CiscoH

you do high quality work Thukydides; I will follow with interest

Beautiful! I especially admire the painted stern and bulwarks. yes, so, whats next?

nice even planking job Mugje

Its Sunday afternoon. Still hot and humid here but not as hot and humid as last week. Time for an update. tmj - I had considered a jig similar to your idea. But to make it I would probably need a tablesaw to accurately cut the frets. My understanding is some of the original modelers started with a square of wood and chiseled each grate hole out individually; this sounds even more crazy than my method. A bit up the page here Dan (Shipmodel) had recommended making the grating first and then fitting the coaming which is what I ended up doing, good advice thank you Dan. I started on the companionway coaming next. I built it the same as the others with mitered half lap joints; to make the joint lines stand out I again used #2 pencil graphite mixed with gorilla glue. I trimmed the horns and glue blobs next. Here is a shot of the deck with all the coamings in place (nothing is glued yet). I realized that somehow I had made my coamings taller than the plans show. I think I made the first coaming extra tall so I could later trim it to the correct height. And then forgot, and made all my future parts the same height as the first. It was fairly straightforward to reduce the main and small hatchways. I ended up leaving the grating hatchway its original excessive height. If it were my ship I would prefer the deck furniture with holes in it to be as high as possible, and I figured it would make it easier to attach a canvas cover/batten. As long as it doesn't interfere with the cannons. Now I'm working on the companionway proper. I glued the panels for the sides up using holly strip and pencil to show joints. Its hard to see but there is slight reveal between the framing and the vertical slats the thickness of 3 pieces of paper. Next up is making the companionway doors. The instructions and the Bob Hunt practicum show them to be simple frame and flat panels; obviously this is too simple and I need to complicate things. So I will be attempting raised panels in my next post. David Anstcherl has directions to make raised panels in one of his books but despite reading it multiple times I can't figure out what he did (Fireship Comet pg 60). In one of the Swan books Greg Herbert used sanding sticks. We'll see what works for me. Enjoy the rest of the weekend all, thanks for reading Cisco

Purchased Swan II and had no issues with the website. Mike I am assuming its a Seawatch guarantee that i can now build to the same level as Mr Antscherl

beautiful start Rik

pretty genius methods of construction BE thanks for posting your continuing tuitorial

really impressive work Paul

I just made a small grating by hand. this has convinced me i really need a good tablesaw. i’m a big proponent of Buy it Once so was hoping for a Brynes as well

i’m missing one of them, vol 2 i think. once i confirm which one i’m in for Digital Now Book Later

your sails look great! the cookie-ship’s rigging has some errors

thanks Ron. I am able to truthfully report theres a good reason you don’t see anyone doing gratings by hand.

I wrote Moonbug but i meant Mugje or however you spelled it. Yes they are in Amsterdam gawking at scenery and annoying cyclists. i think today they are going to Brussels. thanks Thukydides. i want to figure out how to do things by hand before i get power tools. i do full scale woodworking as my other hobby and learned hand tools first and i think it was very helpful.

Thanks for the positive energy Ronald. I greatly appreciate it. Today, Friday night, my wife and daughter are away at a Taylor Swift concert, my son is visiting his cousins, so I am home alone with the dogs, cats, and fish. We are all relaxing, except for the dogs, who don't like July 5th fireworks. Today's update concerns making the AVS' (not sure how the possessive works there) single grating. I don't have a mini-tablesaw and I didn't use the kit supplied basswood grating as I wanted mine to be made of holly. There was a lot of thinking involved in this one... I did a test run with a basswood version, which I won't show, that influenced the current version. First I planed then sanded my holly stock to about 2/64s inch thick, matching the thickness of the slats on the kit plans. Next I wanted to cut slots crosswise. In my test piece I found it was easy to make the slots not straight, or to end up rounding one end when I tried to file them square, especially if the stack of strips i was cutting across was narrow. To help with all these issues, and because all my clamping techniques didn't work well, I made a packet of strips, alternating holly and basswood, and glued them all together and to the baseboard, with white elmers glue. Then I planed the tops flat. Below is this step; the holly stock I started with and the kit basswood strip is to the left. Next I needed to mark my slots. I used my smallest square and a scalpel blade to make the first mark, then used pieces of 2/64 stock (the width of the slats) and pieces of 3/64 stock (the width of the holes) to mark each successive slat. I found that the scalpel left a deep line that was relatively easy to cut to with a veritas mini-chisel, then I carefully cleaned out each slot with a tiny chisel and sometimes with a small file. Because a chisel is in essence a wedge that exerts pressure sideways, to keep the "teeth" from popping out I pressure fit a strip of basswood into each slot only (no glue) as I made each one. This worked remarkably well and I didn't pop off a single tooth. Below I have filled one slot and marked the next. Here I have filled all the slots except the last one. The empty big slot at the top was rejected and turned into a test run. Then I soaked the whole thing in isopropyl alcohol and finally it reluctantly came apart. I should have taken the cross fillers out before soaking, they immediately swelled up and stuck, so I had to leave the packet out for a day to dry so I could remove them, then re-soak for 24hrs. Miraculously nothing broke. Below I have taken the now free strips of holly, used small pieces of 3/64" basswood as spacers above and below where the grating will be (I didn't want to glue the spacers in), used my square to even all the pieces up, and used wedges to hold the strips in place. I used pencil to highlight the joints. Next I inserted a variety of holly strips crosswise (whatever scraps I had that would fit, this stage isn't pretty), and attached the strips with white elmers glue applied with a toothpick. Way easy to get glue blobs that would be tough to remove so i went very sparing on the glue. Here it is drying. And after it dried I cut off the edges, did some sanding to bring the thickness down, and presto here is my grating: It still has some dust on it but overall I am very happy both with the final product and that I am done making gratings. Below I am attempting to make the coaming. I made the port and starboard sides fine, then screwed up 3 different times in 3 different ways on the fore and aft sides (pieces at the bottom of the picture) so called it a night. Maybe time to consider a tablesaw? thanks for reading Cisco

