grsjax

Exterior latex house paint works well. White seems to work best but any color seems ok.

Just $.02 from someone who has screwed up more than one plank. Take it slow, measure several times before cutting. Use slow setting glue and lots of clamps rather than instant glues. This is so when (not if) you find out at the last moment that your plank isn't fitting right you can remove it without breaking anything.

Just ordered the English Pinnace kit from Modelexpo (great deal at $34.99, think the sale is good for a few more days, code is Blues14). The color scheme in the pictures is nice but about the only way you can make a kit like this a bit different from all the others like it is the paint. My question is what colors would be appropriate for an 18th century pinnace? The reccomended colors/decorations look like they would be for a very senior officer with a lot of money to spend on making his pinnace a show piece. What about all the lesser officers with fewer personal resorces? I would like to have a boat representative of the work a day craft likely to be carried by the average man of war.

I bought a machinist chest on ebay for about what I would have paid for the wood chest from Harborfreight. It is a Kennedy 8 drawer metal chest with felt lined drawers. Much better quality than the HF offering.

Keep an eye on ebay for a good deal on a compressor. You can get the same thing that Modelexpo sells a lot cheaper. As for air brushes I can only say I got a cheap single action to practice with and it works fine for general use but I would guess I will need a better one when I start experimenting with detail work.

Haven't had much time to work on this lately. First a problem with my eye and now we have family visiting. Went back to it after letting it sit for several days and sure enough I discovered I had made a mistake . Comes from poor eyesight and getting in a hurry. The first couple of strips were short. Not by much but enough that it would be obvious when the rest of the planking was applied. To repair the damage I broke the planks free from the stem and managed to break the stem in the process. After sanding everything smooth again I repaired the stem and reinstalled it. I was going to just remove the planks and start over but found the other end fit perfectly and so decided to let it be and see if I could fix the short end by adding a small strip of wood to the end of the planks and sanding it to the right contour. After letting the glue on the added wood dry for a couple of days I set out to carefully sand the ends to fit against the stem. After much sanding and fitting it looks much better. Can still see the added wood at the stem but paint covers many sins and I think this will work fine. Going to have to pay much more attention to fitting the ends of the planks from now on.

Had to visit the dentist and saw a real neat set of binocular loupes. Asked the doctor about them and was told that they worked very well and had a depth of field of about 16". Sounds like a great thing for model building. Of course the real good ones cost a lot. Looked on ebay and found some cheap ones with 3.5x power and a 420mm depth of field. Anyone ever use these (especially the cheap ones). Are they something worth getting?

I have used white glue and carpenters glue. Both work well.

Similar set is available from Amazon

This is my first build log and I expect it will progress in fits and starts with many mistakes along the way. I have been building models off and on for 50 years. Mostly plastic cars and planes when I was a kid progressing to simple wooden boats later on. The last 20 years have been taken up with family and job but now that I am retired I have gotten back into the hobby and have time to work on models. This model is the Midwest Maine Peapod in 1" = 1' scale. I have built a few of the Midwest offerings and generally like the kits but they do have a few problems that I will point out as the build progresses. The first is the poor support for the building forms. As I mentioned on another forum it was necessary to use scrap from the kit to reinforce the strongback as can be seen in the following pic. The edges of the forms are coated with bees wax to keep any stray glue from sticking the planks to the forms (I hope). As you can see I have a couple of planks in place. Planks are fastened with Gorilla 10sec super glue at the stems and a very small amount of Elmers white glue along the seam.

Here is a pic of the peapod with the extra support. Just scraps glued to the forms to stiffen them up some.

Any and all dust can and does cause problems. Fine dust of even the most benign material can cause serious health problems if breathed in over extended periods. It is not the toxicity of the dust but the physical impact of the particles on the lung tissue that causes the damage. A dust mask is always a good idea when sawing or sanding wood. tkay11 has it right, dose, exposure and sensitivity are all things that must be taken into acount when evaluating toxicity. People that worked in US cotton mills of the 19th and early 20th century suffered lung problems from breathing cotton dust. No longer a problem here but it still is a problem in developing countries. Cotton isn't toxic but I wouldn't want to breath the dust from it for 20 years.

