Erik W

Not a ton of progress this week.  I did finish fashioning and installing the boarding ladders and channels though.  I must say ripping the boards by hand out of sheet stock to make these parts is a bit of a pain in the rear.  lol.  Also, it was tough getting the pattern cut into the scraper to make the boarding ladder profile.  I think my limitation there was my lack of precise small files.  I deliberately made the filed notches in the channels that will house the chainplates narrower than they'll be.  I just wanted to get the notches placed correctly and the angles in, according to the plans.  I'll finish the notches up when I fit and attach the chainplates.
 
And lastly, I'm patting myself on the back.  My third photo below manages to capture the elusive and hard to photograph lower step of the Cheerful's boarding ladder (located on the wale and painted black).  Haha!
 
Erik

Wow!  Thanks for the kind words guys.  You are all phenomenal modelers.  So that means a lot coming from you! 
 
Erik

Wow!  Thanks for the kind words guys.  You are all phenomenal modelers.  So that means a lot coming from you! 
 
Erik

Not a ton of progress this week.  I did finish fashioning and installing the boarding ladders and channels though.  I must say ripping the boards by hand out of sheet stock to make these parts is a bit of a pain in the rear.  lol.  Also, it was tough getting the pattern cut into the scraper to make the boarding ladder profile.  I think my limitation there was my lack of precise small files.  I deliberately made the filed notches in the channels that will house the chainplates narrower than they'll be.  I just wanted to get the notches placed correctly and the angles in, according to the plans.  I'll finish the notches up when I fit and attach the chainplates.
 
And lastly, I'm patting myself on the back.  My third photo below manages to capture the elusive and hard to photograph lower step of the Cheerful's boarding ladder (located on the wale and painted black).  Haha!
 
Erik

Not a ton of progress this week.  I did finish fashioning and installing the boarding ladders and channels though.  I must say ripping the boards by hand out of sheet stock to make these parts is a bit of a pain in the rear.  lol.  Also, it was tough getting the pattern cut into the scraper to make the boarding ladder profile.  I think my limitation there was my lack of precise small files.  I deliberately made the filed notches in the channels that will house the chainplates narrower than they'll be.  I just wanted to get the notches placed correctly and the angles in, according to the plans.  I'll finish the notches up when I fit and attach the chainplates.
 
And lastly, I'm patting myself on the back.  My third photo below manages to capture the elusive and hard to photograph lower step of the Cheerful's boarding ladder (located on the wale and painted black).  Haha!
 
Erik

Not a ton of progress this week.  I did finish fashioning and installing the boarding ladders and channels though.  I must say ripping the boards by hand out of sheet stock to make these parts is a bit of a pain in the rear.  lol.  Also, it was tough getting the pattern cut into the scraper to make the boarding ladder profile.  I think my limitation there was my lack of precise small files.  I deliberately made the filed notches in the channels that will house the chainplates narrower than they'll be.  I just wanted to get the notches placed correctly and the angles in, according to the plans.  I'll finish the notches up when I fit and attach the chainplates.
 
And lastly, I'm patting myself on the back.  My third photo below manages to capture the elusive and hard to photograph lower step of the Cheerful's boarding ladder (located on the wale and painted black).  Haha!
 
Erik

Looking very nice, Erik.

Really nice clean work. Usually when you zoom in the flaws start to appear, but I don’t see any on your work.

Its really looking terrific
 
 

Lovely clean work, Erik!

Not a ton of progress this week.  I did finish fashioning and installing the boarding ladders and channels though.  I must say ripping the boards by hand out of sheet stock to make these parts is a bit of a pain in the rear.  lol.  Also, it was tough getting the pattern cut into the scraper to make the boarding ladder profile.  I think my limitation there was my lack of precise small files.  I deliberately made the filed notches in the channels that will house the chainplates narrower than they'll be.  I just wanted to get the notches placed correctly and the angles in, according to the plans.  I'll finish the notches up when I fit and attach the chainplates.
 
And lastly, I'm patting myself on the back.  My third photo below manages to capture the elusive and hard to photograph lower step of the Cheerful's boarding ladder (located on the wale and painted black).  Haha!
 