you have achieved exactly the effect you were looking for. really nice planking/caulking effect

is the lightbox used to better see gaps between pieces? and if so are you simply looking straight down over the joints?

super precise work! thank you for posting your methods and not just the finished product

good evening fellow modelers. Here in Delaware its been hot, humid, a/c killing weather for the last few days. A thunderstorm went through and now its looking a little cooler. Long overdue for an update. Gregory no offense was taken or implied. In hindsight I think the standard lap joins look better from the normal viewing distance than my mitered half-lap joints. But its too late now I ainte redoing them. Dan, I still have a single grating to do and I'm following your advice and making the grating first, then fitting the frame. Thats next update. Last few weeks I have been working on the coamings with hatches, of which the AVS has 2. I made my test piece in my last post and it went well. After thicknessing my holly stock so it matched the plans I made all 4 sides. My updated miter guide worked well but it still took some fussing. It is very challenging clamping pieces this small so they don't shift. Here I am sneaking up on the 45 degree cut. I glued various paired thicknesses of wood to my working board and used them as guides to mark the height of the lap joints (you can see one of these in the top of the above picture to the right). It is impossible to photograph but I used a pencil to mark the lap first, then a scalpel blade held flat against my jig to incise the lap over the pencil mark, and then took progressive tiny shavings with my chisel until I could see the shiny "scribe" the scalpel left on each side. When I tried using files I seemed to round the joints more than I wanted so this was mostly done with edged weapons. Below is the next step with all 4 sides finished. Seemed ok. For all you woodworkers out there you can see my penciled on triangle which was really helpful. You can also see at some point I accidentally flipped the right side piece so the mark ended up on the bottom. Then I glued it into 2 halves and let them dry. I used my usual yellow gorilla glue with #2 pencil graphite mixed in. If you look above you may notice some glue on the left non-attached sides. This is because I glued the left side pieces together to the wrong ends. Isopropyl alcohol to the rescue; luckily I noticed something was wrong with the halves when I tried to dry-fit them. I made another mistake with the first coaming, this one not so easy to fix. Once glued together I realized i had a trapezoid, not a rectangle. I had glued the joints so the miters looked tight but hadn't checked for square. I guess my perfect 45 degree miters weren't. My buddy Jason (JLong) was here last weekend and said no one would ever notice it except me. Next up was the smaller coaming, or the "scuttle" as the practicum calls it. It made me miss working on the big one; it was a lot harder to hold stock this short. This time I also glued the 2 halves first, making sure it was the correct sides this time, and made a 90 degree jig to increase the odds of ending up with a rectangle and not another trapezoid. It went better. And here are the 2 coamings. The little one still has some pencil marks that will be removed and some final sanding but I call it not too bad. And here they are on the deck. The model shipways directions show both hatch planking oriented athwartships; the pacticum shows the smaller coaming hatch in a fore-aft position. Dr Feldman shows his small coaming fore-aft so thats how I did it as well. I also liked how the practicum added a presumably removable center divider for the large coaming, and I liked the recessed look. I didn't do a divider for the small coaming. And here they are in place on the deck. The light is making the model appear much darker than it really is. And thats it. Next up is making the single small grating and the companionway. Also the ring hardware. Have a great evening all Cisco

love the lion Toni

great miniature work

I learned a ton reading Chuck's planking directions for his Cheerful build/kit. They are free and can be found at https://syrenshipmodelcompany.com/resources/ChapterchapFour.pdf

masterfully accomplished! how did you hold these tiny pieces while carving?

i really like your copper plates technique. makes them stand out beautifully

Marc - it has been my experience that sharpies fade to a clear grey color in about 2 years (we use them in our medicine logs at work all the time). i think you said you painted over and if so not as issue. beautiful build

Gregory- as per Rogers Collection of Dockyard Models V3 by Gran Walker, pg 322, George Stockwell was a ship modeler from Sheerness who was active 1750s-1800. Apparently one of his hallmarks is the mitered half-lapped hatch coamings. Its not clear if this was an accurate representation of hatch coamings (if so its seems like not many contemporary modelers fitted their models this way) or an affectation. I don't know enough either way to have a weighty opinion; to me it simply looks cool. And since the AVS is a made up ship I'm enjoying trying whatever strikes me. If I hadn't done the half lapped miters I would have done Chuck's Cheerful version as you posted above. I already copied his hull planking plan in place of the kit's version.