Charles Green

The cant frames are depicted as though laying on a flat surface. If depicted as though in position (canted) on the deadwood, the projections you refer to would line up fair and the beveled surface at the bottom of each half-frame would appear as a line. I have two editions of Davis' book. Neither has a pocket for plans. As far as I know, Davis never produced a set of full-size plans for the Lexington.

Some allowance for ventilation is recommended. The grooves will do the job of holding the glass. A loose fit (0.005 inch/0.13 mm oversize) will not be large enough to draw attention and will help with air exchange.

I have been in your situation (in-house-model-shop dust control). Gramophone-like cones are available that provide cross-table air movement when attached to a shop-vac. I made a vertical air-movement version. Home improvement stores sell sheets of plastic grid with 1/2 inch openings for light fixture covering. I cut out an 18 inch square of it to serve as the top of a box with sides made of 1x4. The bottom was made of 1/4 inch press-board. I mounted the box on the side of my bench with hinges so it folded out of the way when not in use. A hole in the center of the bottom accepted the nozzle of my shop-vac. All sanding work took place on the grid so any dust the vac did not pick up wound up in the box. Your vac must have a HEPA rated filter or your dust collection efforts will be in vain. Fein and Festool make top quality vacs. They have HEPA filtration and are quiet. I have a Fein Turbo III, their largest one at the time I bought it. While its running, you can stand right next to it and have a conversation with someone. Fein and Festool items are expensive but are very well made. You will get what you pay for. I will add, I had a small vac dedicated for use with the sanding box. It was under the bench, out of the way, but impractical to get to. I plugged the vac into a switch-box with an on/off switch for convenient control of the vac. This vac was not quiet. I built a sound-insulated box to cover it. On the subject of shop-vacs, due its quiet nature, the Fein vac is the most used tool in my shop. I can use it anytime without wincing or having to take time to find the ear-muffs. As a result, the shop stays clean - at least cleaner than it would be if the vac was painfully noisy.

At least you still have the wood. It looks like it tried to get up and walk away! I have worked on ornamental boxes built with sides of 1/4 inch maple. To prevent warping after construction, I have glued two sheets of flat 1/8 inch together, making sure the grain in each piece runs in opposite directions. Each piece cancels out the other's tendency to warp. After your efforts to flatten your wood, it will still tend to want to wander. As wood is sliced to ever thinner dimension its rigidity is reduced. At some point, any internal stress will overcome the wood's ability to resist and the stress will take over. If you need to use the wood in sheets, getting it as flat as possible and then gluing it up as above may allow you to use much of it, albeit for projects requiring a thicker cross-section than what was originally intended. Single thickness, narrow strips may be used if they are well supported and glued and/or pinned down solid. It is not water - but the heat in hot water - that allows warped wood to be reformed, or straight wood to be bent. Industrially, steam-boxes are used, since that is the most efficient way to heat large pieces or large amounts of wood for bending, but for hobby-size pieces, dry heat will work just as well. I have an idea - I have never tried this - but do you know someone with a dry-mount press? These presses bond paper or fabric based art-work to a rigid substrate by heating and pressing the two together with a sheet of heat sensitive adhesive in between . The one I have is 18 x 24 inch and provides heat from 180 to 325 deg. F. (82 to 163 C.) Larger art-work is handled by passing it though, section by section. Your sheets of maple could be passed through a dry-mount press in the same manner. The press would provide all the heat and pressure needed for thin sheets of wood. With clean, non-resinous wood, I would allow my press to be used in this way - I can't speak for anyone else!

Bob: I have a 1902 Disston & Sons catalog (copy). On page 138 it clearly states the nib "...has no practical use whatever, it merely serves to break the straight line of the back of the blade and is an ornamentation only."