Erik

Not a ton of progress this week.  I did finish fashioning and installing the boarding ladders and channels though.  I must say ripping the boards by hand out of sheet stock to make these parts is a bit of a pain in the rear.  lol.  Also, it was tough getting the pattern cut into the scraper to make the boarding ladder profile.  I think my limitation there was my lack of precise small files.  I deliberately made the filed notches in the channels that will house the chainplates narrower than they'll be.  I just wanted to get the notches placed correctly and the angles in, according to the plans.  I'll finish the notches up when I fit and attach the chainplates.
 
And lastly, I'm patting myself on the back.  My third photo below manages to capture the elusive and hard to photograph lower step of the Cheerful's boarding ladder (located on the wale and painted black).  Haha!
 
Erik

Though I feel like I didn't get much done on the Cheerful over the last week, I do feel a sense of accomplishment.  After about 9 hours of work total, I finished both boom crutches.  These are easily the most complicated shapes on the build so far.  I read and reread Chuck's instructions on how to get the angles correct many times before I started.  I formed the first boom crutch and glued it on and painted it before I started the second one.  It probably would have made more sense to make the second one before I glued on and painted the first.  Doing it the way I did made it harder to get them the same size and symmetrical to one another.  I wound up spending some time sanding the first to get it to look like the second, after it was already glued into place.  A delicate task, to say the least.  At any rate I'm happy with how they turned out, more or less the correct angles and the same as one another.  While carving/cutting these out of single pieces of wood, I couldn't help but think of the guy who carved this out of a single piece of Carrara marble 500 years ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg/1024px-Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg
 
Erik

Not a ton of progress this week.  I did finish fashioning and installing the boarding ladders and channels though.  I must say ripping the boards by hand out of sheet stock to make these parts is a bit of a pain in the rear.  lol.  Also, it was tough getting the pattern cut into the scraper to make the boarding ladder profile.  I think my limitation there was my lack of precise small files.  I deliberately made the filed notches in the channels that will house the chainplates narrower than they'll be.  I just wanted to get the notches placed correctly and the angles in, according to the plans.  I'll finish the notches up when I fit and attach the chainplates.
 
And lastly, I'm patting myself on the back.  My third photo below manages to capture the elusive and hard to photograph lower step of the Cheerful's boarding ladder (located on the wale and painted black).  Haha!
 
Erik

Good evening, last week I was busy with the door hinges of the pump house. They're okay for my first hinge.
 

 

 

 

 

Furthermore, today I sanded the hull and filed the water channel into the frames.
 

 

 

 

 

Log #74: Painting the Yards
I have been slowly picking away at finishing up the painting and shaping of the yards and masts.
 
I had acquired some brass sheeves for putting in the masts. Ideally I would have thought of this earlier, but trying to adjust the holes on the spars already on the model struck me as a bad idea. I blackened them all in one go and it went will with no issues with flaking that I usually have blackening things.

 The next step was to paint all the proper parts black using some primer. As usual this required several coats with sanding inbetween each to get a smooth surface.

Then using a similar method to that discussed previously with the boom and gaff I highlighted them all. You can see here the spars to be rigged:

And the spars that will go on the deck:

The highlighting is fairly gradual as I want them to still read as black even though the upper highlights are actually a medium grey. The main benefit is probably on the spars with the octagonal section in the middle as this makes that much more visible.
 
And here are the spare spars tested on the model. I am still not sure exactly how to secure them and where exactly to put them. Where they are they are obscuring the eye bolts for the rear gun tackle. If anyone has any suggestions for the proper placing of them I would appreciate any advice you can offer.

Not a ton of progress this week.  I did finish fashioning and installing the boarding ladders and channels though.  I must say ripping the boards by hand out of sheet stock to make these parts is a bit of a pain in the rear.  lol.  Also, it was tough getting the pattern cut into the scraper to make the boarding ladder profile.  I think my limitation there was my lack of precise small files.  I deliberately made the filed notches in the channels that will house the chainplates narrower than they'll be.  I just wanted to get the notches placed correctly and the angles in, according to the plans.  I'll finish the notches up when I fit and attach the chainplates.
 
