Glen McGuire

Work begins on the real waterfall. I bought some foam blocks for floral arrangements, glued a couple together, and cut them to fit my base. I affixed a couple of bamboo skewers to the base which will pierce the foam giving it some extra stability when I load it up with rocks. The next step was cutting the foam to the basic shape of the waterfall's wall. You can also see my large assortment of rocks to choose from as I build the wall. I started affixing rocks at the top with the rock heating/foam melting process I used for my test. Unfortunately, I got off to a rocky start (sorry about that 😁) with the very first piece. It was a bigger than my test pieces so I decided to use a propane torch instead of the butane torch I used for the test. Bad move! When I heated up the rock and placed it on top of the foam, it started sizzling and sinking really fast. I realized it was about to cause a mini China Syndrome and melt all the way thru my carefully shaped foam, so I grabbed it quickly and went back to the butane torch. More progress... And here's the face of the wall complete. At least for now anyway. It's got some ridges that are more noticeable in person than picture, but I'll let it sit overnight and take another look in the morning to see if I want to make them more prominent. I also tried to visualize the flow of the water down the rocks as I was piecing it together, but I found that's a lot harder than I thought. Hard to see the forest when you're working on each tree. So again, I need to step back, let my brain refocus, and look at it with fresh eyes. Viewing from the top, you can see I left 2 small channels on each side of the main channel in the middle. I might have a couple of small ribbons trickling down paths from there. Maybe.

Looking good, Ian. I think your color scheme will really bring it to life.

Great job, Phil! I really like the base. Nice presentation!

I think you are right, Ken. Penguins AND icicles in a Hawaiian waterfall? So much for global warming!! 😄 Happy New Year to you too, Keith!

You weren't kidding when you said quick! More like warp speed. Looks great, Phil!

Hey Javelin, are you talking about something like these circled below? Or can you find a picture of what you have in mind?

Thank you, KG! I appreciate your confidence and encouragement! You know, when you put it like that, it should be really hard for me to mess this one up, shouldn't it! 😃

Thanks, Bob. Always good to get confirmation that someone else sees the same thing I do! Thanks, Keith. Funny you say that. A friend was over yesterday and asked "why do you have a big rock on your kitchen counter?" 😃

I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas and got to spend a lot of time with family and friends. I've been watching a bunch of youtube videos trying to figure out how to approach the second half of this project, which is making the rock wall and waterfall. In between videos, I decided to go ahead and make the base so I could at least feel like I was getting something done. Nothing too elaborate. It's 14" wide by 9" deep with the front beveled for a nameplate. I added a 3/16" rim around the perimeter which will hold in the epoxy resin that makes up the waterfall pool. On to the rock wall. From the youtube videos, I got several ideas for how to make the wall, like stacking polystyrene and scoring with a knife, wadding up newspaper and covering with plaster of paris, making rock molds and casting rocks, or even buying plastic rocks and pushing them into modeling clay. I did some trial and error on a few of these methods which ended up being a lot more error than trial. I just could not get anything to look like I wanted. The video using cast rocks from rock molds seemed to give the best look for my purposes. I was about to pursue that route when I thought why not use real rocks instead of fake ones? There are places at my ranch that have these thin, flat reddish rocks with good texture (no idea what kind of rocks they actually are). So on my next trip out there, I gathered up a few handfuls to try them out. I decided to use some packing foam for the basic shape of my rock wall. I took a small piece of foam and a few rocks to test things out. As you can see, it was kind of like putting a puzzle together. But the next question was how to adhere to the rocks to the foam. Because some of the best looking rocks did not have a real flat or smooth surface, I did not think gluing them on would be very secure. So I decided to try something a little different - melting them on. I took a small butane torch, heated the back of the rock, then pressed it into the foam. This actually worked great because it allowed me to push rocks into the foam at different depths so I could make the outer surface as smooth or blocky as necessary. I tested the melting method on one of the rocks and it adhered to the foam quite securely. So I continued with melting the rest of the rocks onto my test piece. Next, I mixed up a small amount of plaster and filled in the gaps. After that, I put a thin layer of gesso over the whole thing to seal it for painting. And finally, I mixed up some gray and white paint with plenty of water to make a thin wash. I covered the rocks with the wash, then added some darker grays in places for shading. Here's how the final test piece came out. The second pic is the basic color and rock texture I was trying to match. I think my coloring is not too bad. But I think I need to have a few more sharp edges on areas of the wall to give it more of a blocky look like in the picture. For a test run, however, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Clever solution for the spears and polearms. Well done!

Fantastic work, Keith. Like everything else on this build, your gaff and lift rigging is very clean and crisp.

I believe I am the guilty party that asked to see your ship in a bottle (my Oseberg/Kraken build log)! I'm glad you were able to find it and share pictures. Plus, I think you did a marvelous job for a first exercise. Quite impressive! Hope you don't wait too long to make a new version. And Merry Christmas to you and family as well!

Hey Greg, I'm not sure what you have in mind here. Can you elaborate on your suggestion?

