grsjax

What mtaylor said. Another consideration is to use a scraper to do the final fitting. This works best with hard woods like cherry although with care it can be used on fine grained softer woods like basswood. An Xacto #11 blade works well as a scraper but it isn't the only option. I have seen broken glass, small chisels and pieces of sheet metal used. Scrape the joint a little at a time with the scraper held flat to the surface. Trial fit after each scraping. Scraping, if done right is better than files or sandpaper for fine fitting work and is the method actually used in old time shipyards to fit tight joints. A few cavets, if scraping across the grain you can get an uneven surface, be very carefull to keep the blade in the correct plane or you will end up with a surface that is tilted out of line.

Don't know why I didn't think of this first. I looked up pictures of the USS Constitution's guns. The carriages are painted a red ochre color with the trucks painted black. Don't know if this was a standard color scheme for US Navy ships but it is the best data I can find.

I believe the British painted broadside gun carriages red during the war of 1812. A couple of questions, 1; Did they also paint pivot gun carriages the same and 2; did American Naval practice follow the British fashion?

On a slightly different subject, are the decorations necessary at all? Endeavour was a Whitby collier originally and I would be surprised if it had even a small amount of carving on the transom or anywhere else. Did the royal navy add carving to the transom during the refit or is this just a flight of fancy by the kit designers?

Amazon has some good ones for less. Depends on how big you want the magnifier to be. I bought one several years ago that has a 2x lens about 3" across and a 60w light. I think I paid about $30 for it.

Any of the above.

I have been looking at a set of plans for a boat that used wire rope for shrouds and stays. Has anyone tried using a ropewalk to make wire rope? I was thinking about trying it with very thin copper wire lubricated with bees wax. Any help, suggestions are comments welcome.

"Shine looks sort of like the armed Bermuda sloop yet has two masts." Entirely possible. It wasn't unknown for a cutter or sloop hull to be remasted and rigged as a schooner or brig. BTW The smallest fully rigged brig I can find reference to was only 50' overall and it worked for a long time as a merchantman around Britian.

An old dremel table saw with a 4" blade can be had on ebay for less than the asking price of this one. Anyway you cut it the Dremel table saw is a much better deal.

The locks were only mounted to the guns when ready for action. Few pictures were taken when the guns were about to be fired so it isn't suprising that there are few pictures showing them.

Dapper Tom is a good kit but suffers from the same problems as the others. For one thing it is based on a set of lines taken off by a French officer in 1925 from a ship being built. This puts it well outside the time frame for the Baltimore Clipper. The model also has so many sails and cannon that it would probably capsize on launching. Last but not least it shows the aft quarters being below deck in an area where the head room would only be about 3'. Still makes a good model and if modified to a more appropriate sail plan with a rearranged deck layout it would actually be fairly accurate for the second quarter of the 19th century. Chapelle discusses this ship in his book.

Try Bookfinder.com. This is a great website for finding out of print books and comparing prices from different vendors.

Few if any of the baltimore clipper type model kits are very accurate. Most are way over canvased, carry to many cannon and pretty much ignore the deck layout found on most of them. H.I. Chapelle's book "The Baltimore Clipper" is an excellent reference on these ships. If you want a model to start with that is challenging without being impossible for a beginner I would recommend Model Shipway's skipjack model "Willie Bennett". If you want a ship with cannon try the MSW "Armed Virginia Sloop". For a simplier but very nice kit look at the offerings from Midwest's apprentice series.

A while back I asked on this forum if anyone had experience with the Genesis 7.2v rotary tool. I got one to test out as it was not to expensive and it looked like it could be a very useful addition to my tool collection. Here is what I found when I got one. 1. First one I got had a defective switch but the vendor replaced it without any problems and the second one works fine. 2. Fit and finish are very good, at least as good as any of the other rotary tools on the market. 3. Has plenty of power for drilling. I used a 1/16" (1.5mm) drill to test it and it drilled through dry hardwood with no problems. Only issue is you can't push it, if you start to press to hard it tends to wobble a bit. Other wise no problems. 4. Very comfortable to hold. Fits in my hand well and doesn't cause hand cramps like holding a regular tool does when you need to do a lot of work in one session. 5. The on/off/speed switch is in an ackward place at the upper rear end of the tool. You can't position the drill bit and then turn it on. A trigger switch on the pistol grip would be a big improvement. 6. The small LED light is useless. Might be useful if you were working in complete darkness but is otherwise to dim to add any value. Maybe putting a trigger where the LED is would be a good design change. 7. A Proxxon 3-jaw chuck fits the spindle and is a worthwhile addition. Over all I would rate this tool a 7 out of 10. I might rate it higher or lower depending on how dependable it turns out to be over the long haul. As of now I am very satisfied with it and at $30 delivered from Amazon the price is right.

