Ian_Grant

A lot of electrical work, Bill. The terminal strips are a good idea.

I was thinking fixed relative to the bow 🤔.  I later thought, "Wasn't it just v-sights rather than an optical tube?". Oh well.

Thanks for your comments and encouragement!

Just a quick pic or two.

Printed the magnetic and gyro compasses for the bridge. Came out pretty good for such diminutive parts.

I can't find any info as to equipment present in the spotting top. I felt certain there must at least have been one of those gadgets with a circle graduated in degrees, and an eye-scope one points at a distant object to read off its bearing. Here's my rendition, in the top. As it turns out, with the overlapping cover in place over the top, one can hardly see into it but I'll know it's there as well as those few who peer into it.

Very nice display for the gardens!

On 6/10/2025 at 9:08 AM, Hubac's Historian said:

Oh, I see what you mean now, Bill.  Honestly, I marvel at our modeling friends who are mastering CAD/resin printing.  I’m pretty far away from tackling anything like that, although I do want to eventually learn drafting software.

 

Your paint bottle experience is very relatable!

On 6/10/2025 at 12:23 PM, Bill97 said:

Same with me Marc on the 3D printing. My 13 year old grandson has one and can do things I marvel at. 

I enjoy creating the CAD drawings for stuff, and it's great to see the crisp printed parts, but in the back of my mind lurks the thought "is this true craftsmanship"? Perhaps it is just in another way. What is certain is my HMS Lion would not look nearly as good if I'd had to try to create all those small parts by hand in wood or plastic. I marvel at Marc's carved plastic pieces......

Another absolute gem of a build, Siggi.  I am in awe...........

Rained today so no pool testing. I finished painting the grey around the deck periphery and on the torpedo net storage shelf. She has a much more finished appearance with that done. Also reprinted all my weather deck hatches, skylights, bollards, cleats, and breakwater with the smaller 0.2mm nozzle and everything came out nice and crisp. Drew the 13.5" director platform and "spotting top" in CAD and printed them too.

Reprinted parts.

Torpedo net shelf and deck perimeter painted.

Director platform above compass platform; spotting top above that; fore topmast inserted but not trimmed to length yet. Sorry for the focus. 

It turns out my foremast is a little closer to the funnel than drawn so I will have to make some adjustments to the spotting top and reprint.

I still, as when I was a teenager, have difficulty seeing in the drawings exactly how men climbed up to these platforms,especially as Norman drew the foremast with tripod supports from aft which is not historically accurate. Supports were deleted during a refit early in her career when they swapped the positions of the foremast and fore funnel --- she was actually built with the funnel between the supported foremast and the compass platform which led to embers falling onto the compass platform and the poor men in the spotting top living in the smoke stream from the funnel! They wisely corrected that....🤔...and deleted the mast supports while they were at it.

Early photo of Lion as built. You can just imagine the smoke and heat from the funnel spilling up the mast.

Apparently the mast got so hot one couldn't touch it. Note also the other two funnels are shorter. Spotting top

is seen but the director platform was a later modification. Lowest yard was removed when director was added.

Thanks for following!

On 6/8/2025 at 8:33 PM, Hubac's Historian said:

..Alive and kicking - however, so softly.

 

In the time that I have available, and am ALERT, I make what little progress I can.

 

Geez Marc, you gave me a scare!!  Checked in for the first time in a while and saw this, thought you must be very ill indeed.......scrolled upto see that you're just a busy guy.....what a relief!! 👍

Looks great John!! Looking forward to the cabin work.

I spend far too much time on the computer and not enough working on this model. I have made some progress, but I am going to switch from adding detail to getting it functioning on the water and keep adding to it. I have enough of the topsides done now that it would be presentable "with explanations" to the club members. Smoke and sound will have to wait for now.

Here are a few shots.

The foredeck: Looks great, but the only parts glued down are the main windlass and the anchor winches and chains. The rest of the parts are just placed for the shot, in fact I see I forgot to paint final grey on the breakwater which is still primer grey. Of course, it would only be the work of a few moments to CA the rest down, but only after I mask and paint the grey rim along the deck edges/torpedo net shelf.

Forward tower FINALLY assembled with glue. I procrastinated for weeks due to needing to have forward shelter deck railings in place beforehand.

