Glen McGuire

I’m getting a little out of order here but I keep thinking about how I’m going to do the rails that go around the ship and on top of the chart room.  I think the rails are a distinctive feature and I want to do a decent job on them.  

My soldering iron broke, so while waiting for a new one to arrive (does anyone ever go to the store anymore?) I tried something a bit different.  I’ve got a bunch of leftover .5mm ball bearings that I used for cannonballs on the Hannah.  So I wondered how they would look as posts for the rail.  I did a little test run on the railing around the chart room just gluing them to the thin music wire.  What do you think?  
 

Next were the foremast yards.  Pretty basic stuff here.  I used 3 toothpicks and put them on the drill-lathe to taper them down to size.

It was a dreary weather weekend in Austin so that meant plenty of time to work on the ship.  Trying to figure out what to do next, I decided on the masts.  I’m using wooden handles from long q-tips which are a bit thicker than regular toothpicks.  I had 3 leftover tiny eyebolts from the Amati Hannah kit and used them as anchors for securing the upper end of the lower shrouds just below the tops.

When I did the Morgan last time, I made the mistake of stepping the masts before installing the upper shrouds and ratlines.  Not this time!  Much easier doing it on the bench.  The ratlines are fly fishing thread (Uni-thread 8/0 72D) glued onto the shrouds with Aleene’s fabric glue, then ends clipped close with cuticle clippers.
 

Really impressive, Grant.  I love your creative solution for the iron rings.  Well done.    

And, all the fittings in place.  My deck is pretty crowded but apparently nothing like the real Aurora when it left Australia loaded with all the gear for the expedition.  That included 38 dogs, radio masts, timbers and boards to build shelters, an airplane-tractor contraption, sledges, food, fuel and other misc equipment.  

As the ship left port, Mawson commented, “The piles of loose gear presented an indescribable scene of chaos.  The deck was so encumbered that only at rare times was it visible.”

That's actually a pretty good description of my kitchen table when I'm working on one of these ships.

On 1/4/2022 at 7:09 PM, Keith Black said:

the dreaded tweezer releaser

Another term added to my ship building vocabulary!

Completed the deck fittings.  Left to right:  companion way #1, vent pipes, wheel #1 (small eye bolt), bollards (heads of brass nails), sky lights, engine room with yellow vent pipes and smokestack, chart room, wheel #2, small winch, stairs to chart room, main hatch, galley, whale boats with supports and davits, fore hatch, companion way #2, large winch, stairs to forecastle, forecastle hatch, more vent pipes, capstan (leftover belay pin from CSS Alabama kit), and anchors.

Thank you, Keith and Pat.  The worst part was that I kept dropping the little parts of the anchor on the floor and then I could not find them.  I can't tell you how much time I wasted searching!  I finally ended up dragging a magnet over the floor each time I dropped a piece to find it.  😵   

Time for the deck fittings.  First up is the anchors.  For the Morgan ship last time, I made anchors by filing down leftover photo-etch sprues.  They came out ok I guess, but I wanted to try and do better this time.  

I thought music wire would be good for anchors at this size.  Unfortunately, that requires soldering and I’ve never been good at it.  The only thing I’ve really tried to solder before were copper wires to fix electronic things and those always came out ugly.  So, I’ve been taking some soldering classes at Youtube U.   

The music wire is the smallest diameter I could find at Hobby Lobby - .015”.  The challenge was holding the tiny pieces in the exact position while applying the solder.  I ended up finding yet another use for duct tape as you can see in the first pic.       
 

The deck has 3 levels – a tall forecastle, a lower main deck, and an extended, medium height deck in the stern.  The stern deck seems too long to call it a poop deck so I’m not sure what the proper name for it would be.  I also added the bowsprit and knee and then sanded everything down.
 

Mawson’s book “The Home of the Blizzard” has some good information about the Aurora including a nice cross-section and deck plan below.  It also has an interesting description of why they chose a wooden vessel rather than a steel one.  

“The construction of wood imparts a certain elasticity which is of great advantage in easing the shock of impacts with floating ice.  The ordinary steel ship would be ripped on its first contact with the ice.  Another device to obviate the shock and assist in foraging through the pack-ice is to have a cut-away bow.  Thus, instead of presenting to the ice a vertical face, which would immediately arrest the ship and possible cause damage on account of the sudden stress of the blow, a sloping, over-hanging bow is adopted.  This arrangement enables the bow to rise over the impediment, with a gradual slackening of speed.  The immense weight put upon the ice crushes it and the ship settles down, moving ahead and gathering speed to meet the next obstacle.”

“The hull was made of stout oak planks, sheathed with greenheart and lined with fir.  The bow, fashioned on cut-away lines, was a mass of solid wood, armoured with steel plates.  The heavy side frames were braced and stiffened by two tiers of horizontal oak beams.”