The two that go back as far as I can remember were both saws. The first was my Dad's prized Winchester hand saw. I was allowed to use it but was admonished to be careful with it. Without him knowing, I left it outside overnight. The dew got to it - no rust but it was stained. To this day I kick myself for it. That and a few (many actually) other acts of stupid negligence as I was growing up - I'm surprised my Dad didn't put me and a bunch of rocks in a gunny sack, take a walk to the river and come back empty-handed. The other tool was a Dremel, power jig-saw I bought with my own money for my first ship-model project. It ran on one speed - Too Fast. It made more noise than corn-picker; enough to startle anyone not familiar with it and it vibrated so much following a line was impossible. Anything over 1/4 inch pine was too much for it. The saw came with provision to power a flex-shaft tool. The motor ran too fast for controlled sawing but too slow for rotary tools. Friction created by a bend in the flex-shaft robbed all the power. The jig-saw was a real disappointment but I learned about tools and what you get for your money.

As per above, set a feather-board just in front of the blades entry point. If there is room, set another feather-board in front of the that one. For a small model-saw, you may have to make your own feather-boards and be creative in how to anchor them. Do not vary the feed speed - don't pause halfway through to change your stance or grip - use one continuous push. Variations in the hardness of a piece of wood will effect the amount of wood the blade will remove. Check the fence's alignment. A tiny amount of relief/angulation away from the blade will prevent the back-side of the blade from rubbing and removing additional wood after the blade's front-side has accomplished the cut. This angulation will also help prevent kick-back. It just came to my attention you are using a Byrnes Saw. Jim machines 0.005 inch relief on the out-feed side of his fences to prevent kick-back and blade-drag as the wood passes the back-side of the blade. Make sure your fence is aligned straight on the infeed.

Beautiful work(!), but my eye is drawn to the isolated, small port near the stern, situated at the water-line. What was its function?

Requiring wood pre-milled to a specific dimension places a serious limit on what you will be able to find. Types of wood to look for include: box - you will most likely have to settle for Asian or South American varieties, pear or any other fruit-wood and holly. These woods are essentially pore-less and do not exhibit out-of-scale grain patterns. It's worth going the extra mile to find European box (Buxus sempervirens). It's expensive but for small parts a little goes a long way.

Kurt has the right answer. I will add, if the factory foot gets in the way it is easy to fabricate one for a special application.

The glue you have described is "hide glue", made of animal hide. The hide is processed into a granular form that when mixed 50 - 50 with water and then heated, produces a honey-like glue. It has been in use for hundreds of years. I am not sure of when its use started or when it was replaced with modern glues, but up to some date, the fantastic old models made by the Masters were assembled with hide glue as was all antique furniture. Most hide glue is made from cattle hide but rabbit and fish-skins are also used. The various types of hide have different strength characteristics. The fish-skin glue is common to costal areas in Asia. Hide glue is water soluble/reversible, making it one of the glues preferred for archival restoration. Its other archival advantage is, it does not out-gas acetic acid vapor as it cures - as do all of the common, modern wood glues. This out-gassing never really stops. For a model kept in a display case, with no provision for ventilation, the acidic vapor is death to lead fittings and cordage used for rigging. If kept fresh, hide glue is fairly odorless; the dry granules have no odor.

Since these are stern ports on a weather deck, could it be there were no lids?

The problem of the tube sagging from heat can be solved by using thick-wall PVC or buy using CPVC (chlorinated PVC) pipe. The thick wall can absorb more heat before it sags and the CPVC is made for higher temperature - 140 deg. for PVC and 180deg. for CPVC.

For naval vessels, I believe it was the country of origin that determined the orientation of keel scarphs. Blaise Ollivier, on page 45 of his 18th Century Shipbuilding, states that English keels are built with a "side by side" scarph while French scarphs are "one on top of the other." Page 208 describes the Dutch following the French practice. As for the German practice, Ollivier's description of the Germans securing keel scarfs with clench-bolts driven up from the bottom suggests that they followed the French practice as well. The Admiral called me away momentarily - to continue: English stems were scarphed side by side (p. 84), the Dutch scarphed the stem to the keel side by side then rotated the rest of the stem's scarphs 90 deg. (p. 209). Ollivier infers French stems are scarphed as are their keels (p. 209), one atop the other. Ollivier mentions "storeships from the Northern lands", (p. 367) with stems scarphed directly to the end of the keel and "in former times some Builders used to follow the same practice in warships". This suggests a simple butt-joint to me.

I hate to be the first to offer a serious answer but: Go to page 2 of the Nautical/Naval History forum to Sperry's November 18, 2020 inquiry on a similar topic - lots of information there. And recently there was a post on rope walks; exactly the sort of building you are inquiring about, but I can't find that post.

