AnobiumPunctatum

Thank you George and John.
 
Next I made the Gunwales. I traced around the hull to get the outside shape, cut that out and used a pair of compasses to get the inner line :
 

 
Then I made the Mast Step in two halves - one was glued to the keelson, the other to the mast. When the mast is raised the two halves come together :
 

 

 

 
Last job for today are two knees for the transom and the breasthook :
 

 

 

 
  Danny

The method of hinging the bottom of the mast presented a fairly unique problem. My solution was to enable the thwart to which the mast is clamped to turn. I had to deviate from correct practice and fit the mast to the fore end of the thwart. as there was no way the mast would clear the adjacent thwart when fully lowered with enough room to fit everything through the bottle neck.
 
I also glued a brace under the thwart for extra strength :
 

 

 
A length of 0.8mm brass wire was drilled and glued into one end of the thwart brace. Holes were drilled right through the risers, frames and external planking. The first wire was inserted into the hole on one side, and then the thwart was lowered into position and the second wire was fitted into the thwart brace from the outside :
 

 

 

 
In the pic above I was still experimenting with the raising of the mast. This was when I discovered that I'd need to reverse the direction of the thwart.
 
The hinge pins were cut off flush with the planking. These will be covered by a wale later on :
 

 
  Danny

......
 
                        Rekon54

The planking is looking really good

Your Symphony is a very nice little model. Well done

Your Symphony is a very nice little model. Well done

Your Symphony is a very nice little model. Well done

The planking is looking really good

The planking is looking really good

At the August SMSNJ meeting I had the opportunity to compare my Cheerful with Chuck's. It was obvious that I had made a few mistakes making it difficult to achieve the overall look at the stern that I was striving for. 
 
This is what the square tuck was going to look like if I continued on. There is only enough room for four 3/16" filler pieces when there should be room for five. This was caused by my over fairing the last two bulkheads by a considerable amount. The black lines indicate what the correct shape should have been as pointed out by Chuck.
 

 
I thought about leaving things the way they were and I might have, if it were not for the fact that the fashion pieces were misshapen as well. I made three attempts at these but never got the consistent width that I was hoping for. Bothered by all of this I decided to try and fix these mistakes if possible.
 
This photo shows most of the planks and the two fashion pieces removed. I could have left a few more planks in place but I wanted to correct for some gaps left during the first attempt.
 

 
1/16" shims were added to the last two bulkheads and faired.
 

 
The planking has been completed for the second time. After gluing and clamping, I used a flashlight shining from inside the hull in order to show the tiniest gap that might have existed between the planks.  Any gaps were corrected by tightening the clamps a bit more.
 

 
In order to get the proper shape for the fashion pieces, I had to cut back the upper half of the wales about a 1/16". This allowed the fashion pieces to rise up slightly thus giving more width to the middle section. The process was tedious as I didn't want to damage any of the surrounding planking.
 

 
After all the fixes were completed I was able to complete the square tuck. The five filler pieces are actually .196" wide instead of 3/16".
 

I have started the capstan.  The diameter of the capstan on the Atalanta plans (as well as the Fly) is larger than shown in TFFM Vol 2, which represents Pegasus.  I redrew the capstan to reflect this.  The first thing I did was look at Greg's pictures in TFFM Vol 3.  Next, I re-read Dan's tutorial for Vulture's capstan.  Finally, I put wood to machine.  
 
After several years of threatening, I finally took the plunge and bought a Sherline mill.  I already own their lathe and so saved some money by using the motor from the lathe.  It takes less than two minutes to swap it out and that includes walking from one end of the house (where I have the lathe in my workshop) to where I set up the mill (better natural lighting this time of year).  I used English boxwood for the barrel and whelps to provide a subtle color contrast between the capstan and the framing.  The barrel wood has a few checks in it but the flaws will be hidden under the whelps.  The whelps are of good clear wood.
 
