Kevin-the-lubber

What a sad, sorry sight - the photo, that is. It’ll be at the least hugely entertaining watching what you do here Daniel. I sense experiments with drinking straws ahead 🙂.

Oh good, glad some of them are proving useful. I’ll recycle the files for the CS. By the time I get back to the Victory I’ll probably have added to the collection, like you I hadn’t even heard of thimbles. I think for ultra-small sizes you’re probably better off with wood anyway and I can see myself buying these. I bought the stern decoration for CS from Hismodel a couple of weeks back and he included some samples of his tiny deadeyes, which are works of art. In a similar vein, I saw some Cornwall model boat brass stanchions and other parts at the weekend which were also impressive.

Over the last couple of weeks I've been tinkering with printing a new deck with disguised joints and negative plank lines, and pinrails with some embellishments. The latter will be for it's own update as and when I'm there. For now, the deck, which is printed on a filament printer. I wanted to see if it was worth the effort of remaking this, bearing in mind the kit part (top of first picture) has come out reasonably well so far. So, printed in 5 pieces; the 4 you see here, and a quarterdeck (work in progress). The bowsprit socket is printed separately in resin; although the top of the deck has an elliptical profile (thanks Richard) the bottom is flat and, by making all the protruding parts separately, this is easy to print and sand. A bit slow though - the bigger sections take about 6 hours each to print. The white card is 0.5mm evergreen and the sections are glued to this as well as each other using CA. This is to ensure the bottoms of the sections are perfectly aligned, thus making the top also aligned. These sections slot together very nicely, no undue play nor tightness and only a little bit of post-printing cleanup of the joints required. The radial lines you see are layer lines, as the thickness varies along the centreline but is constant at the edges. Trial fit. Not bad. some slight 'air' at the prow which I may or may not improve on. As it's hidden by the foredeck it doesn't matter. The quarterdeck needed more work, what you see here is a new profile sat on top of the test piece as this was very gappy. I've needed to make it about 2 or 3 mm longer and it will now be nearer the Campbell plans than Revell and I'll remake all the furniture (which I'd probably have done anyway). The monster clamp isn't there for force, it was just what was to hand to lightly squeeze the hull so I could get true profile measurements! The pink strip is the WIP pin rail, you can see the butchery to the inner hull where I've removed all the interior mouldings. Pity I'd started painting! A few pics now of it sanded smooth. I used my normal woodwork orbital sander just to see whether this destroyed the plank lines as these are only 0.3mm deep, but it was fine. PTEG is tough material! The joint lines between the foremast and hatch are a real joint. I haven't washed out the dust from sanding yet, it gives a good indication of what it should look like after painting and inking in the lines. The joint lines are almost indistinguishable from the others in the picture, which are just 0.2mm wide printed grooves. Clearly this is still well out of scale but, at scale, the lines would be near invisible. (Note to self, to move the joints on the margin planks by a few mm, and make them look like the other plank ends: it will disguise them better). same here across the fore cabin: the line across this will be hidden by the cabin All told I'm pleased with how this is shaping up and will go with the replacement deck. It's really not very much work in itself and I'd already started remaking much of the deck furniture. So, drifting away from the 'build out of the box' but happily so.

Bill, I keep meaning to ask, now that you're in the thick of rigging, were those blocks any good? I really won't be in the least offended if you said no or they are a complete PITA. I mostly want to know because I'm quite close to having to attach my own deadeyes to my new pin rails on the CS and if it turns out they fail or have other big shortcomings, better that I know now. I'm having a lot of fun with the CS. New deck trials have gone really well, same with pin rails etc. I'll post about it again soon but, unsurprisingly, I'm ending up spending a lot longer on it than planned. I guess that's inevitable when every step is a learning exercise. I still wouldn't know a gusset from a gannet though. My but you're making strides on the rigging, and it lifts the model so much, doesn't it.

I bought my kit about 10 years back and the quality of the pressings is/was pretty good, very little flash, few sinkholes and good detail. The issue with the deadeyes is the design rather than moulding, they don’t have a groove around the edge for rope to sit in. The wood grain is always going to be debatable, at this scale it would be invisible and people often sand this back on the hull especially. On the whole I’d say it’s a much better quality kit that the revell Cutty Sark and is holding up well. That said, it would be a shame for them to retool exactly as is. They could lift the kit up to ‘superb’ by redesigning a few bits. Though maybe that would take all the fun out of it!