Never said you shouldn't manage risk, just that saying something is toxic does not necessarily mean that it is. Most government agencies use the "precautionary principle", i.e. that if someone thinks something might be toxic better to list is as such rather than take any risk. It is just another cya move. An example, Professor Blowhard of Grants-r-Us U, head of the questionable science department issued a statement that dihydrogen oxide has been determined to be toxic in rats and should immediately be banned or at least strictly regulated to avoid risk to humans. Professor Blowhard determined this by an experiment using two test groups of lab rats consisting of 6 rats in each group. The first group was placed in 1 liter chambers filled with dihydrogen oxide and the control group were placed in identical chambers filled with air. The first group all died after struggling desperately for a few seconds. The control group all survived with no ill effects. This 100% mortality in the test group is very strong evidence of the toxicity of dihydrogen oxide. Professor Blowhard is asking for a 100 million dollar grant to study the affects of dihydrogen oxide on humans in areas such as Hawaii, Tahiti, and other areas where large groups of humans are exposed on a daily basis. Professor Blowhard and his grad assistants Wendy, Bunny and Sue will spend the next several years visiting these areas and accessing the impacts. A bit over the top but you would be surprised at just how many studies used to classify substances as "toxic" are no more extensive than my humorous example.

There are three types of drill rod, A, O and W or air, water and oil hardening. Which type are you using?

This data should be taken with a grain of salt. I worked testing and evalutating toxic materials for many years and most of the data available is based on very few studies usually with a limited number of test subjects. Unless human studies have been completed with a large and significant test population the data is not really reliable as a guide to impacts on humans. That said it never hurts to take precautions and some individuals are far more sensitive than others. Dust masks and eye protection is never a bad idea.

I will take a few pictures and see how they turn out.

I started work on a Midwest Peapod model and the first problem I ran into was the flimsy building form. The instructions say to glue the formers to the "strong back" but that doesn't work very well. The formers are 1/8" bass wood that has a tendency to split and warp. In addition the formers tend to get out of alinement when you start planking. To correct this I glued a strip of scrap along the bottom of each former and added a triangular support to each side. Much stronger structure. This issue does not seem to be just with Midwest kits. Why don't the kit manufactures include instructions for strengthing the building form using the scrap from the kit. Costs them nothing and makes the work easier.

Howard Chapelle's books have a lot of information on Skipjacks. "American Sailing Craft", American Small Sailing Craft" and "Notes on Chesapeake Bay Skipjacks" are all good references.

Long ago in a former life I took a class is lost wax casting. We used plaster to make the molds and cast brass and gold items. These were single use molds. Easy to make and would work just as well with pewter or Brittanina. An advantage of using plaster is you can pre-heat the molds which gives a better casting result.

Just an update. The Craftsman 3.6v screwdriver works well with the micro chuck. One issue I had was the hex of the micro chuck had a bit of looseness in it. Not a real problem but it bothered me. To correct it I put small strips of clear tape on 3 sides of the hex, that solved the problem. BTW the no load speed of the screwdriver is 200rpm.

Maybe a dumb question but are some of the Midwest kits originally Laughing Whale Kits. Seems to be a lot of similarity between the old Laughing Whale and some of the Midwest offerings.

Trying my hand at building MS whaleboat. Lots of holes to drill for the chench nails.

Thanks for the input. I went online and got a cyber monday deal on a 3.6v Craftsman pistol grip drill. I also ordered a micro chuck that is supposed to hold drills from 0 to 1mm. I would like to have gotten one that would go up to 3mm but none of the ones I found online had good reviews or they wouldn't hold drills smaller than 1/32".

It gets hard on the old hands drilling lots of very small holes with a pin vise. Are there any good low speed power drills available? I was thinking of using a Black and Decker 6v cordless screwdriver with a microdrill chuck but don't know if that would be adequate.

Amazon has a number of collet type and drill chuck type micro drill holders for sale that have standard 1/4" hex shanks for use with cordless drills/screwdrivers. Most will hold as least down to a #97 drill. I would guess that these same items are for sale from other outlets as well.