figuerres

idea for our model building.... what about the vaporizers sold for when someone has a cold or bad sinus problems ? do some hacking / modding to attach a large pvc pipe and hold the wood such that the steam goes into the pipe that has the wood. no pressure just the flow of steam for a time until you pull the wood out to use it. I have not tried this so I do not know if the steam from the device is hot enough or if it makes enough volume to work.... but the vaporizers are not costly and sold at lots of stores.

Something you may want too look up is sewing scissors that you can get in any fabric store they are small and the blades are curved. Fiskars makes several versions and they are not too expensive. I use them to nip off rigging thread very close.

I would love to get that book but the prices I found on amazon were nuts! Like 500.00usd or more

I have been looking and as posted a lot of them had no cabin and a tiller , or had a cabin and ran the rudder post and tiller on top of the cabin. I know that in a larger ship the controls would have run under the cabins and then up to a wheel. the idea that I have seen of having a cabin and running the lines and the rudder inside the cabin seems to be crazy to me. I am thinking of making the cabin taller and picturing a kind of cubby / bench by the windows that allow some workings to be there and then run down under and forward. will have to make a drawing and see if my idea could work at all..... or if the nice looking Fair American models would have never worked as shown. what good is a 3 foot cabin full of ropes and blocks and with the tiller in the middle ?? if you made the cabin say 7 foot tall or 8 foot tall then at the stern you could lose part of the floor space to make a box to hide some of the works and have a decent cabin I think.

looking at the plans and making some copies to cut and paste it looks like my idea will work.

where can i find any examples of real workings of rudder contol lines to the ships wheel?

good info on how steaming is done. i am a bit surprised at how much that oak strip would bend. but then 1 x 2 is fairly thin.

have any examples in an actual ship? also part of the question here is that this model seems to have a cabin that is not tall enough to manage a functional cabin with rudder control lines in it.

After a look at the plans I think the length change will be 1 inch not two inches.

Length, now that I have looked at the plans I think 4 feet or at scale 1 inch will be better.

OK as I am finishing bluenose and reading other logs for the FA I have come to a couple of "Kit Bash" changes I will make to this build: hull length will be extended by about 8 feet or 2 inches at 1:48 to make more room for the cabin, ships wheel and cannons. great cabin will have one door and one ladder. with more room aft the main mast and by not trying to fit in two doors and ladders the ships wheel should have more room for the crew to work and the cannons will not be in the way of the ladders, doors and wheel. second is the height of the great cabin roof / q-deck and the transom and the rails, others have noted that the gun ports and the tops of the side rails seem wrong and some have added a plank to give more room, to work out the issues I think the main rail will go up about 1/4 to 1/2 inch at 1/2 inch that would give the great cabin 2 feet - it currently seems to be about 3 or 4 feet tall from the main deck to the top of the cabin door when you check the plans. if the q-deck and related structure is raised about another 1/2 an inch then the door height could be about 6 or 7 foot tall and the cabin could have a six foot inside height. I am guessing at how much to allow for structure / beams so that the sailors don't crash thru the q-deck into the cabin :-) both changes will only make the ship slightly longer and taller and should look very much the same overall. the transom profile will have to change to be taller. the boom from the main mast to the q-deck will need to be mounted higher up by a bit. in theory the changes would allow the rudder to ships wheel rigging to fit under the main deck and great cabin more cleanly. I think this will make my version closer to what they would have built when they looked at the plans and tried to make a real working ship from the modal and plan.

I also use a block of wood with different grit sandpaper to help shape and smooth , 60 or 80 grit will take off a lot of wood fast and then 180 or 220 will smooth things out. using a wood block makes sure you are "flat" and you can see the rough angle you are getting at.

Yeah I do think that if the model was ever to be made into a real ship some alterations would be needed badly. possibly make the cabin taller and adjust the heights of the stern deck and transom and move the main mast boom up to match, that would also give more room to fit the control of the rudder under the cabin deck. say add 5 feet to the cabin height and adjust the q-deck and transom to match ? also go with two cannons less or add a few feet to the total length of the ship, say add 8 feet ? both changes should keep her overall the same plan but make the cabin and the rudder / wheel working much more practical. go with one ladder and one door. then i think the number of cannon work and the cabin works. Hmm wonder if i could cut the right parts in the kit to make that work ? 8 feet @ 1:48 = 2 inches to add to the length, make one more bulkhead somewhere near the mid ship where there is no real change in the hull shape... cut a longer part for the keel, check for how this alters the main and foremast locations.... perhaps do it just aft of the main mast ?? must make a copy of the plan and play with it.....

my bad, debugging code running tests and peeking at posts... too many things at the same time.

