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Dr PR

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    https://www.okieboat.com

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    Corvallis, OR, USA

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  1. I have finally caught up on taxes, financial dealings for the nonprofit I am Treasurer for, my own savings accounts, and preparing a lecture - it has been a hectic couple of weeks - and can now get back to important things! I have a little bit of progress to report on the ship model. I left off with the preparation of a sail, the main spar gaff topsail. The next step was adding the boltropes. These are on the port side of fore-and-aft sails where the linings were placed (on square sails the bolt ropes are on the aft side of the sail). I made a few changes to my work area. I stapled a sheet of parchment paper to the cardboard work surface (the other side serves as a cutting board). I also have a piece of parchment paper to place over the glued areas for heating them with an iron. The parchment paper seems to work better than the waxed paper. The little Mini Iron II (Clover No. 9100) is a quilting iron for seams. I saw it mentioned in another post on the Forum as a plank bending tool. But it is also perfect for ironing the tablings, linings and bolt ropes after they have been glued. It is less cumbersome than a large iron and the small tip gets into tight spaces. But I also used it to iron the entire sail after everything was finished. And now I have a plank bender too! It is basically a 40 Watt/120 Volt soldering iron with specialized ironing tips. It has three heat levels, low (200F/105C), medium (390F/200C) and high(580F/295C). They recommend the low setting for silk. I also mixed up some diluted white glue 50:50 with water. I like the white glue because it dries without a trace and you can loosen it if you need to with water or the diluted glue. The small clamps are essential to prevent the sail from moving while you are attaching the ropes! This sail has a larger boltrope across the head (1/2 diameter of the main topmast stay) and smaller ropes on the leech, foot and luff (1/4 the diameter of the topmast stay). I used 0.012" (0.30 mm) rope on the head and 0.008" (0.20 mm) on the other sides. Note that the rope is glued to the port side of the sail (opposite the tablings) and not to the edge of the sail. This is the way the books say to do it and it gives a larger surface area for the glue to attach to. I do not plan to lace the bolt ropes to the sail edges as is done with real sails, because the lacing material would be microscopic. At the corners I created a small loop "cringle." This method requires a bit of patience. Of course the rope has a mind of its own and wants to be anywhere but exactly along the sail edge. So you have to do a little bit at a time and wait for the glue to dry before continuing. The little iron does speed things up a bit. There were a few places where I had to go back and reposition the rope so it was nice that the white glue can be softened after it dried. After the glue set up I seized the cringles with small stuff and white glue. This should place all the strain on the bolt ropes. As you can see in the photos there are a few small spots that can be reworked to get the rope exactly along the sail edge. After the glue dried the small stuff was trimmed. The ends of the larger rope across head of the sail were turned into a loop for a cringle and a short bit of rope was glued down along the top of the leech and luff. Small stuff was tied around the cringle for seizing. Here I did sew some small stuff through the sail material and around both ropes. The head of the sail will be laced to the spar. For this I will sew the lacing through the sail material just inside the bolt rope. Here is the finished (I hope) sail. Eight more to go (if I install the fore course).
  2. I have to disagree about the accuracy of 2D drawings, and restate what Terry said. You can draw nice 2D frame/station drawings, but you have no way to tell if they will produce a smoothly faired hull surface. Even working from a Table of Offsets will not guarantee frames/stations for a smooth hull. I have done this several times, and when the 2D frame/station drawings are erected in 3D the resulting hull surface is often wavy.
  3. Mike, If all you wanted to do was use email and browse the Internet just about anything would do (even a cell phone). But if you are thinking of doing CAD work a higher clock speed (3+ GHz) and more cores (6+) is better. A video system that supports hardware acceleration (and the software drivers to work with it) is a plus. If you are going to do a lot of photo editing and storage more storage space will be needed (1 Tbyte or more). **** A fundamental problem with laptops is heat. All that electronics generates heat, and laptops have a totally inadequate cooling system. So when the processor and power supplies heat up the processor shuts down momentarily to let the cooling system catch up. So even the fastest clocked processors can end up running at a snails pace. Before buying read the reviews on line. Remember that 25% of the reviewers are morons who can't (won't) read and understand instructions and maybe 10% really know what they are talking about. But if a product has less than 70% 5 and 4 star ratings it is probably junk.
  4. The metal tube doesn't extend very far up into the handle. Be careful putting any strain on the handle part of the pins. My experience with 3D resin printed objects are that they are very brittle and very fragile. It should be easy to break the handle off.