I took a square piece of boxwood and rounded it down to eight sides, like one would do for a mast.  I do not own a 4-jaw chuck and this made holding the wood blank easier in the 3-jaw chuck.  In the lathe, I turned the blank to the proper dimensions. I made all three sections longer than necessary to make sure there was sufficient length for final assembly.  
 

 
Now I was able to play with the new toy!  The upper barrel is divided into 12 sections for the 6 whelps and the lower barrel is divided into 10 sections for 5 whelps.  I mounted the blank onto a rotary table so that all of the sections could be milled to the same width.  The flats were milled while supporting the end of the blank to prevent downward deflection.  The upper and lower sections were then cut away from the central round section.
 

 

 

 

 
The next things to make were the whelps.  The upper and lower whelps are different in shape and width.  I traced the outline onto the end of a piece of boxwood, orienting the whelp along the grain. The blank was mounted into the vise, which was attached to a tilt table. The first one took over an hour (but half of that time was figuring out the correct setup); the second one took 30 minutes.  They will be sliced off the loaf when I am ready to install them.
 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 

Both Pegasus and Confederacy arrived at the new home without damage, Phew!
Movers did a great job of the packing.
Now to start building a new workshop.
 
Ben

I have finished installing the bulwark planks on the inner and outer side of the hull.  The outer hull above the wales still needs to be sanded smooth and treenails will need to be installed on the gun deck and outer hull planks above the wales.  Once that is done, I will move on to finishing up the guns and making all of the deck furniture.  I plan to use walnut for the deck furniture.
 
It may be a few weeks until I get work on it again due to a surgery that is scheduled for Tues on my left wrist; but I hope to be back at it in about 2-3 weeks. 
 
On to the good stuff, here are some pictures for your viewing pleasure.  I snapped a few with the guns placed on the deck to get an idea of how it will look. 
 
Enjoy......
 

Build log part 20
 
 
putting the hull to the stand first time and marking / checking the waterline
 
 
Nils
 

 
due to the length a 3-pedestal stand is adequate
 
 

 
the brass pedestals are from candle holders, drilled with 4 mm centerholes  for the three M4 spindles that are anchored securely in the ship`s "backbone"
 
 

 
the waterline has been marked with a soft pencil, all around
 
 

 
 

 

Congrats Dan for both, for the honor and for finishing a beautyful model

Congrats Dan for both, for the honor and for finishing a beautyful model

How did you know that Mark??? EDIT - ah, I just found the post that Grant put up earlier. Thanks Mark and Grant
 
Yep, Vulture took out the Members Choice trophy, their equivalent to "Best in Show" at the Canberra Model Shipwright's Society Show last weekend. She also came 2nd in People's Choice.
 
I'm pretty chuffed :
 

 
I'm taking it to the Mid North Coast Maritime Museum at Port Macquarie later on today after I mount the Binnacle.
 
  Danny

Binnacle
 
When I said I was finished, not quite. The Binnacle isn't a part of the main section of TFFM, it's hidden away in the Appendix. Easy to miss .
 
I knocked it up in a couple of hours. No finish has been applied yet :
 

 

 

 

 
  Danny

Hello all,
 
Here is another update with the progress over the last couple of weeks.
Alexandru
 

Hello,
 
without much words, the knees are ready. It wasn't so bad as I first thought. Because I had not to dive so deep into the hull. From that point of view were the knees at the gun and upper gun deck the most worse things I had to do.  
 

 

 

 
The next thing to do is to install the cannons with all there tackle.  
 
Regards,
Siggi

After several hours of careful sanding, I managed to complete the fairing of the bulkheads and move on to installing the gun port sills.
First, seen here, using a temporary batten to mark the smooth alignment of the sills on both sides....

Then carefully cutting and fitting the sills and uprights according to the plan sheets with exactly 17/32nd openings.


Also note that all gun port sills have been faired perfectly flush with the fairing of the bulkheads.
 

Well, I've returned from the wild and will eventually get back to modelling. First, though, some relevant photos from the Bertrand museum and elsewhere.
 