OK then i must have not quite understood the example / or read enough of the text. will have to read when i am at home to make sure i get it right.

as the other have said the dremel can be too much unless you have a really really good "touch" with it. I would say that two issues are that it can very quickly take off to much wood and that it can also skip or jump if you are not careful. and as was said get some other scraps of the same wood and try out each method a few times and get a better feel for each tool. there are a lot of places I do use the dremel to sand and cut wood and a lot of places I use a good sharp blade.

I like the idea, the only issue I see is possibly not getting the right angles on the shrouds and ratlines between the jig and the ship. Hmm One other issue is how you install the lines, I was taught to run my shrouds by cutting one line for one pair for each side run one pass on the port with a sizing then run a pair on the starboard and size the loop. alternating them. I do not see how I can do that with this method for the ratlines unless I use the mast in a jig and mask off the mast parts. possibly a different jig setup .... will look into this tonight.

re making the boom, I tried for a while to "patch" the first boom and saw that it was just a mess with the crooked hole I made and then trying to patch in a bit of wood to make the dowel solid again plus trying to then drill it and the time I was spending just fixing the first error.... in the end I figured it was faster and cleaner to go back. and I have some spare wood that included a dowel of the right size. JIG not sure if I got this in the other post but I am thinking of this: take two long blocks of basswood and cut a "V" in each of them. they need to be thick enough to also drill holes below the V to take a bolt that runs under if you had a 24" long pair of blocks that would be enough for a long dowel. shorter ones would be good also. if the bolts are adjusted to hold the dowel firmly in place then you should be able to set this in any larger clamp and have it such that you could drill straight down the top for a centered hole. if the width of the blocks was not too much then you could also rotate the jig 90 deg and drill a true 90 offset w/o messing it up.

Update: last week I had the main gaff rigged and looked at the main boom and saw that I had missed a couple of holes for the boom sheaves ... but in stead of using my dremel drill press I tried to do them by hand; BAD IDEA result was that I made crooked holes and had to re-make the main boom. tonight I should be finishing the new boom and then I can move on to getting it rigged and finish the rigging. side note: drilling holes in dowels. I am starting to think it might be usefull to make some kind of jig to hold a dowel for drill press work. the problem I have had is that I need to set a "TOP" side for the dowel and dill holes at for example 0 90 180 270 degrees, a small error can be very visible when two eyes are not at a 90 deg. angle from each other or a number of holes that should all be on 0 deg. are off a degree or two. something like a set of blocks with a round or v shape that can be attached to the dowel before you start drilling and stay on at a set location till you are done. that make it easy to clamp and un-clamp the jig to the drill press

if you do not find it on the model expo site call them and ask. from what I was told they are working to bring the updated site "up to date" it sounded like they had a big change to stuff in how the site works and are getting it fixed as they go fwd.

Yes basswood can be used for some kinds of carving but not for the small detail work on our ship models. if you were to carve say a figure the size of your hand then it's ok. but for miniature details too soft and to "Fuzzy"

stuff I have seen in documentary shows on pirates that I thought should be a good guide to the real ships were this: 1) most wanted a fast ship 2) shallow - good for escape thru reefs that a larger warship would run aground on and good for hiding in coves 3) they did not want to sink the ship , just to disable it so firing large cannon at the hull would be foolish, small shot and chain shot at the masts and rigging seem like the better option. 4) cut away extra stuff, make the decks as clear as you can to make it easy to board and plunder and make off with the goods.

Loquat: not sure of all the areas but when I grew up in California we had that tree in Stockton so it will grow in states that get a cold winter temp the same as central ca valley frost on the ground but not deep long freezing.

Yeah gasparilla is fun and all but not 'historic' I need to get a copy of my picture in my pirate garb...

actually the Narvaez expedition of 1528 to 1536 is the one that really tanked. and then there was Hernando DeSoto thanks for the links. will check them out.