  5. As I understand it the term "knighthead" originated for any timber that had a fancy carved head or figure on the top. "Bitt" is a term that applies to vertical timbers that provide places to belay lines. So a bitt can be a knighthead, but not all bitts are knightheads. The rigging arrangement in the drawing in post #5 is a "whip on whip" tackle. A single block with one line fastened (the standing part) and one line running (the fall) is a whip tackle. Pulling on or letting out either fall will raise or lower the yard. Working both falls at the same time just raises or lowers the yard faster. And two lines allows twice as many people to work where deck space is limited. One of the lines from the lower block is the "standing" part that would be fastened to a cleat or eyebolt - the one on the bitt/knighthead would work. The other two lines are "running" lines that could be passed through sheaves in the bitt/knighthead and then belayed somewhere nearby. As Bob said, running the lines through the sheaves in the bitt/knightnead allows them to be pulled on horizontally to raise or lower the yard. The same redirection can be accomplished with a single "runner" block attached to a ring bolt on deck (or anywhere else) and running the fall from a tackle through the runner block.
  6. It's funny how some people complain about the government as "Big Brother" when it really is companies like Apple that are the problem. They spy on you 24/7 to record everything you watch or listen to and purchase, and tax you any time they want to without any public input. Orwell was right about Big Brother, but he just picked the wrong villain.
  7. Seal the wood before painting! Water based paints like acrylics raise the wood fibers and leave a "fuzzy" surface. A good sealer is shellac. You can paint over it with any paint. It dries quickly. Sand smooth with fine sand paper. Brush off sanding dust and grit and apply a second coat of sealer. Sand again and then finish with #0000 steel wool. BUT You must clean the surface after using steel wool - the tiny particles can rust and discolor the finish. I brush the hull first, and then rub down with a clean dry rag. I also have a 1 inch (25 mm) "U" magnet to pick up steel wool lint from the model surface and work bench. You can also use the fine steel wool on a coat of thoroughly dried paint to produce a "satin" finish. Some instructions say acrylic paints dry in an hour or less. They will change from "wet" as you paint to "dry" that is no longer runny, but it will still be soft and easily damaged. It may take a day or two for the acrylic material to harden, and a week or more to attain full hardness. It is OK to apply a second thin coat over an initial thin coat when the first coat is "dry," but wait a day or two before sanding.
  8. I am interested in seeing how this works. I have an old compressor that makes only about 18 psi and that doesn't work with some paints and tips.
  9. For me Marquardt's The global Schooner is a must have book for working on schooners. It is a "Lees" for fore and aft rigged vessels.It has some history, but much of the book is about howfore and aft craft were built and rigged, and the appendices have a lot of tables of historical data.
  10. Steve, 1. More belaying points is better than not enough! 2. I think you are correct that the spaces between pins should be over the gun ports. When the cannons recoil you don't want them hitting belaying pins. 3. Take what I have said in my build with a grain (or spoonful) of salt. It is a hypothetical build, so I can do whatever I can imagine. I am building that schooner to learn about schooners, and not to build a correct replica of any particular vessel. 4. With very few exceptions, we are never going to know exactly how any particular historical vessel was rigged, especially from times before photography and modern engineering practices. My philosophy is to put myself in the bosun's shoes - how do I make this work so the Captain doesn't chew my posterior? **** I wasn't around centuries ago, but I did my time on ships in the mid 20th century. Whenever the ship's bosun decided he needed a new belaying point - a cleat or bollard - he talked to the chiefs in engineering and soon a new fixture appeared. Sometimes he took a five pound can of coffee from ship's stores over to a friend in the shipyard and came back with what he wanted. And for something really big a canned ham would usually do the trick. Official blueprints weren't needed. Where there was a will there was a way!
  11. Karl Heintz Marquardt's The Global Schooner (Chapter 1, Origin of Schooners) shows numerous examples of this "bermuda rig" dating from a 1526 Spanish account of a Peruvian raft, and a Dutch sketch of one of these rafts from 1615. The Dutch were building similar two mast triangular sail torentuig rigged vessels in the early 1600s, and possibly introduced it into the Bermudas in the 1620s. By the late 1620s the Dutch had developed a refined version called the speljacht. It is suggested that these vessels might be the origin of all schooners in Europe and then the Americas.
  12. Steve, You are making good progress. I have been working on the rigging and belaying plan of my topsail schooner model for some time, and routing the lines without any fouling is tricky! Chapelle's The Search for Speed Under Sail (W. W. Norton & Company, New York & London, 1967) has a two page drawing of the Prince de Neufchatel sail plan, including a belaying plan, between pages 229-230. It is pretty small print but I can read it clearly with a magnifier. This is very rare! Most sail plans just show lines going down to deck somewhere. Few plans actually show where the lines belay. He shows nine pins forward and five aft (9-5) of the gun on the aft pin rail, and 4-8-3 (fore to aft) on the forward pin rail.
  13. Jsk, I have heard of using coffee filters (and tea bags) for parts of models (like tarpaulins over hatches). I just measured the thickness of an ordinary coffee filter paper, and it is 0.0005 inch (0.0127 mm)! That is thinner than the silk span, and would be closer to scale for sails on 1:64, 1:75 and 1:96 or 1:100 scale models. The only problem I see is that the filters I have are too small for any of the sails on my 1:48 model. But if you can find sheets of coffee filter paper (I'll bet artists use it for something) I can see no reason not to use it. Come to think of it, we did have large sheets of filter paper of several different grades (thicknesses) in our chemistry labs in college, so it is probably available through chemistry supply companies. Paper chromatography paper is similar to filter paper.
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