Glen McGuire

I was quite ready to do some easy stuff after those dang shields, so I hit the oars and rowing benches. The oars are made from .5mm brass rods. I cut 30 of them into 5/8” lengths and smashed the ends down with some pliers for the paddles. Then I painted them a shade of brown. I drilled holes for the oars in the hull between each shield at a downward angle so the oars will point towards the water. I won’t install the oars into the hull until I get my water in the bottle and see how much room I have to work with (i.e. how far to let them stick out towards the water). Next up were the rowing benches. I took a 1mm x 1mm walnut strip, cut it into 3/16” long pieces, beveled one edge to match the curving angle of the gunwale, and glued into place. I also added the mast step. It is glued to one half of the hull and overlaps the other. Finally, I added epoxy resin water to the bottle. It looks like I got sloppy and drizzled resin in the neck of the bottle. For once, however, that was on purpose. Since the bottle will be tilted a bit towards the Kraken’s mouth (as if he’s trying to drink the ship out of the bottle) I thought it would look better to have a little water in the neck. It will take a couple of days for the resin to dry, so now I will begin work on the mast, yard, and sail.

Congratulations on a great project, Bob! And really nice work on making those repairs inside the bottle, which is not the easiest thing to do! What a fantastic keepsake for your niece!

That small building looks fantastic, Grant. The split in the board and the uneven ends on the double doors are very nice touches. Were those spelled out in the instructions or did you do some artistic kit bashing?

Thank you, Ron!

Very nice work, @modeller_masa!! Looks like you figured out a rigging plan that will work. It also looks like you have 3 pull threads, which is interesting. I only had 2 when I did mine. Here's what my Hannah rigging looked like.

And BTW, I like how Marvin the Martian shows up every now and then to inspect your work! He looks very demanding.

You are right again, Steven. I quickly realized the difficulty you describe after doing a few practice punches. So I took a hi-tech approach and used a sharpie to mark to mark the tip of the punch at 0, 90, 180, and 270 degrees to line up with my crosses. Once I did that it was a breeze!

Rapidly Ageing Agent of Shield is more like it after this ordeal!

Looks great - especially the sewing job on the sails! Your first mate deserves a promotion! Regarding the water, please avoid my Hannah build log for ideas. You do NOT want to try what I tried. Epic fail. My preference now is epoxy resin for the water's base with a touch of acrylic paint dabbed on top (after the epoxy dries) for texture. If you look at page 5 of my build log for the Independence (link in my signature below) you can see some pictures of what I do with the resin and acrylic paint. The resin also works well for just a thin layer of water. See my build log for Zheng He's Treasure Fleet for an example. My bottle for that build had 3 bulbs and the resin was a different thickness in each, and super thin between 2 of the bulbs.

That sounds like another great idea, Mike! I could find several uses for those.

First of all, a big thank you to @Ian_Grant, @Knocklouder, @Louie da fly, @Landlubber Mike, @Roger Pellett, @Keith Black, @gjdale, @mtaylor for all of your comments and suggestions on my shield manufacturing process. Since I was so far down the path, I was committed to finishing the shields up by cutting off the nail heads with my Dremel and then deburring. As predicted, lots of curse words followed - but not for a reason I anticipated! The good news was that the Dremel did not fling nail heads hither and yon. The bad news was that cutting off the heads generated so much heat it bubbled the paint right off. So much for all my hours of careful artwork! 😠 😠😠 and #@$%#!! x 100. Back to the drawing board and a review of everyone’s suggestions. The one that really grabbed my attention was the hole punch suggested by Landlubber Mike. It made me remember that I had an adjustable leather punch that I’d bought probably 30 years ago to make a leather wrap for a set of longhorns I got in San Antonio. Based on Mike and Roger's suggestions, I thought the leather punch might work on some thin (1/64”) maple veneer that I’ve got. I tried it and it punched out perfect little circles the perfect size! Using the maple veneer also provided several advantages over the nail heads. First, I could now make the shields out of wood, like the original Viking shields. I do prefer to make as many part out of original-type material as possible. Also, with a nice flat sheet of veneer, I figured I could use pinstriping tape to paint the thin lines for the crosses rather than gluing on bulky thread. Second, I could now make a real boss for the center of the shield rather than just painting a black dot on top of the thread as I had done before. My tiny brass nails were a good size for the boss. Third, the thin veneer should be easier to glue to the ship’s gunwales. So even though I had to pitch all my previous work in the trash and start all over, I was confident this process would be easier and produce better looking, more authentic shields. For the process, I swabbed paint for the 5 shield colors on the veneer. After it dried, I laid out the pinstriping tape and painted the crosses. Next was drilling holes for the brass nail bosses. The brass nail heads were a bit taller than I wanted, so I filed them down and squared them off just a tad. Then I used the leather punch and cut out all the shields. For the green and blue shields, I added the extra thin lines with super thin fly-tying thread. It’s so thin, it’s almost indistinguishable from paint to the normal eye. The last step before attaching to the ship was cutting off the brass nail shanks flush. The pictures below illustrate the main steps of the process. And here’s the new shields mounted on the 2 halves of the hull.