And lastly, I'm patting myself on the back.  My third photo below manages to capture the elusive and hard to photograph lower step of the Cheerful's boarding ladder (located on the wale and painted black).  Haha!
 
Erik

Not a ton of progress this week.  I did finish fashioning and installing the boarding ladders and channels though.  I must say ripping the boards by hand out of sheet stock to make these parts is a bit of a pain in the rear.  lol.  Also, it was tough getting the pattern cut into the scraper to make the boarding ladder profile.  I think my limitation there was my lack of precise small files.  I deliberately made the filed notches in the channels that will house the chainplates narrower than they'll be.  I just wanted to get the notches placed correctly and the angles in, according to the plans.  I'll finish the notches up when I fit and attach the chainplates.
 
And lastly, I'm patting myself on the back.  My third photo below manages to capture the elusive and hard to photograph lower step of the Cheerful's boarding ladder (located on the wale and painted black).  Haha!
 
Erik

Hull planking
Fairing the outer hull was fairly straight forward. There is plenty of extra meat on the frames which gave me lots of wiggle room. The fairing cap edge should remain untouched, if at all possible. Easier said than done! Final sanding was done with 400 grit. Btw; I totally forgot to take some photos of the outer hull after the fairing was completed. Sorry!
 
Once everything looked good I added the first strake (the upper wale). This was done with three planks. I did my best to eyeball the run as I added each plank and not to strictly rely on the drawn line which I made from Chuck's hull template.

From there on it was just a matter of adding the two remaining wale strakes and a few more strakes above the upper wale. I also added the small filler piece which goes between the lower wale and the square tuck.

With the added support given by these strakes, I decided to fair the inner hull. This ended up being more time consuming than I thought it would be. It took me several days to complete the work. Working the bow timbers, even with a Dremel or 80 grit, was slow. Once I was close I switched to a miniature curved scraper to smooth out the work.
 
You can see just how thick the wood was in places.

When fairing the area around the lower gun port sills, I found that a simple depth gauge came in handy. Including the 3/64" outer hull planking, the width of the sill should be 3/16” or maybe a hair less. I made this simple “T” shaped jig that I could place against the frames and then mark the width of the sill from inside the hull.

Ready for the keelson

Mike

Though I feel like I didn't get much done on the Cheerful over the last week, I do feel a sense of accomplishment.  After about 9 hours of work total, I finished both boom crutches.  These are easily the most complicated shapes on the build so far.  I read and reread Chuck's instructions on how to get the angles correct many times before I started.  I formed the first boom crutch and glued it on and painted it before I started the second one.  It probably would have made more sense to make the second one before I glued on and painted the first.  Doing it the way I did made it harder to get them the same size and symmetrical to one another.  I wound up spending some time sanding the first to get it to look like the second, after it was already glued into place.  A delicate task, to say the least.  At any rate I'm happy with how they turned out, more or less the correct angles and the same as one another.  While carving/cutting these out of single pieces of wood, I couldn't help but think of the guy who carved this out of a single piece of Carrara marble 500 years ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg/1024px-Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg
 
Erik

super clean build Erik.  and assuming you didnt find a larger than life pencil that tugboat is ridiculous. 

Though I feel like I didn't get much done on the Cheerful over the last week, I do feel a sense of accomplishment.  After about 9 hours of work total, I finished both boom crutches.  These are easily the most complicated shapes on the build so far.  I read and reread Chuck's instructions on how to get the angles correct many times before I started.  I formed the first boom crutch and glued it on and painted it before I started the second one.  It probably would have made more sense to make the second one before I glued on and painted the first.  Doing it the way I did made it harder to get them the same size and symmetrical to one another.  I wound up spending some time sanding the first to get it to look like the second, after it was already glued into place.  A delicate task, to say the least.  At any rate I'm happy with how they turned out, more or less the correct angles and the same as one another.  While carving/cutting these out of single pieces of wood, I couldn't help but think of the guy who carved this out of a single piece of Carrara marble 500 years ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg/1024px-Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg
 
