capnharv2

Thanks for the likes and comments. It feels pretty good to be back in shop.
 
Still sanding but made a jig today for drilling the gunport holes for the eyebolts.  Pictures show front and back of next to the dummy cannon.  The eyebolts are them for reference only.
 

Thanks for the likes and comments. They are deeply appreciated and encouraging.
 
I finished the planking the interior of the gundeck and have sanded it all pretty smooth.  Still needs another pass with the sandpaper, IMO, along with some crack filling.  I also need to make some "trim" bits (fiddly) for the cabin. To break the monotony of sanding, I have started work on the gun carriages.  I just need to find a good time to start the guns themselves.
 
Here's the pics as she stands in the shipyard today.   I'm running an inventory of eyebolts, rings, and some blocks to see if I have enough to fit out what's needed on this deck as well as the outside hull.  
 

 

As promised here is a Picture of the other Jim inspired Jig. And about 1/2 a day of garage cleaning and its back to modeling!!
 
Dang it got cropped. So here is the same picture but rotated.

Something simillar ... When she arrives (8 weeks old) it was very cold outside, so I broke my own rules, and let her live into house. She was fast learner and she get her hygienic habits quickly, so I decided here to stay with us all day. But, with some rules and regulations - she can not eat from our table, she can not sleep with me in my bed, she can not sit on chairs and couch in living room etc etc.
But ... week ago, after returning her from cutting her hear, she was so sweet and charming and cuddle so nice, so I can not resist to let her climb on me when I am on chair. Only once. And here is her really happy face. She perfectly understand what was happening, that she was allowed to do something which is not allowed, and it was fabulous looking changes on her face at the proces of climbing and after that ...  

Thank you again Carl, Nils and Popeye.
 
I've made all the Breeches and Hoods, and assembled them :

 
The breeches and conical support fitted. These supports are weird, they pivot the wrong way in my opinion and I don't really see a need for them at all. If anything they should swivel as there is no provision for that, and I'm not about to modify them to do so :



 
The four guns ready for the barrels and final bits and pieces :

 
Barrels fitted. Prior to fitting them I wicked some thin CA into all the seams and filed out any irregularities with a diamond file :


 
And with a coat of grey primer. I'll paint them Mid-grey before fitting to the deck :

 
  Danny

Thanks John.
 
It's been a while since I've posted, but I've achieved a fair bit of mostly small fiddly stuff. My aim was to get the 2nd Aft deck finished and ready to install on the hull. Apart from two 37mm guns on the 1st deck I'm about there .
 
There were seven small boxes to make. Here are a couple of pics of the process :



 
I also had two 37mm guns and two 20mm guns as well as one more winch to make. Here's one side of the deck with all parts fitted :

 
Before fitting the whole assembly I thought it would be a lot easier later if I did as much of the rigging as I could. There are a couple more lines to fit, but that'll have to wait until tomorrow. First there are a few pics of fitting two eyebolts made from 0.2mm brass wire :





 
And here's the rigging I've done so far. The line is a fine elastic :




 
  Danny
 

Oars for Captain's Gig finished and mounted

I'm very happy to finally be able to introduce MSW community to an exciting new television series that I am a part of. Produced by AMC, "The Terror" is based on a novel of the same name by Dan Simmons.  Last year, I was contacted by AMC and hired as a technical advisor on the show. I can’t say much about it yet, but I can confirm that they really did their homework.
 
The trailer has just been released. I hope you all tune in to watch!
 
 

Another book, if you're interested in the how and why of rigging, is Seamanship in the Age of Sail. I've found it to be very interesting and useful

Another book, if you're interested in the how and why of rigging, is Seamanship in the Age of Sail. I've found it to be very interesting and useful

Another book, if you're interested in the how and why of rigging, is Seamanship in the Age of Sail. I've found it to be very interesting and useful

I finished up the ladderways and then added the mooring deck rails.
 
 
 

 
Next I made the mooring deck winches of which there are two styles, as well as left and rights based upon the electric motor location. Here they are set on the plans.

 
Here they are set on the deck with bits and mooring posts. White rope will be added before the winches are glued in place.
 

 
Next I moved on to the bow that has three winches the same as the mooring deck; in addition there are anchor winches and the pictures show "in progress" anchor winches in place on the bow fore deck.