Wonderful work on those Christmas ornaments!! Also, IMHO your Ems Punt would look really good inside a bottle!! Something to think about? Maybe? 😀

@Boccherini, @BANYAN, @Keith Black, @GrandpaPhil, @Knocklouder - Thanks for the Christmas greetings! Merry Christmas to all of y'all and your families and everyone else in this amazing MSW community!

That's a Christmas present for all of us, Keith!!!

Your job on the tiller is a killer and a thriller!! Well done! Hope those kids are taking good care of you! Merry Christmas to all!!

I like your choice of base, Javelin. Very unique and the colors work well with the build.

Hang in there with all those sick kids and take care of yourself, Bob!! And have a Merry Christmas too! No white Christmas here in central Texas, maybe a suntan!

Well Bob, there are definitely no penguins in Hawaii so I guess you are right! Here they come 🐔🐔🐔!! That little penguin did sneak in! But according to Bob, he's apparently out of a job and I've got to find some chickens. Thank you, Pat. I agree with you about the hull. It was definitely a challenge for me and I have no idea what the next one might be! Thank you, Keith!! Thank you, Mark!

@Tomculb Hey Tom! Thank you for reviewing my work (so far) and for your comments. What an interesting story about your parents and your time in Hawaii! Thank you so much for sharing. As I did my research and learned more about the culture surrounding these ocean voyagers, I was fascinated at how the vessels were held in such high esteem by native Hawaiians as well as those like you and your parents who spent part of their lives on the islands and understood the history. I have been doing my best to do justice to this special reverence, which is one reason I tried to make my wa'a kualua out of as many native Hawaiian materials as possible. I absolutely love that model that your father found and you inherited. What a lovely tribute to him to have that model sit close by while you work on your models. As for sailing out on a Hobie to welcome the Hokulea on her return from her maiden voyage. Whoa!! What a cool thing to do!! While I did not try to build a copy of the Hokulea, I did use her plans as a baseline for some of my boat (like the relative hull and mast dimensions). She is an amazing vessel with an amazing story. I'm really glad you found this build log and shared your story!

Thank you very much, Noel!!!

Here’s how the whole operation transpired: Step 1 – Insert the hull assembly. I made some red Sharpie markings on the bottle to help me figure out where to dab the epoxy on the water. Then I slid the hull assembly inside, straightened it out, and lined it up on top of the epoxy. The main concern was getting the 2 hulls squarely aligned. No real difficulty encountered with this step. Step 2 – Add the deck. After the step 1 epoxy was set and the hull assembly securely in place, I put a touch of epoxy on the hull assembly’s connecting ribs and dropped the deck on top. Very easy. Step 3 – Insert the 2 mast/sail assemblies and drop them in their respective mast steps. This is where things got a bit tricky because of a small blunder. Since my original plan was to insert the deck and masts as 1 piece, I had put a hinge near the bottom of each mast. And that became problematic. I got the aft mast/sail inside the bottle ok. But when I tried to insert the base of the mast into its mast step hole, the hinge kept folding on me. Once folded, the angle made it dang near impossible to get enough leverage to push it down firmly into the hole. At one point, I even considered trying to pull the mast/sail back out of the bottle, but fortunately I came to my senses and abandoned that dodo idea. After maybe 45 minutes of frustration, I finally got that dang thing in place. Now it was a matter of orienting the mast/sail properly and securing it in place. I angled the sail forward at maybe 50 degrees (similar to some of the paintings), made sure the mast was vertical, then worked up a brass wire jig to hold the mast/sail in place while the epoxy dried. The last step was tying off the rigging. My standing rigging consisted of 2 shrouds on each side of each mast. The running rigging was simply a line on the starboard side attached to a loop of thread tied to the curved spar. All lines were tied off to the small spindles or studs protruding along the gunwale. This was a tedious process, but not very difficult. The pic below shows the aft mast/sail with all the rigging tied off and threads cut. Here’s the completed wa’a kualua fully assembled inside its new home. And with that, the easy part of this project is over. Now it’s time to figure out how to build a Hawaiian waterfall. YIKES!!

I just added another word added to my Aussie vocab – “gobsmacked” Thank you, @Louie da fly! Time for what I expected to be a relatively easy insertion process with my main concern being whether or not the pineapple leaves for sails would survive undamaged. My plan was to insert the hull assembly and glue in place. Then attach both masts/sails to the deck and insert the deck/mast/sail assembly as a single piece. I made a couple of practice runs with a dry-fitted deck/mast/sail assembly. It was tight and would require me to scrunch up the pineapple leaves more than I was comfortable doing. So I decided it would be safer to insert the deck by itself into the bottle, then add the mast/sails afterwards. So a 3-step insertion process – hull assembly, deck, and mast/sail assembly. I’ve got pictures and descriptions of the process in the next post. But if you want to see videos of how the sausage was made, here’s a couple of short ones. The first is about 5 minutes and covers the hull, deck and mast/sail installation. The second is about 10 minutes and covers the rigging. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldEVtqMFj_k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HdLKyqNNMo

Did you say auditions for a new figurehead??? You knew this was coming...