Erik

Though I feel like I didn't get much done on the Cheerful over the last week, I do feel a sense of accomplishment.  After about 9 hours of work total, I finished both boom crutches.  These are easily the most complicated shapes on the build so far.  I read and reread Chuck's instructions on how to get the angles correct many times before I started.  I formed the first boom crutch and glued it on and painted it before I started the second one.  It probably would have made more sense to make the second one before I glued on and painted the first.  Doing it the way I did made it harder to get them the same size and symmetrical to one another.  I wound up spending some time sanding the first to get it to look like the second, after it was already glued into place.  A delicate task, to say the least.  At any rate I'm happy with how they turned out, more or less the correct angles and the same as one another.  While carving/cutting these out of single pieces of wood, I couldn't help but think of the guy who carved this out of a single piece of Carrara marble 500 years ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg/1024px-Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg
 
Erik

Thanks for the kind words!  Toni, as far as the photos go, your comment is worth an explanation of how I get my photos.  I take the photos on my work space, which is pretty darn small.  Especially for the last year or so since I've been working mostly from home (I'm a remotely working accountant for the National Center for Atmospheric Research). I threw in a photo of my work space too.  Basically my work day, and hobby, all take place on different sides of my L-shaped desk.  It means my commute from work to modeling at the end of my work day takes about one second.  Haha.   I have a large sheet of light blue construction paper for a photo background that I tape down to my work surface.  For lighting, I always take the photos mid day in front of the window, which provides good area lighting, and use a halogen desk lamp with 700 lumen bulb as a spot light aligned with the lens of the camera.  The camera I use is a 7 year old Olympus OM-D mirrorless camera with a 14-22mm lens mounted on my now 30 year old Gitzo tripod.  I use the self timer so I'm not touching the camera when the shot is taken, this aids in crisp photos.  For each shot I take a 3 photo bracket by 1/3 stops using aperture priority with an F stop of F22 (creates the greatest in-focus depth of field).  The aspect ratio I prefer is 16:9 which gives a horizontal rectangle photo, rather than a square, so there is not too much dead space at the top and bottom of my photos.  For size I select 1280 x 720.  This is big enough to see details, but small enough to not use a lot of memory.  Once I have all my photos I upload them into the Olympus photo software on my laptop.  I delete 2 of the 3 photos taken in the bracket, selecting the one that is the best brightness wise.  The only editing I do is making the crispness greater (not sure why the camera doesn't automatically do that itself with in-focus photos), and to get the boxwood to look the actual color/shade it is, I've been color correcting slightly by adding a small bit of blue hue and very slightly removing red hue.  This has been an evolutionary process for me.  I don't have any kind of formal training, and taking photos of something as large as Cheerful, the largest model I've ever built, has had it's own learning curve.  I threw in a photo of my last ship build below, a 1/350 scale tugboat, for a comparison of the "normal" size I'm used to photographing!  For me, presentation is a fun part of participating in forums, so I really strive to have good photo presentation for you wonderful folks!   Hope this is useful for people.  I encourage my fellow modelers here to play around with their photography.  You'd be surprised at what you can come up with.
 
Erik

As always, thanks for the likes folks.  I finished a few different things over the last week.  I spent time shaping the rudder.  Using the plans I drew the lines that I would sand down to on the rudder faces and sides.  Doing this gave me the visual cue to not over or under sand.  Once the rudder was done I cut out the rudder port.  I made a paper template from the plans that I used to get the shape correct.  Next I made the top of the rudder post.  This took way more time than it should have.  I accidentally removed too much material from the laser cut piece.  So I would up gluing on a chunk of scrap wood to that piece and then shaping the whole thing again.  Sometimes it's the one little piece of wood that is the biggest pain!  The last thing I did was shape the 6 timber heads.  This was a bit nerve wracking as a newbie, but they turned out OK.  The photo below shows the tools that wound up working best for me (as well as a rough cut timber head before clean up).  For some reason, on any model I build, I'm most comfortable using either a #17 or #18 X-Acto chisel blade with no handle (rather than a #11 blade w/handle).  I know it's weird, but it gives me more control by holding the blade directly.  The overall height of the timber heads match the plans, but my angled faces are not as tall as the plans.  No big deal really since all 6 look the same.
 
The next thing I'll be working on is the boom crutches.  Wish me luck!  Haha.
 
Erik