tlevine

Griphos, I have never tried using more than four strands when laying up rope. For very large ropes I will take three or four smaller made-up ropes and put them in the ropewalk. I prefer to use ecru as this has not been bleached. I have tried many different things to dye the rope, including Minwax, Rit fabric dye, shoe dye and India ink. They all color the thread. It becomes a matter of personal preference as to the appearance one is after. You simply have to experiment on small batches of heavier thread (don't waste rope for this) to see what works for you. Currently I am using Minwax Jacobean (two dips a day apart) for the standing rigging and Minwax Fruitwood (one quick dip) or gray diluted artist acrylic for the running.

I did, Griphos. My post suffered from auto-correct. That is a wide range of scales. For 1/8 scale (1:96) I use size 60 for 4" rope and size 50 for 5"rope. The larger sizes are made up from three or four strands of size 60 to 100. Keep in mind that everyone lays rope a little differently. In fact, I can use the same thread on both of my rope walks and get different sizes of rope.

I use resharpened carbide bits with a 1/8" shank for all my fine drilling. https://drillcity.stores.yahoo.net/restool.html The Foredom has an optional 1/8" collet so that would work out for me. Thanks for bringing to my attention. I still have to figure out an excuse to buy another expensive tool.

As I am in between projects, I was encouraged to rig my 1:96 Mantua Victory that I abandoned 10+ years ago. Thus the concern about rigging supplies. I only have the lower and topmast standing rigging completed, so there is still a long way to go.

Thanks for the bad news, Chuck. This will be another reason to avoid rigging any more ships.

Thank you for the information. Those Foredoms with the battery packs are very tempting.

I use DMC crochet cotton to make up my rope. I just tried to reorder it and discovered that it is no longer being sold by the company except in the large diameters (10-30). All my usual sources either have stopped carrying it or mark it as out of stock. I was able to find the sizes needed on Ebay and bought enough to last a few years. So if you use this product to make your rope, stock up while there is still some available.

When you talk about micro-motors, what product are you actually referring to?

The History of Navigation written by Dag Pike traces the history of navigation from pre-history to the present. Mr. Pike is a lifelong mariner, having first gone to sea at age 16, has written many books and is a contributor to various marine magazines. Instead of dividing his chapters by historical time frames, he divides them by technique, starting with line of sight navigation and moving on through direction, speed, position, etc. He finishes with a discussion of the human element in navigation. Although there is no new information presented, this is a well-written, easy-to-read summary of naval navigation throughout the ages. There are many charts and photographs reproduced throughout the book but sources are only cited for a few of them. In the same way, none of the information is referenced, making it difficult for the reader to obtain further information without additional research. The book was published in 2018 by Pen & Sword Maritime. It is available in both hardbound and digital editions at www.pen-and-sword.co.uk.

Bob is correct in his comments. Yes, there are many of us who insist on individual copper plates treenails everywhere, etc. Are we goofy? To a certain extent we are. Remember that you are building a 3/16 scale ship. These things would be barely evident. What would look really jazzy, in my opinion, would be to make the copper paint look like the real thing by subtly weathering it rather than having it all the same color.

What made it worse was that the builder removed the evidence (the rags) but forgot to cut out the subflooring they burned through. Oops!

When my house was under construction 30-ish years ago, the painters used tung oil as the finish on my windows. The rags were left in a pile and spontaneously combusted, burning a large hole in my bedroom floor. I was lucky the whole place didn't go up in smoke.

I feel like a computer neophyte compared with some of you guys. (PC XT with a 10Mb hard drive . I splurged on a color monitor.) But going back to 1972, I remember my physics teacher going nuts over his new purchase: the original HP scientific calculator for a measly $750. Considering he probably made no more than 10-15k annually, that was quite a chunk of change.

May I recommend either of the links below. The first link is to purchase CD's and flash drives of the Nautical Research Journal going back all the way to the beginning. The second link provides access to purchasing individual articles from the Journal for the last 10 years. Prior to that the Journal was not digitized, making purchase of individual articles difficult to provide. Roger Coles' articles predate this. https://www.thenrg.org/the-nrg-store.php#!/The-Nautical-Research-Journal-in-Digital-Format/c/2719574/offset=0&sort=normal https://www.thenrg.org/the-nrg-store.php#!/Buy-and-download-articles-from-past-issues-of-the-Nautical-Research-Journal/c/8560300/offset=0&sort=normal

Frank, could you add a link to you build log to you signature?