If I can digress slightly, I needed to get out of the house today after being cooped up in my home office all week, so went to the only surviving model shop in this area, Sussex Model shop in Worthing. Always a pleasure, a veritable Aladdins cave and pleasingly very, very busy. Anyway, I had a quick look at one of the Tamiya 1/350 warships as the box was open. Really impressive detail and crispness and no flash. It's a shame they don't seem to make any age of sail models.

I've never been terribly satisfied with my earlier methods of thickening and framing the gunports and, once or twice, thought about doing something similar to this. For me it's mostly been that it's difficult to get really crisp edges and corners when filing out the moulded holes and to get the port liners just right all the way along. Printed inserts partly solved it but not entirely. I hadn't thought about using a method like this for aligning and like it a lot - I think I'm now persuaded. Whenever I've looked at the real Victory, including photos, the gunports all look dead square from the side or a tangent off the bow, but it's hard to be certain. The model has them becoming a bit 'parallelogram-ish' towards the bow and stern. Which is right?

Oh, just sixth sense😊. Clever. On my Mk2 hull I did something similar last year, using filament-printed inserts to simulate the thickening and lining. That was before I started resin printing, which allows a much thinner minimum wall thickness and, when I go back to the Victory, I'll probably have another go using resin instead. Funnily enough, I was thinking the other day of using strips of photo-paper for planking but haven't got around to trying that out. As you may have noticed, my solution to difficult painting is to spend weeks and months making everything in separate parts.... it'd probably be easier if I just learned how to paint!

Coming from you, unsurprisingly beautiful Daniel. I'm guessing that since then you've taken to resin printing and some of the remaking will utilise that. Not that it doesn't come with it's own challenges. It really is time for someone to do a faithful CAD reproduction of the heller hull!

I’m a complete novice in airbrushing but through trial and error, so far, Ive settled on model air plus a few drops of flow improver. That seems to have largely stopped clogging mid-spray. I tried thinning model air but by the time I got it so it stopped clogging, the opacity was very poor and I ended up needing six or seven coats. Likewise tried adding a bit of retarder but don’t remember than making any difference. I also make up the mix in little bottles first and give it a good shake. I’m not even sure what difference there is between cleaner and thinners, been using both but mostly thinners. I do a complete clean in between colours and at the end of every session. I like acrylics, so easy to clean and remove if I make a mess, and virtually no smell or fumes. I have one of those airbrush cleaning jars, which helps.

Those are the Imai instructions, I have them too, downloaded from somewhere and that's what my file is labelled as. No idea about the blocks though.

I grabbed some too while it was available!

Same here, I’ll dig out the nail dryer and give it a go.

The game changer for me was figuring out basic meshmixer, for sculpting shapes I'd created in F360. The fundamental shapes were not that complicated in F360, a lot of it was done through projecting sketches onto bodies, but if you have a specific question, fire away. I'm no expert but you never know, I might have crossed that bridge. I will say this though - it was a royal PITA, mostly because F360 'hangs' rather than errors, and as the project file became bigger and bigger a vast amount of my screen time was spent swearing at a hung screen. I haven't yet found the energy to learn Rhino 3D but do need to do this and swap over. In passing, after a year of almost exclusively using elegoo abs-like resin (I found the elegoo standard stuff too brittle so quit that straight away) I'm experimenting this week with two alternatives, the anycubic basic grey and sirayatech fast creamy (the only colour that was available on the day). Only tried the sirayatech so far but there is way, way less post-printing curling and it seems less 'soft-and-bendy' than the elegoo. In fact it feels like a good comprise between the quite rigid but very brittle elegoo standard and the too soft abs-like, and it's in the same price range. I'll be trying it on a few more bits but can see this becoming a go-to. The entire Vic stern was done around the painting, so that I could get really sharp lines, hence splitting everything yellow as separate parts. It was quite a bit of work to design everything and get it to fit, but worth it, I think. I still have to hand paint the trophy of arms, but only because I knew it would drive me mad to try and make this in different colour parts (yes, it did cross my mind!). I've not tried using resin as the glue. How do you cure it/get it to set? I'm making parts now, on a Cutty Sark, where it probably is possible to get them back under the lamp if necessary.

