset when I discovered all this, but it's what happens when I'm not focused. I had to step away for a week and not look at the model. Gradually I was able to think through ways to deal with this. I carefully measured, drilled, cut, and sanded the chimney hole, which was nerve-wracking as the strucure is delicate and any breakage would be very difficult to repair. I sliced out and fixed the glue-warped part. I can't do anything about the color smear underneath, but at least it's hard to see from most angles. Here's the fixed deck, with clamps still holding down the repaired back part. Here I'm attaching more of the deck: Here's how I meant to do the starboard side, until I sat down for stress relief and got ahead of myself. Here, I've pre-measured and cut the hole so that the deck piece can just drop down on top of the already installed chimney, and made sure to fully color the underside. So now the whole hurricane deck is installed. Here are two views of the current status. It will be another few weeks before any updates as we'll be taking several short trips to Arkansas to help my in-laws with various things. I hope when that's over I can focus again and keep going. Next, I'll be applying the "tar paper" covering of this deck and painting it all black. Then it's railing time.
  20. Cathead
    When you glued these together, did you weight them down evenly? Pieces may seem to lie flat when dry-fit, but glue can cause the joint to warp a bit during drying. So, as Mark says, one option would be to try again and ensure that everything is weighted and/or clamped down nice and flat so that it dries that way. If this were a "regular" ship and the twist was minor, you might be able to get away with pulling the stem and stern back into line with other planking and framing. But the way these pieces stick out, and with the relative lack of support around them, I don't think that would work.
  21. Cathead
    John, a question, to my eye it seems that the planking above the opening differs on the port and starboard side. On the port side it curves down to meet the vertical piece on the outside, but on the starboard side there's a distinct flat zone between the curve and that outside piece. Am I seeing this wrong? Hate to pick nits, but I'm curious about this.
  22. Cathead
    Careful cutting and filing can achieve almost anything from a solid piece of wood, so have at it!
  23. Cathead
    Cool, looking forward to seeing more.
  24. Cathead
    Cool! As for the T-shape, I'd forgotten about that. Would be it easier to start over and manufacture a T-shaped keel using two different pieces of wood, rather than trying to cut the T-shape onto your solid piece? Another option, depending on the tools available to you, could be to carefully use a table saw set very low to "rout" the lower edges of your keel. Whether that's practical or safe depends on the size of the saw and workpiece. How does the T-shape transition to the wedge shape? I can't quite picture this. A wedge sounds like it could be carved/filed/sanded fairly easily, but I'm not sure about the connection.
  25. Cathead
    A bit more progress framing the hurricane deck: I also added the railings protecting the main staircase. If you look closely you can see another goof. I ran two of the longitudinal beams too close to where the chimneys had to be (they aren't installed permanently yet) and had to file a slot on the outboard sides of the chimneys to let them sit where they needed to be. It's going to be essentially invisible when the decking is in place, but it caused some temporary gnashing of teeth.

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