vonstetina

Hi Ed, Awesome work as usual. Ah....deadeyes....so many. The tiny blocks are a real treat to do when you get there. I made a special pair of block holding tweezers. I took cheap tweezers and turned the tips the other way so they met flat on edge, and filed little depressions across from each other. They grip deadeyes and blocks well for shaping. I have sent many tiny deadeyes and blocks into the 4th dimention [sp?]. They sure can't be found anywhere else. Plink! off they go. Nice having the accuracy of machines and their tooling. I finally got a few. Bruce

Hi Nenad, Lookin' good! Interesting photos. bruce

Thank you Rob and John. It's good to be back. I had a very long stretch of boring jobs to do. Bruce

Hi Frankie, I agree, it was hard for the model builder too! The ship must have been able to take some driving. Another thought I've had is that the weight of all that heavy rigging on those smaller upper masts and the tops must have been hard on them. All that weight bearing down. But one can see why McKay's ships set the speed and 24 hour records. If you look at the hull construction too you will see they were built like line of battle ships with only a tiny bit of room between the frames. Huge backbones too. Amazing. A letter I found from a passenger in an as yet to be published book by a distant McKay decendent says she was never beaten in a race. Not even by his other ships. Bruce

Id like to mention that after belaying lines it's best to leave extra thread hanging off and not put any white glue on the pin yet. I have made a little jig for making the rope coils, which will go on later. Bruce

My wife rescued me. Here are pictures showing the hinged parrel, and a yard going up. Note that I attached the rigging to the yard before putting the yard up. At this stage I found the work the hardest part of the build yet. I have the whole mizzen complete, part of the main, and the fore royal up. I'll post this work soon. For now I'd like to include some detail shots of other parts of the ship also. Some related to rigging, some not. Some show fairleads Bruce.

Pics I hope. Here goes. No good. To say I'm p----d would be a vast understatement. The browse goes to documents after I select the pics, where of course nothing is. Sorry, I'll try with my smarter wife. And where has my picture with my cat gone from the left. Bruce

Hi guys, I'm finally back on my Lightning model. I've been making progress when I've had the chance. Hopefully I will have a good stretch of building ahead now. The yards are going up now and it's quite exciting to see. I've taken the advice in Gerald Wingroves book on ship modeling and started at the top. It makes great sense, I would have been snagging lines on tools and fingers the other way. Also I've run the mizzen rigging first as it is overlapped by the main. I've had to make more special tools. Especially to reach down into Lightning's main deck obstructed by 2 gangways. A real problem getting to those belaying pins. One important thing that I had to learn was to not snatch my hands back towards me quickly, but to move slowly and feel for lines.. A bad habit that snapped some lines up top. The rigging up there at 1/8 scale is only .008 to .010 thick. The hardest part of the work has been the lifts. I don't know how to describe this, but it's tough to get nice square yards. The top yards are so tiny and light that not much weight hangs them down. First thing to mention is that all of my yards have hinged parrels. I felt this was a must for doing a sane build. Can't imagine any other way. Once the parrels were closed I ran the halliards. Then lifts, then braces. Many of these blocks are 6 and 7 inch blocks. Smaller than a grain of rice. Doing these in wood was ridiculous. I used Wingroves method and am now turning all blocks of brass. After so many years I now have a lathe. I'm having a teeth grinding time getting this post up with the pictures included. New computer...nuff said. So I'll post this, then follow on with the pics. I hope...I may need to get the wife involved...