 

 
The anchor chain will index into the hole with the brake arm over the roller and into the deck. Just a great deal of more details and fixtures to add yet. 

Sorry Danny, but I had to look up the drill size. . .
 
.15mm is .0059", which (according to Wikipedia) is a #97 drill size. I can't use a #80 without breaking it, so how do you drill holes that small?
 
I assume PCBs use this size and smaller all the time, but they have accurate locating/drilling jigs and are set up for mass production.
 
I don't think I have the patience anymore for card models, but it's fascinating to see your work. My compliments.
 
Harvey

These plastic side hinge pin pieces should be the last bits to glue onto the gun doors. That is 4 each for the 32 double doors and two each for the 34 snigle doors, you do the math, I would be to intimidated if I actually knew how many it was, lol!

Thanks, gentlemen, for your kind comments and 'likes'
 
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There are numerous ideas for constructing ladders or stairs for shipmodels. Together with gratings, this seems to be something that pre-occupies the the mind of shipmodellers. Perhaps because spacing saw-cuts evenly is a challenge with hand-tools. Having machines with tool-slides, controlled by spindles with graduated dials, at one’s disposal takes away most of that challenge, at least in theory. It seems logic to transpose the common techniques for making ladders just to a smaller scale, say with thinner saw-blades to cut slots into the spacing device.
 
 

Preparing a spacing device for stairs
 
 
 
However, the sizes of the materials to be used in itself poses a challenge. Treads in (wooden) stairs are typically 25 to 30 mm thick, which translates to roughly 0.2 mm in the 1:160 scale. The stringers of stairs may be somewhere between 40 and 60 mm thick, which translates into 0.3 to 0.4 mm on the model. The treads are usually notched into the stringers, so that the outside of the sides are smooth. This is a technique that would be very difficult to reproduce at this small scale because milling notches 0.2 mm wide and 0.2 mm deep into material that may be as thin as 0.3 mm is practically quite difficult to do consistently. The other difficulty is to cut the treads to exactly the right lengths. This problem also appears, if one tried to simply butt the steps against the sides for glueing. The clean glueing, without fillets appearing, also was a challenge, at least for me.
 
 

Cutting notches for treads into stair-stringers of bakelite-paper
 
 
 
Initially, the material of choice was bakelite-paper, which is very stiff, but rather brittle at a thickness of 0.2 mm and has attracted all the issues mentioned above. I then tried polystyrene, which is much less brittle, but also much less stiff. It has the advantage that it can be glued, or rather welded, using dichloromethane, allowing nearly invisible joints between close-fitting parts. While all these properties are useful, the styrene proved to be too flexible to be sanded to size on the milling machine, compared to the bakelite-paper.
After various trials the most promosing method for stairs that emerged was the following:
 
 
1. cut strips somewhat wider than the stringers of the stairs from 0.2 mm bakelite paper.
2. arrange these strips in a pack on the micro-vise; count as many strips as needed for the stairs, plus a few spares, and a couple of sacrificial/protective ones at each side of the pack.
3. push the strips down into the vise and then sand them as a pack to equal width.
4. incline the vise to the angle of the stairs and cut slots at the required distances with a fine-toothed saw-blade of 0.2 mm thickness.
 
 

Cutting slots for steps into stair-stringers of polystyrene
 
 
 
5. cut strips slightly wider than the width of the treads from 0.2 mm bakelite-paper, clean them up and round one edge slightly.
6. cut the treads slightly longer than the final length from those strips.
7. take two stair-stringers and insert the treads, which should be a tight fit, with the rounded side first.
8. adjust one side so that it is straight and the steps are only protruding slightly – everything should be square, of course.
 
 

Glueing together the stair components
 
 
 
9. infiltrate thin cyanoacrylate cement into the slots and let set thoroughly.
10. adjust the opposite side to the right distance and repeat as above.
11. nip-off excess tread material on the outside.
12. file the outside of the stringers flush with a diamond nail-file and/or the disc sander
13. glue a second layer of 0.2 mm bakelite paper to the outside of the stair-stringers
 
 

Sanding to thickness the stairs
 
 
 
14. transfer to the vise on the milling machine, slots down, and sand down the stair-stringers to just above the steps.
15. turn the stairs over and sand them down to to the scale width of the stringers.
16. sand the stair-stringers to the required thickness.
17. clean-up all burrs etc.
18. the stairs are now ready to be trimmed to length.
 