The good news is that if HomeDepot is carrying something like this the product will continue to get better and cheaper. In a few years it may be possible to buy a decent 3-D printer off the shelf in your local big box store for a reasonable price. Early days yet on these things.

The elm tree pump was just a hollowed log with a valve in it. The valve would let water through on the down stroke and lift it during the up stroke. The "tree" part of the pump, i.e. the pipe or body goes all the way down to the bilge and doesn't usually have a well or other structure associated with it. The pump body or tree doesn't necessarily have to be of elm although that was the traditional wood used. Any hard, rot resistant wood would do. If the pump was set up as a wash pump it would go through the hull and would probably have had a separate well structure to keep the water out if the pump had to be removed for repairs.

Scientific name of Washington Hawthorn is Crataegus phaenopyrum. Tree grows to 25' or so and during the early years grows from 13" to 24" a year in good soils. I have seen speciments in the Willamette valley of Oregon that appear to be taller than 25' and were 12" to 14" in diameter. I don't know how old they were but assume they must have been there a long time.

Right now I have several short logs of various woods drying which is a large amount for me. I also have a pretty good supply of strip wood and sheets of different kinds but there are probably not that much all together. I would guess enough wood to compete a large model would be a fair amount, enough for two would be a large amount. Just remember you can't have to much wood as long as you have a dry place to store it.

Depends on how much I can find to salvage or get at discount prices. Sometimes I only have a small amount in the shop sometimes a lot stacked up drying and/or waiting to be cut up.

nice work. In many areas pear and fruit woods in general are hard to come by. However I have found that many woods that a woodworker would reject can be great for model building. I read an article years ago by a gentleman that regularly visits the green waste facility at his local trash dump. He wrote that he finds many pieces of wood that work very well but are not in general use. Pyracantha was one he mentioned and star fruit was another. Star fruit is a tropical species so I assume he was down in south Florida or some other warm place. The point of his article is to not rely on the conventional wisdom and experiment with what ever you can find. From personal experiance I can say that gardenia and dogwood are both good sources for hard, close grained wood. Neither gets very big but you don't usually need large pieces for model building.

As a general observation I have found that most of the walnut used in kits, especially the thin strips for planking are of poor quality. I would suspect most of it is not true walnut anyway. If you can salvage enough to finish the project you can get a pretty good finish with some work. Problem I had the most trouble with was the brittlness of the wood and the tendency to split and fray when being trimmed. Good hardwood veneer can be bought off of ebay fairly cheaply and might be a better choice than going with the kit wood. Another option is to leave off the second layer of planking and finish the first layer with wood filler and paint.

Best I have tried with curly walnut is BLO. Sand to a very smooth finish and apply BLO with a rag wiping off the excess. Let it dry and go over it with 0000 steel wool. Wipe again with BLO let it dry and go over it again with 0000 steel wool. Repeat until you have the finish you are looking for. A couple of cavets, I have only done this with hardwood and don't know how a soft wood would preform. Also as said above try it on a small piece or the underside of your slab first before committing. Although it is not impossible to remove the BLO by sanding it is a lot of work.

For simple shapes using a low melting point alloy like brittania metal it is very doable at home. The one thing to remember it to incorporate as many vent holes as you can into the casting to ensure a complete fill out. Using plaster to make the molds is probably the easiest way. After the mold is dry use low heat to melt the wax and let it run out of the vents. Keep the heat on for a while to ensure all the wax is out. Heat the mold, melt the alloy and pour. As was said above the disadvantage is one casting per mold but for one offs it is hard to beat. One more thought. For series production you can make a split mold to turn out wax masters. Only works with symmetrical shapes like cannon.

Go to bookfinder.com and look for this book. I would bet you will find a copy for a lot less than $45.

Can't help you but that is a great looking kit. If you do manage to find instructions for it please let us know.