Oh but that’s a rabbit hole! Take a look at my victory log, just go straight to the end. Incidentally, part of the purpose of taking a break from the victory is to see what, if anything, happens to the resin-printed stern, as post-curing curling/flattening was a royal pain. And it does continue to cure. The curve of the stern plate on mine is now noticeably flatter at the unrestrained top than lower down where it’s more forced to hold a shape. I imagine normal drying and curing just does the top few layers and the rest of it remains ‘wet’ but slowly dries out over time. Not a major problem if the object is all glued up to the hull as that’ll stop any untoward movement, and as I’m using abs-like resin it’ll still pull back into shape easily enough, though I don’t like having tension on the hull, I.e. will the glue one day give way? Now that I have a ‘near enough’ fit, for the next iteration I’ll measure the hull point to point at the joint line with some damn great callipers and hopefully that’ll get me there.

Maybe not a museum Marc, but I bet you’d sell yours for a pretty penny.

As indeed it does, thank you for that. The differences are more apparent now, through toggling and I'll have to study them more carefully.

No need for apologies chaps, former biker here too, likewise on the same page about most big cities and glossy museums. Time was when every city was unique, whereas these days they are just interchangeable hell-holes. Don’t hold your breath on the new one at Portsmouth, I was through that in 45 minutes myself a few months back and don’t remember seeing any models. They do have a fine collection of figureheads though, and an exquisite royal barge. Nothing to do with ships or modelling, but if you like old style museums crammed with artefacts and curiosities, an old favourite is the Pitt’s River in Oxford. I have another little gizmo arriving tomorrow, a filament dryer, which will see me starting on printing the deck proper. My preferred filament, PETG, is hygroscopic and misbehaves once it’s sucked in some moisture. I’d all but abandoned filament printing over the last year other than for utilitarian objects, but some like for like filament vs resin tests on pin rails this week have made me reassess. Filament is better than I (mis)remembered. Richard, I suspect I’ve been dim and the file you’ve sent has layers. I’ll check later. If I stuff up on hacking bits off the hull - perfectly possible - I may yet have to either go the whole hog or get a second kit.

Yes there is that, though the differences become less noticeable year by year. I worked in the east end on and off in the ‘70’s, when it was seen as rough as nails, but as is often the case, where there’s poverty there’s also a lot of warmth and kindness. It’s the city that I don’t like very much; too fast, too busy, too transactional.

Bill, are you planning on using the rat lines jig that comes with the kit? People seem ambivalent about its usefulness and I’m interested in why; I think I’ll need to make some dummy / provisional shrouds shortly for the CS and thought I might use the Vic jig.

I don't think this business is very good for the eyes. I have umpteen pairs of glasses including varifocals and magnifiers but I'm now struggling with even these some days. It's the miniscule detail that's the killer, though colour contrast can make quite a difference.

About the same for me - hate going to London! I lie of course, but only the first bit.

I’m not planning on transforming it that much! Although it’s tempting to use Richards tutorial to remake the hull, I know that will suck up weeks or months so, unless my current antics with the dremel go pear-shaped, I’ll settle for some fairly modest modifications on this build and treat this as R&D for when I feel competent to try something a bit more ambitious. A good thing about 3D design work is that it keeps forever and is very recyclable.

Richard is a bit more than an enthusiast Marc, but I’ll leave it to him to share his history. The pandemic thing has made me become very lazy about going out and about and, despite it being only an hour away, I still haven’t visited the ship. Perhaps when the weather is a little warmer.

All good from here Bill! Very good in fact. I have dim recollections from my youth that it was always quite hard to end up with the masts perfectly aligned, usually down to a little warping or whatever, so you should be happy. The Vasa/Wasa, depending on your origins: pretty, but ot nearly so pretty as the Soliel Royale or my other crush, the Caroline. And at 1:150, too small. Keep giving us the detail Bill, rope by rope, this is invaluable. I'm even more in the dark than you when it comes to all these words and names. I guess you learn them as you need to.