First off, it's an illustrated children's story-book published in 1941, authored by Holling C. Holling. It's still in print. I came across the book in the '60's while I was in high school. By then, in a strict sense, I was out-of-age for the book but it struck me because, by then, I was also a modeler and the book is about a model. As modelers, at some point, at some time, we have put ourselves in the place of the pilot, the captain or the driver of the airplane, vessel or car we had modelled. It's OK, admit it! Imagination is what drives our hobby. In the case of this book the modeler is a North American native child of the 1940's; unidentified, but probably Ojibwa, living in the Nipigon country along the north shore of Lake Superior. Over one winter, the boy carves a model canoe. At this point comes the book's appeal to me, as I hope it would to any modeler: the boy imbues the model with his sprit - sets the model on a snowy slope and leaves it for the thaw to take it away. The model then becomes the main character. The story is a spiritual yet literal ride as the model enters rivulets, streams, the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence and ultimately makes it to Europe. All along the way, the model is at the mercy of the elements and the few people who find it along its journey. It is a book written for a child's sensibility but coming from the '40's, it carries occasional reference to that time's attitude towards Natives. Rather than discounting the book for that reason, these few references should be used as examples of ignorance that demean the speaker rather than their subject. By the end of the story, the Native boy has become a young man working on a wharf not far from where the story began. French-Canadian lumberjacks are nearby, talking. One has a newspaper sent from France by his cousin. The paper contains a story about a model canoe that made it all the way to France from North America. One lumberjack exclaims that years ago, that's the model he put back in the water after saving it from the mill-saws! He put it back in because the Native boy had placed an inscription on the bottom of the model - Please put me back in the water. I am paddle to the sea. The young Native approaches the lumberjack, inquires, then softly says..."Good. I made that one." Boarding his own canoe, the young man takes a few strokes and pauses, becoming his Paddle to the Sea, freeing his imagination and spirit to his model's untold adventures. Show this book to a kid. It will make a modeler out of anyone who reads it.

jhearl: Enlarging or cropping to achieve a larger image produces what is call "empty magnification". The image is larger but it does not contain any more information than the smaller image. The result is a larger image but a loss of resolution. A wide-angle lenses close-focusing ability must not be confused with an ability to magnify. The field-of-view of a macro lens of the same focal length, set at the same focusing distance, will be much narrower than that of the wide-angle lens. Concerning wide-angle lenses: the depth of field they achieve at close focusing distances is a function of their short focal lengths. But take a lens of any other focal-length, set things up so it covers the same field-of-view as the wide-angle lens, set the f# the same, and the depth-of-field will be the same.

An even less expensive way to achieve magnification is to use a lens reverse ring. They have a male lens-mount on one side and male lens filter threads on the other. Mount the ring on the camera and then screw the lens on to it - backwards. If you want to see how this works, just hold a lens backwards over a camera's lens opening. Be prepared to get very close to the subject while experiencing very shallow depth-of-field - both are facts of life in macro photography. The amount of magnification a reversed lens will produce can be estimated by comparing the apparent diameters of the lenses entrance and exit pupils. For the 35mm format, a 50mm lens mounted backwards will get you around 0.5M - the image on the film will be 1/2 life size. This reproduction ratio is fixed for any specific lens. Shorter lenses will provide more magnification and longer ones, less. Your extension tubes can be used in conjunction with a reversed lens to achieve quite a bit more magnification - so much so that hand-held exposures quickly become impractical. Even at 0.5M, you must be very careful with your technique. The different diameters of the entrance and exit pupils is a function of lens design. Conventional lenses are optically asymmetric. Dedicated macro lenses are usually designed to be optically symmetrical, so reversing them will not get you any where. However, once M becomes greater than 1, an M factor that exceeds the design parameters of most general use macro lenses, resolution will be better if the lens is mounted in reverse. Reverse lens mounting means manual operation of the camera. This is good. It doesn't mean things get harder. It only means you must know what you are doing.

Bob: Everything you have said is right, yet, that's how it is! I go back 25 years with PSME and it has always been that way, except the catalog used to be $15.00. If what you want is cataloged, but not in the right size, a call to the owner will put him to work finding it for you.