The camera is certainly a humbling tool.........need to add a jumble of bracing beneath the forward projection of the compass platform out ahead of the chart house.

Speaking of railings, for some reason I decided to try for handrails on the two ladders on the shelter deck's aft edge. Bent up from 0.5mm brass rod.I ended up making seven to end up with four; the other three pinged off my tweezers and I simply couldn't find them. I enjoyed the process so much I am not adding handrails on ladders to the captain's walk. 🙄  I will however have to add them to two ladders at the aft end of the aft superstructure since they're quite a climb from the upper deck; also the two ladders down into the aft well deck. Did not even contemplate handrails for the ladders between decks in the tower.

Aft well deck, with some open engine room vents, a closed skylight, a closed hatch, and the pair of steam launches as yet unpainted.

As I mentioned there will be a ladder with handrails on each side. Somehow other boats have to cram in outboard of the launches.

Final shot: the painted funnel grates and steam vent pipes at fore and main funnels. My flat black seems to have become satiny near the end of the bottle which has happened to me before. Will be touching up.

So, I now have both my 12V motors and my two ESC units. Next steps are:

(1) Grease prop tubes and add props/shafts.

(2) Add motors with U-joint links.

(3) Measure the current draw of a motor driving its 2" prop.

(4) Fingers crossed - the current is not high and I can order the smaller 12V gel battery.

(5) If high will need to do another ballast/load test to see if larger 12V gel batt weight could be tolerated. If so need to rework the rotating mechanism for "Q" turret to make room for the bigger battery.

(6) I can do some more building while I wait for whichever battery to arrive. If Canada Post goes on strike (yet again!) it could be a while.

Thanks for following and the likes!

Ian

Perfection!!

The family will be thrilled to see the result, Glen.  Beautifully done!

I'd be "loudly wondering" the same thing. 😏

Beautiful plank job, and deck. 👍

Bill you have a new follower on your AV build. 

Bill, love the LED "deck lanterns" and internal illumination. To reduce possibility of shorts, you could provide protective "heat shrink tubing" at your soldered joints. It is a neater solution than electrical tape. Can't be added now except at "dead end" joints for example to the left of the third internal LED in the first picture above, where you could slip the tubing onto the soldered length then shrink. Either a heat gun (preferred) or your iron can be employed to heat thus shrink the tubing.

Just an idea for future soldering 👍

Ian 🤙

Hi Bill! Nice to hear from you. Yes, it's a new direction since getting back into modelling, but as you know it's a reboot of an old build of mine. She is going to look much, much better than before.

Are you doing another wood build now?

Best Regards,

Ian

OK, so this has nothing to do with Lion or even ships, but seeing as penguins are a recurring theme among the cognoscenti like Keith and Glen, I bring the following to your attention:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/penguin-poop-helps-drive-cloud-formation-over-antarctica-according-to-a-new-study-180986686/?utm_source=smithsoniandaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial&lctg=92646438

What character in a model, Keith!  I love the lounging cats.....we too have always had one. Our current old man has been living with cancer for over a year after my wife the vet predicted his demise within weeks of diagnosis. She has him on prednisolone (sp?) and he's the same character though a little thinner. To get him to take the prednisolone, we crush the pill in a small bowl and stir it into a wee bit of vanilla ice cream. When we went away to Italy, my son messaged us worried that Ginger was suddenly refusing his medicated ice cream. My wife realized she had bought a different brand just before we left, so told Alex to go out and get a carton of "Kawartha Premium Vanilla" ice cream. Problem solved. 🙄

Finally got around to painting the bootstripe. It adds nicely to her appearance. I was out of "Frog Tape" masking tape so went to HD to discover they now sell Frog Tape only in really wide width; all others are "Painters Tape Ultra" which I know from past bitter experience is crap in terms of bleeding but I wanted to get the job done so I bought it anyway. Sometimes we are our own worst enemies. As you might expect the tape bled in many places along the upper edge even though I tried my best to burnish it down. Redid it with 1/4" Tamiya tape with the green masking tape overlapping to shield the grey paint and got nice clean edges.

Printed two little jigs to help me bend the steam vent pipes consistently; needed two because there were two different offsets for the various pipe s-bends; 3/16" and 1/4".