Love the barnacles! Those minor details are one of the things that set your work apart. BTW, I'm having new shingles put on my house today. I hope my roofers do as good a job as you did with the shingles on this building!

I've been using cuticle trimmers to flush cut thread but they don't work on metal. I need to get a jeweler's flush cutter. Keith, great walk-thru of your ratline process. As with the rest of your build, very clean and crisp. Beautiful work!

Probably! But unfortunately I did not think of that. ☹️ If I end up flinging my painted shields all over the garage this week, I may try that. Wouldn't be the first time I started something completely over!

Het Steven, I actually considered that but could not figure out a way to hold the tiny, flat head secure enough for me to decorate it. No easy answer! I've already spent hours decorating the shields so I just gotta put my head down and git r done!

That is a very insightful question, Ian. The answer is yes, but it ain’t easy. I did a practice run on a spare, using a sideways mounted Dremel and cutoff wheel. The first challenge was getting the nail head completely off without the spinning Dremel flinging it into the far reaches of my garage never to be found again. The 2nd challenge was getting the back of the shield deburred so it will lie smooth against the gunwale. With 30 of these things, it’s gonna be a long and tedious process. I predict lots of curse words to follow.

I think I do these build logs just so I can see where y’all will take the conversation. Would never have guessed Monty Python, but here we are thanks to Mark! Trying to get the thought of canoes out of my mind, it’s on to another iconic feature of Viking longships – the colorful shields mounted on the gunwale. I searched around and found a shield I liked, which was a yellow background with a red cross (1st pic). The 2nd pic is an idea of the ship's look with all shields in place. For my shields, I found a batch of small nails in the garage that I thought would work. They are ¾” long with a head that is 1/8” diameter. So I painted all the nail heads yellow. While waiting for them to dry, an annoying friend came over and told me it was boring to make all the shields the same color and the same design. I call her annoying because, of course, she was right. Sigh. We did some searching and sure enough, we found few examples of Viking longships with uniform shields, and they were indeed boring. Ugh. More confirmation she was right (at least I was smart enough not to argue with her). So long story short, we picked 5 different colors and decided on some simple designs that I thought I could pull off on a 1/8” canvas. Here’s the artist’s rendition of what it will hopefully look like. After scraping the yellow paint off my previously painted nail heads and repainting them, the real fun began. How to get the lines for the crosses drawn on each shield. First, I tried dipping thread in paint and laying it across the nail head. Epic fail. The thread made nice straight lines but I could not get uniform thickness. Next, I tried painting the lines with a fine tip brush. The results were like Steven, a.k.a. @Louie da fly, described Fosters Lager – ghastly. So I took a page from my previous Morgan build where I glued on white thread for pinstriping. The results were passable I think, at least from a distance anyway. Here’s the array of 15 shields for the port side of the ship.

Insane for you and entertaining for the rest of us! Keep up the great work, Bob!!

You are off to a great start, Bob!! And now I see clearly that you have the true palindrome Hannah on the transom!

Wonderful work on both ships, Bob. I love the clamshell nameplates. Very creative!!

I did have to google that one, Mark. Funny and right on the money!!!

Congrats on the accomplishment, Ian! That gives you more cuss words in the bank that you can use later! What are you using for the ply skin and how thick is it?

Hmmmmm. That's a very interesting idea. I might be able to solder a couple of small bits of wire to the middle of the eye pin's shaft where they could act as sort of an axle which would allow me to lay it down and then flip it back up. I'm gonna play around with that. Thanks for the suggestion, Keith.

I agree, Ian. The body of the bottle is not wide enough for me to to flip the ship around once it's inside, so attaching the curlique thingy to the sternpost will have to occur at the very back of the bottle. Fun awaits!!

That is so awesome! What a great gift and keepsake this will be for your niece. The first SIB I did from scratch I chose the Charles W Morgan because my friend that gave me the bottle was named Morgan. But I was selfish and kept the project for myself after I finished it rather than giving it to her! I am glad you are doing a build log as you go. I'm really looking forward to watching your work, Bob!