Ian_Grant

And now we take a brief break from the build for some humour. Today's topic, and I know this will be appreciated by Keith and Glen, is the penguins of the Heard and Mcdonald Islands. Here are a few pics.

Actually those were only funnel scraps. There is lots of other scrap, including on the floor of the model room. I wonder about their future; I'll toss them and they'll end up in a landfill. Am I generating future microplastic particles? Yes, still TinkerCAD. I think I will stick with it as I have no ambitions to loft a hull or something similar.

Making slow progress. Painted the red u/w hull and grey above; yet to add the wide black bootstripe. Kind of washed out in this pic. Note, I'm again having second thoughts about the grey colour thinking it is too pale. Need to decide before I assemble bridge structure which would be impossible to repaint afterwards. Speaking of the bridge structure: Lowest brown deck is the forward shelter deck. - Above that is the flag deck; navigating officer' cabin, flag lockers at back. I intend to terminate the signal halyards from aloft on the rail attached to them. Note the stanchions. - Next up is the sea cabin platform, with captain's and admiral's sea cabins and two twin 24" searchlights. - Above that is the chart house platform with (obviously) chart house and another pair of searchlights. = On top we have the compass platform, magnetic compass, gyro compass, chart table, range finder (all to be added). This is all just dry assembled with the foremast passing through holes in all the decks. Note also my 3D printer representation of "kapok" anti-splinter matting attached to the railings of the platforms. Boy the camera hides nothing; looks better to the eye. I've spent lots of time this week working on the funnels. Deceptively simple looking but I was many hours in CAD drawing the three individual sizes, two different-sized ovals and one round. Each funnel consists of seven pieces which "click lock" at positions hidden by the horizontal bands. Nothing is glued together yet. They're all hollow to give the possibility of running pipes up them from a "steam" generator. Boiler room ventilation hatches at base of main stack. Some of the engine room ventilation hatches at base of rear stack. Pieces require to build the forward, round, funnel. The second piece, the lower flange, was especially problematic to draw, with the continuously changing bevel radius in the forward half. I tried making it with various attempts at truncated, tilted cones but could never get it right. I ended up drawing a series of narrow wedges rotated in two degree increments which worked out in the end. Since then I've realized I could probably have done it by stretching a cone out to an elliptical base and adjusting base size, and height, to suit. Probably would work; never thought of it as I was trying to do it with tilted but circular cones.🙄 Previous versions of parts rejected at revisions of files.

Fantastic - immaculate - not a single glue mark!!!!

Great job on the pikes. I expect to see them on your upcoming SIB too, mind! 😁

Too bad you're on the opposite side of the world......I have two copies! I thought I'd lost the first, bought the second, then found the first months later. I suppose I should try to sell it on. It's a limited market.

Harry, do you have a copy of Underhill's "Masting and Rigging the Clipper Ship and Ocean Carrier"? A great reference for such ships. I bought it to help with rigging my Preussen.

Nice print!

Rigging looks daunting, but as you go through it in manageable pieces it all comes together in the end, so long as you have good instructions. 😏

She is is very shipshape and really looks the part of a naval vessel, Glen. Immaculate!

Well done, Bill. She looks wonderful! Looking forward to your AV build; seems quite a bit more complex than Endeavour....

???? 🤔

Seems to be a very small aircraft; kind of stubby.

Great work, Glen. Your clients will be thrilled! Ah yes, mai tais. I don't have much experience with cocktails but I discovered the mai tai while in Hawaii. And the pino colada while on a boat in the Galapagos. My two favourite (and almost my only) cocktails...

Very nice Glen.Looking great! 👍👍

I always get that flaky finish too! And I too dump the chains into the solution. I will try your new method. Thanks Keith!

The other thing about chains which drives ME batty is blackening them. I have had little success. 😞

She's looking great, John! But I don't seem to see the scramble of unsecured rigging?? Here's a shot of my Preussen build.........😏 (paused about three years now) 😞

I ran across this article on dazzle paint in WWI. I added a topic in "Nautical/Naval History" but thought I'd mention it here for those who don't commonly browse that forum.