For my Aurora, I’m using laminated strips of basswood rather than oak, greenheart, and fir!  I’m also using coffee stirrers for bulwarks.  
 

Thanks, Keith.  I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with the stovepipe, the engine room, and the vent pipes.  That deck looks awful busy in the pictures.  And now my son told me I must have smoke coming out of the stovepipe.  I thanked him for adding more complexity to something that's probably already over my head! 

But I've gotta get the hull built before I start worrying too much about the deck fittings.

Thank you, Mike!  Hope you and your family had a great Christmas!

Thank you, Grant!

Back to work after a nice Christmas break.  For the base, I did not want the sledge to just sit on a block of wood, I wanted it resting on snow/ice.  One of the difficulties the explorers encountered in Antarctica was that the terrain was not smooth.  It was mostly sastrugi, which is hard, wind-blown ridges of snow and ice.  See 1st pic below.  

So I did my best to give the base a flavor of sastrugi.  I used acrylic paint (consistency of cake icing), smoothed it on the base with a spatula, drew ridges in it with a spoon, then sprinkled white sand on top to give it a rougher looking surface texture.  

OK.  The display is complete and it’s finally time to start building the ship!    
 

Beautiful work, Grant.  Curious as to what you did with all those cool reindeer you made earlier?

Merry Christmas and best wishes to everyone for a wonderful holiday season!  It's been a real blessing to have discovered this forum and be able to learn so much from so many amazing people!  

Thanks, Keith.  I know you've got a ton of experience with these steam and sail ships so if you see me screwing something up, be sure and let me know!

@mtaylor Thanks for following along, Mark.  How are you doing?

And here's the finished sledge with the exception of the pull ropes on each end.  I've got to order some 1.5mm cordage for that.  Everything in my small stockpile of leftovers is either too fat or too thin for what I need.  

Continuing with the finer details of the sledge…The original looks like it has leather or rawhide wraps around each joint.  I cut up the palm of an old leather glove for my joint wraps.  The original has angled metal braces that support each cross slat as well as small metal pins that secure each support post to the runners.  I used the thinnest piano wire I’ve got for those.  The original also has 2 thin metal straps around each cross slat.  I used leftover photo-etched sprues and painted them a steel gray.  

I’ve decided that in my vocabulary, “artistic license” is just a fancy term for overcoming a screwup.  And the next step required some artistic license.  There’s lashing that holds the 2 long side rails to the cross slats and support posts.  I realized I should have drilled the lashing holes in the support posts before assembling the frame.  Unfortunately, I now had no room to drill the holes where they should be – facing front and back (see 1st pic).  So, the only thing I could do was drill holes from the side and come up with my own lashing loops.  Artistic license, right?     

Dang!  When I took the bamboo skewers out of the bending jig, the ends flared out a bit which put too much outward force on the runners.  Every time I tried to compensate by over-bending the skewers, they broke.  

Plan B.  I realized that since the whole curved part will be wrapped with cordage, it doesn’t matter what it’s made of.  And 12-gauge copper wire with insulation is the same diameter as my bamboo skewers.  So, I bent a piece of the copper wire into the curve and snipped off a bit of the insulation on each end.  Then I cut a couple of short, straight pieces of the skewers and drilled a shallow hole into each end where I could insert the uninsulated tip of the wire ends.  After gluing the 2 pieces together it’s a good fit.  And after wrapping, I think it worked out ok.

The bend on the runners came out nice and uniform.  It was a bit different than plank bending since there was no hull to shape it against and the bend needed to be the same on each end.  But the simple fact that there are only 2 instead of 50 means it was waaaaaay easier than the usual planking stage for a ship!  

For the framework, the challenge was trying to figure out how to clamp everything while the glue dried without deforming the bend in the runners.  Thank goodness for a garage full of miscellaneous junk!  In the end, I’m happy with how the basic frame turned out.
 

Well, while I work on trying to empty the bottle of rotgut, I’ve decided to do this project in reverse order and build the display first.  Here we go!

I know the name of this forum is Model Ship World and not Model Sledge World but I figured I log some of the work building the sledge.  

The sledge build appears pretty straightforward except for the leading edge which requires a sharp u-turn (first pic).  The 2nd pic shows the shaping of the runners and the leading edge.  The runners are basswood strips and the leading edge is a bamboo skewer.  The bamboo seems to bend a little easier that a regular dowel rod.  
 

Looks great, Keith.  You should post a closeup pic of the last yard that you say is the best one.  That would help people like me who are still learning.  

@Beakerboy123 Thanks for the tip!  In my ongoing process of learning, I ran across that tool well after I was done with the Alabama.  But I have now added a couple to my toolbox for future builds.  I have not tried it yet so I also appreciate the warning about keeping the line straight and not bending the copper.