Selection of stairs (not yet trimmed to length)
 
I have tried to follow the same procedure with brass-sheet and soldering, but using bakelite-paper gave crisper results. Perhaps one should have etched the components and then soldered them together, as I had envisaged at the very beginning. This would have allowed to hold close tolerances of the individual parts, requiring less clean-up. However, I found setting up the etching process to onerous and also wanted to see, whether I could fabricate the stairs usind classical workshop techniques.
The hand-rails and other fittings will be produced later, together with the railings, as they will be very delicate.
 
To be continued ... soon ... first I have to go to Helsinki on business – and to have some Rudo-steak, now that Christmas is over 

It has been almost a year since the last post. I have been too busy business-wise and been side-tracked by various tool-making projects, which seem to be easier to do with the frequent interruptions by business-travels. There has been some small progress, however. Though this was not easy, as I have been struggling with the possibilities of the available materials and with my own skills. The 1/160 is pretty small, if you have set yourself the target to put as much detail into as one would do in say 1/96 or even 1/48 scale ... One of my struggles has been to produce acceptable ladders, on which I will report in the next post.
 
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The officers’ mess skylight produced previously did not turn out quite to my satisfaction. It was not as crisp as I had wished. It was build up from layers of bakelite sheet around a milled core of acrylic glass. The mouldings present on the original were simulated by 0.4 mm copper wire milled to half-rounds. This all entailed messing around with cyano-acrylate cement, which is not my favourite and at which I am not very skilled.
 

Officers’ mess skylight milled from a small block of acrylic glass
 
It then occurred to me that much of all this could be milled from a solid piece of acrylic glass. One has to start from a block that envelopes the maximum width and depth, including the mouldings, and then has has to plan strategically which layers to mill off until the desired shape appears (reminds me of the joke, where an old lady asked a sculptor during an exhibition whether it was difficult to sculpt a lion – the artist replied: not really, madam, one takes a big block of marble and knock off everything that doesn’t look like a lion ...). The mouldings were left standing as square protrusions. They were rounded off using a draw-plate fasioned from a piece of razor-blade and held in a pin-vise. The half-round notch was cut using a thin cut-off wheel mounted on an arbor in the milling machine.
 

Micro-drawplate for half-round moldings
 
It is, of course, not possible to simulate panelling by this method. However, some parts can be left standing and the other completed with thin styrene-strips. For reasons of material stability, I am not such a big fan of polystyrene, it becomes brittle with age, but it has the advantage that it can be ‘welded’ onto acrylic glass or onto itself using dichlormethane. This results in invisible bonds and you cannot smear any glue around.
 

Trial of milling out skylight window-frame
 
The next challenge were the protective grilles that were laid into the wooden frames above the actual skylight glass-panes. The bar of brass or bronze had a diameter of less than a centimetre, which translates to something like 0.05 mm on the model. However, the thinnest brass-coloured wire I could find had a diametre of 0.1 mm, so is slightly oversize. Recently I came across molybdenum wires that are readily available down to diametres of 0.02 mm ! It seems that they are used in the repair of mobile phones, to separate the front-glass from the LCD-display. I obtained a selection of sizes, but have not worked with the wires yet. The wires are supposed to be tough, so I do not know how easy it is to cut them to length.
 

 
Spool of gold-coloured molybdenum wire
 
I tried various methods to construct the window-frames with exactly spaced out bar. In the first instance I tried to mill-out the frame from a thin piece of acrylic glass. Evenly spaced notches for the ‘bars’ were milled with a pointed engraving bit. However, I did not manage to get the edges and corners as crisp and clean as desired.
 

Milling notches for window bars
 
 

Placing wires as window bars
 
I then wanted to construct the frame near-prototype fashion. To this end I drilled holes for the 0.01 mm wires into the edges of 0.5 mm by 1.0 mm strips of styrene. It proved difficult, however, to align the four parts of the frame well enough.
 