Pipes at the aft funnel; "Q" turret's gun barrels traverse perilously near them. 🤔 In fact there are a couple of cross-pieces to add across the gap between the blast shields which must be concave to provide clearance for these barrels.

Pipes at the main funnel:

The funnels are not glued on; pipes are not glued in; need to form the support eyes and drill into the funnels to attach them.

Looking at 12V lead-acid batteries I now see I can only get 5Ah in the size I had planned, as opposed to the previous 12Ah 6V battery. An unexpected consequence. I can get 9Ah if I can shoehorn in a battery that is 15mm taller. I'm thinking I can move "Q" turret's rotator servo and mount out from under the turret by moving it to the next compartment and using a longer belt, if available. This would make room for the thicker battery, however this battery is also 0.8kg heavier so I need to, sigh, do another ballast/flotation test. At least the pools are thawed now.

Finally, I thought I'd buy the little sound card I saw a while go, which has an SD slot to store WAV audio files and is triggered simply by pulling any of 16 control pins to GND to play the associated sound.  I  can't find it now! Damn! 😠

Thanks for looking!

3 hours ago, Cathead said:

There's a difference between regular Google and Google's AI-generated results. When you search something in Google, often the top result will now be labelled "AI Overview". THAT'S what you should take with a mine's worth of salt. It's AI attempting to synthesize internet-wide results into a coherent answer and it's routinely full of crap. The problem is that AI is a black box and doesn't share where it's getting its information from or how it's analyzing it, so you have no way to assess the accuracy of its sources or results. For just one example, AI tends to assume that quantity equals quality, so it'll spit back whatever it thinks is the most-common answer. But that doesn't make that answer correct.

Cathead is absolutely right. My daughter's 2012 Camry has no maintenance manual and I encountered "AI Overview" while searching for maintenance intervals for fluids. It would have had me changing all fluids quite frequently. My world was turning upside down until I noticed that little "AI Overview" title.

4 hours ago, Keith Black said:

 

 Well, great googly moogly! Mr Google has lost all respect.  I figured 1950 couldn't be right but when I tried going deeper into broom history, push broom specifically, I couldn't make headway and Google kept coming back to the 1950 date so I accepted AI's 1950 date as gospel. My apologies to everyone! Thank you Ian and Eberhard.

 

 @mcb STOP!  

Part of a patent application is to describe "prior art" ie the current state of whatever you are trying to improve upon. If you read down in the 1950 patent you come to a list of prior US patents, including the one from 1871.  Hmmm, maybe I should have become a patent examiner, specializing in electrical stuff.......too late now!

I read the 1950 patent. It's for a new idea of pushbroom construction, with a new handle design to allow the user to sweep under low objects without having to stoop as with a straight handle design. It was so successful I've never seen one for sale. 🤔

US11504A is a patent from 1871 describing an improvement in handle/broom attachments for pushbrooms, so they must have existed even before then.

As a side note, after one of my high tech layoffs there was a government ad for "junior patent examiners" with technical backgrounds; I actually applied but when they sent a list of reading materials to study it made my eyelids heavy. More dealing with paperwork than anything so I did not continue. I ended up working as a handyman for 15 years which provided much more variety and enjoyment and outdoor time.

6 hours ago, Keith Black said:

 Ian, nice score on the semaphores research. 👍 

 

 Here's a bit more. 

 

https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/our-collections/photography/numerical-list-of-images/nhhc-series/nh-series/NH-91000/NH-91482.html

 

https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/363606/view/naval-semaphore-signalling

Thanks Keith!  I see those have electric lights on the arms for night signalling, unlike the pics I found. Perhaps I will try to represent them although they'd be tiny at scale.

Browsing videos of RC boat models, I came across one of a beautiful steam-powered model of the pre-dreadnought HMS Canopus (1897).

Have a look at the snapshots below. See those black "umbrella"-looking things at the four corners of the upper decks?

I think I found the answer to my question earlier about the "semaphores" on Lion.

Those look like mechanical semaphores with arms drooping when not in use.

The front right one in the shot has a crew member standing at its foot, showing the scale of the thing.

LATER EDIT

I did a google search before but I must have not included a key search word because I just struck gold:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/signalmirror/albums/72177720309364503/