Precision Scale Model Engineering, PSME, is a vendor included in the "Vendors" category on NRG's site but I have not seen it mentioned in these forums. It's a great resource for anything related to model building. The catalog runs around 200 pages. A very brief summary of their inventory includes power tools, power tool tooling (including a comprehensive inventory of steel and abrasive burrs, drill bits and end mills), hand tools, raw material, motors, gears and gear systems, miniature electrical components and pipe fittings. All the tools and tooling, in fact everything in the catalog, is scaled for model-sized projects. The web site includes contact information only - psmescale.com. A print catalog will set you back $12.00, refundable with the first order. In my opinion, its worth 12 bucks just to look through the catalog.

Elm has a nasty reputation for being stringy, tough to split and for its tendency to warp. These characteristics belong to one of the two most common elms, Ulmus rubra, AKA red elm, slippery elm, gray elm or soft elm. Ulmus americana, AKA american elm, soft elm (again), water elm or white elm does not have these characteristics. The trees look a lot alike but a close look at a cross-section of a flake of bark will show red elm's bark a solid reddish color. American elm's bark shows alternating stripes of red and white. If a leaf is available, the top surface of a red elm's leaf is very rough; you can't slide your finger across it. The top surface of an american elm's leaf is relatively smooth. These clues can be of help when scrounging through a pile of "urban" elm logs. I'm not sure of elm's usefulness for modeling, but there is a lot of it available for free in piles of urban logs. It is a pretty wood with utility in cabinets and furniture.

JRGlasoe and CW Tom: First off: Welcome JRGlasoe. The three of us have Minnesotan connections; both sides of my family came from MN and most still are there. My Dad's from Motley, just west of Brainard and my Mom grew up on a farm near Parker's Prairie. Parker's Prairie is near to the abrupt change in land form, from woods and lakes to prairie, mentioned by CW Tom. The town of Lake Woebegone from Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion , the town "on the edge of the prairie", is fictitiously located near Parker's Prairie. CW Tom, your mention of this abrupt transition struck a chord in me. It has held my interest since my days at the U of M's forestry school. The flat land of central North America is the result of little if any geologic upheaval in what was an ancient ocean bottom, made all the more flat by several advances of glaciers over it. The last push of the glaciers stopped right at Fergus Falls' location. A line on a state road-map from Mankato to Willmar, Morris and ending at Fergus Falls defines this change from lake-land to prairie; it defines the western limit of the glacier's last push. The wooded hills studded with lakes east of this line are, in fact, the piles of debris left where the glaciers stopped. East of this line - a myriad of lakes and hills - immediately west of it, prairie all the way to Montana. I will inject a nautical reference into this post by saying it is impossible to fathom the nature of this land prior to glaciation. Speculation is, all the water flowing to the Gulf of Mexico via the Missouri and Mississippi River drainages, used to flow into Hudson Bay. The lakes and beauty of the area around Brainard not withstanding, the number of resorts and summer-homes there goes back to WWII. The Brainard area is as far away as people from Minneapolis could get on a war-time gas ration.

Cutting the contour in the edge of a razor blade and using many light strokes with the blade at 0 to 15 degrees (as many have recommended) has worked for me. Straight-grain box or pear work very well. The Dremel abrasive disks may be too wide for some profiles. Dedeco supplies the dental trade. They sell disks as narrow as 0.005 inch. Don't even chuck one of these up without eye protection!

Decoyman: The offset in Scrubby's first photo looks excessive, I assumed some photo induced distortion was present. A closer look makes me agree the whole fence was misaligned. On my saw the fence's angle away from the blade starts at the arbor's mid-point. At the back-end of the fence it only amounts to a 0.005 inch off-set, but it's enough to keep the stock off the back-side of the blade.

Scrubbyj427: Take a close look and you will see the deviation starts at the center-line of the arbor. This angle provides relief so the stock passing by the back-side of the blade doesn't catch on the blade and get thrown back at you. It's a common and recommended thing to do on any table-saw rip-fence. It's usually done by slightly angling the entire fence. Jim's way assures precise positioning of the stock on the way into the blade. By the half-way mark, the cut is done.