Drilling frame for protective bars
 
In the final version I welded 0.25 mm thick strips of styrene onto the milled acrylic glass body of the skylight. The block then was presented at the correct angle to an engraving cutter in the milling machine and the notches for the wires cut. In the next step the wires were glued into these notches, which was a major challenge – for the steadiness of my hand and my patience ...
 

Built-up frames
 
 

 In situ milling of notches for wire bars
 
The frame was completed by another layer of 0.25 mm styrene strips. As the total thickness should have been only 0.4 mm, the excess was sanded off on the milling machine. Finally, the edges were trimmed to size and rounded with the draw-plate described above.
 

Sanding frames to scale thickness
 
The officers' mess skylight will receive an outside protective grille on the basis of an etched part.
 

Completed skylights for the pantry (left) and the officers’ mess (right)
 
To be continued ....
 

Hello to all
Happy New Year !!!
Captain's Gig, update
 

I guess this is just a celebration posting of the fact that the rigging of all the spar deck guns is now complete.... except for the train tackle, which I'll have to come back to because I ran out of blocks and have to wait for Chuck to ship.
Excuse the lighting of the full deck photo.....

Note the difference in the size of the rope used on the gun deck cannons seen through the cutaway vs the smaller rope used on the spar deck guns.  Not much we can do about that now.

Happy to finally break away from gun rigging and return to working on the Pinnace.  

Thanks again Jan and Paul .
 
When I went to fit the hangar to the 1st deck I discovered a big mistake. Once again the inadequate instructions led me down the garden path. I'd fitted the two centre boats to the racks as per the drawing, but they were a mile out of position. There was no way that the hangar would fit against the deck behind it, as the boats hit the railing. In fact they would have been almost all the way into the range finder on that deck :

 
Nothing else I could do but try and remove the two boats and move them forward the required distance. This wasn't going to be easy, but I managed to cut them both free with almost no damage to either the boats or the racks :


 
A bit of paint, some small modifications to the racks, and all was well . The outer boats are a little too far back as well, but they don't interfere with anything else so I'm not going to push my luck trying to move them :



 
  Danny

Sorry Danny, but I had to look up the drill size. . .
 
.15mm is .0059", which (according to Wikipedia) is a #97 drill size. I can't use a #80 without breaking it, so how do you drill holes that small?
 
I assume PCBs use this size and smaller all the time, but they have accurate locating/drilling jigs and are set up for mass production.
 
I don't think I have the patience anymore for card models, but it's fascinating to see your work. My compliments.
 
Harvey

Dan I plan on having him paddle around in pools and ponds on a calm day. Yes the Charon most are familiar with does use a pole to push himself across the river Styx but I don't have any shallow rivers to pole across. He will be remote control when I'm done and hopefully before the end of summer this year if not then summer next year. Here is a video of my last project.
 

Thank you, everyone, for the wonderful comments. They are very much appreciated, indeed. 

Thanks for the tip Jan.
 
I've finished the 3rd deck. The pieces of railing hanging in mid-air will be attached to the structure along-side. Lots of louvres :


 
  Danny

I hope all had as great a holiday season as we did with all the kids here for Christmas. We had four generations under one roof; Gretchen's father, Gretchen, our daughter Heather and Eric with grand children Sophia and Daphne;  Alex and Tyler. This picture was taken at Heather's house where we spent most of the time together.
 

 
Both Evan and Eric got to see their ships. Here is Evan holding his ship, still a work in progress.

 
Here is Eric and I standing next to his. He really loved the signal flags with the boys names on them.

I also spent a little time after Eric, Jamie and the boys returned to New York working on drawings for the LCVP for the Maritime Museum here in Morro Bay. At 1/12 scale it will be 36 inches long. Here is a PDF of one sheet of the plans I have so far. Once the drawings are done enough I will sort out a materials list to start the build.
LCVP PLAN.pdf
 
For now back to making the ladders and winches. HAPPY NEW YEAR to all!
 
 
 

Santa did not bring a soldering iron or heat gun for me this year, so I turned again to the steam box parts that I had purchased a few years ago. I built a new box out of PVC pipe, scaled down to the sizes of wood I need to bend. I tried one former that was not sharp enough bend to allow for the springback, and then modified the bend more sharply to compensate (see sketch below). The final bend came out just right. I am in business!
 
Mark