Interesting article examining whether dazzle patterns had any real effect on U-boat targeting of ships in WWI. https://www.popsci.com/technology/wwi-dazzle-camo/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

Interesting to see it come together. Not to diverge too much from this log, but in my handyman days I was once hired to "restore" a large L-shaped basement area where the lady's deceased husband had run his model RR along with his friends. This area encompassed half of the basement of the house. RR track completely encircled the room (except for one doorway) with as much as three feet depth from the walls, which were adorned by very skilfully painted hills and trees (I know this because I saw the area before the husband's friends came to remove the whole thing to another location). Anyway, when I went back for the job the walls were riddled with large jagged holes where they had apparently just ripped stuff off them as opposed to unscrewing. The lady was surprised when I proposed to just patch everything up rather than install new drywall but that would have been a big job and I was getting too old to be lugging drywall sheets down stairs any more. It was one thing to patch and tape the holes (and build a little closet around the incoming water valve) but effectively hiding all the painted forests took about four coats of primer. The finished job delighted the lady with the fresh new room. I've found that one advantage of doing a job for senior ladies is that they keep you fed while you're there! 😏 Now back to our regular programming; sorry.

Every summer our RC boat club puts up a table pondside at a local fair and runs boats around. People come over to see the models all lined up on a long table and are really interested. Well, I guess only those interested would come over HaHa. Last year I took my Roman galley (didn't have it on the water, too windy) nonetheless people were fascinated to see the oars rowing. It was great talking to them and showing how they worked.

I got up the morning after my last post, walked downstairs, and my immediate reaction to the deck was,"God it's awful!". I bought some "white spirit" and wiped down the decks with it thus removing all the yellowish tones and most of the dark brown. The laser-etched planking once again became readily visible. Whew! I was left with a faint, weird "greenish tone" in places. Don't know where that came from; seemed to be highlighting the grain of the surface ply even though I had four coats of clear-coat on it, somehow. So I used the "desert sand" wash one more time, then a wash with "white" and I like the decks a lot now. They have received three coats of exterior satin water-based varnish. I know, it should be matte, but I can't find an exterior matte clear-coat. Here's a pic showing part of the decking, and also the interior "walls" of the aft superstructure which will be visible since there is a large well deck here. Teenaged me missed the fact that it was open; I don't blame me because it is not obvious in the single sheet plan and top view drawing. Rather, it is shown only in one of the cross sections in the lines drawing which I probably rolled up and ignored after making the hull. Incidentally, I'm not sure what the secondary armament looked like in the aft well deck. Norman didn't show casemates for them (like the upper pair in the forward SS) but if they were open the crews could all be killed if a single shell landed in the well deck I would think. I decided to add casemates partly because they're not conspicuous when viewing the ship from outside, and partly because I didn't want to have to construct the gun breeches in the absence of casemates. Close enough for RC. 😏 I'm now working on printing weather deck fittings. From left: - breakwater for the foredeck. - top left, engine room vents for the aft well deck, "closed" and "some open" options. - below left, twin searchlights; printed housing and base, brass rod. - printed bollards and cleats. - printed skylight covers, all closed. Thinking of making a couple with steel covers open. -various printed hatches for the weather deck I'm thinking of starting to paint the hull tomorrow. That would be a giant leap ahead for sure. Incidentally, does anyone know if these ships had some sort of mechanical semaphores for visibility? My drawings show items labelled "semaphore" in four places in the forward superstructure (two at back corners of the shelter deck, two on the flag deck above). They aren't shown in detail but they could be a mechanism with the arms folded down, not in use. Or are they just big signal lights to flash Morse, not related really to a man manipulating two tiny flags?? Can't find anything about it in what books I have, or by a brief google search. Here's a pic or two: 1) Showing a semaphore placed in the corner. 2) See the four of them in this section view. They're a good 10 ft tall, whatever they are. They look more like lights here.

Interesting discussion. Here's a theory .... When coming in to harbour they'd be under topsails alone, probably. Knowing they were about to anchor they could remove the bumpkin shrouds. If when anchored the tide was across the wind or whatever the anchor cable could be at any weird angle without fouling the absent shrouds. As to whether Endeavour herself had bumpkins, I have no idea.

Today I bought a Vallejo wash "Desert Sand" and have applied it three times. It adds a yellowish tone and is making a difference. It looks pretty good to me now but in the morning I'll probably apply the wash a 4th time. It only needs 20 min to dry, 40 min to recoat. I bitterly regret, though, applying that dark wash just because it was in stock at the local store. The really foolish thing is that yesterday I forgot my reading glasses so I could barely see the labels thus I missed the Vallejo washes entirely; there are just a few wash colours at the bottom of the Vallejo paint rack and their labels don't really differentiate them from regular paint colours. 😞