A few introductory notes on the museum. As the Bertrand was discovered, and excavated, within DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge, it became the property of the US Fish & Wildlife Service. Thus they built the museum as an add-on to a visitor's center otherwise dedicated to the refuge. It's a nice museum, but not one staffed by "steamboat people", per se. It's just a wing of the larger center. We had very little time there, even less than I had intended, because of the very long drive that day (we had to make it from central Missouri to western Nebraska before dark).
 

 
A cute, if primitive, Bertrand model in the lobby. 
 


 
One of the museum's centerpieces, a large-scale model of Bertrand; me for scale. This is a beautiful model, with complete interior, but in several places it departs rather severely from the archaeological drawings of the boat. The most blatant difference is the relationship between the main deck and the boiler deck just above. In the drawings, and the accompanying documentation, it's concluded that Bertrand's boiler deck extended as far as the width of the main deck and was supported by vertical stanchions between the two, on the very outer edge of the decks. On the model, the stanchions are set well inboard, with a set of curved supports ducked in under the boiler deck. I don't know why the discrepancy exists, since the model was almost certainly made after the excavation (no information was provided).
 

 
A painting of the Bertrand, by the same artist/illustrator who drew the graphic reconstructions included in the archaeology reports I'm working from. Note that he portrays the stanchions correctly, as vertical supports at the very outer edge of both decks. EDIT: I forgot to note that the cute, primitive model shown above DOES get the stanchions right.
 

 
A nice touch; one wall of the gallery is a full-size outline of Bertrand's aft third (roughly), with an actual paddlewheel hub mounted within. Me for scale. 
 

 
The gallery includes a huge collection of artifacts salvaged from the wreck, which are a day's worth of contemplation for a history buff. Unfortunately, as you can see by the photos above, the lighting is kept very low for preservation reasons, making photography a real, well, hassle. This shot gives some sense of the gallery's scale. In the foreground are various munitions from the wreck, which I thought might be of interest to some of you. For example, several racks of howitzer shells and a stand of .50 caliber Maynard cartridges. One assumes these were part of consignments for various Army posts on the frontier.
 

 
The stretch of river on which the Bertrand sank is no longer part of the mainstem Missouri River, which changed its course quite regularly before being channelized and controlled by the US Army Corps of Engineers. The location is now part of a large oxbow lake, a former bend in the river now cut off by a straighter channel and left as a horseshoe-shaped lake. The site of Bertrand's sinking is on the opposite shore, about as far as you can see.
 

 
And here is the actual site, the pit left over from excavation now filled with water and overgrown with shrubbery. Bertrand is still down there; once the teams had recovered the cargo and documented the hull, they left her be. It's perhaps 100 yards in from the old channel, in what used to be a field, where it was left by an early shift in river channel. The active river now is maybe 1/2 mile away.
 
Finally, a few other images from the trip, most of which was spent hiking in Yellowstone and Grand Tetons National Parks. I could bore you all with lots of imagery of backcountry thermal features, wildlife, and geological eye candy, but will restrain myself to these two, whose relevance should be apparent:
 

 
This is Steamboat Point, in the Bighorn Mountains of north-central Wyoming. It's a nice basic climb of 800' vertical feet or so, giving a clear 360 view of the east slop of the Bighorns. 
 

 
And this is Steamboat Geyser. It erupts unpredictable and rarely, the last eruption being just over a year ago. Here it's just steaming in the cool, crisp,  morning air, but even so it reminds one of a boiler hissing away gently, awaiting the engineer's touch to build pressure once more.
 
Next up for my version of the Bertrand are the engines, for which more research and planning is needed. I also need to get everything else in life back under control after two weeks away. But I hope you all enjoy the images above.

It's allways fascinating to follow your logs. I've learned a lot fromin the past years. Thanks

Hello Dirk,

do not worry, I am not bored ...
 
Hello Joe, Carl and Mark
I am very pleased about your nice comments, thanks!

Here is a small update:

Hello Michel. I'm doing a 1 / 48.francoise
progress of the day