Glen McGuire
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Everything posted by Glen McGuire
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Hey Grant - if you drink enough of that $8 brandy, you will see more penguins than you can count! -
The project is complete! For all of you that have been following along, I cannot thank you enough for the likes, encouragement, comments, ideas, and suggestions along the way. I feel like each one of you had a hand in this effort and I can guarantee you it would not have come out near as well without your help.
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Hey Dan - thanks for the idea about hairspray and rope coils. I'm gonna keep that bottle of Paul Mitchell and hope my friend forgets she loaned it to me! Regarding the putty and sea, I actually used "Easy Cast - Clear Casting Epoxy" for the sea. I did not notice any fogging as it degassed. After dripping the epoxy in the bottle, I let it sit on a table in a wide open room with a ceiling fan running so it had plenty of ventilation for drying. Not sure if that helped keep the bottle from fogging or I just got lucky! For the ice, @Joe100 made an earlier comment about his use of Deluxe Materials plastic putty for ice. I did not have any putty handy, but I did have some white modeling clay. His putty idea made me think of trying the clay. I rolled it out thin, painted it with a mix of acrylic white and gloss gel medium (for a bit of shine), and cut it up into a bunch of random, odd shaped pieces.
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Success!!! Only a few minor snags (so to speak) when pulling all the strings and raising everything up. My last SIB (Charles W Morgan) had 5 pull strings. This one had 12 so it was a very careful process. But all went well. The thing I struggle with most is cutting the strings at the bowsprit after I've got everything up and in place. I need to improve my technique or tools or both there. The finish line is in sight!
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The Aurora is in the bottle! But I cannot say that the ship has fully launched until the masts and smokestack are successfully raised and everything in its proper place. So the bubbly is still on ice for a little while longer. This time, there was no stomach-turning "pop" or other ominous noises when I did the big push. In fact, I'm a little nervous because it went sooooo easy. I mean it just slid right in with relatively little resistance, much smoother than the practice pushes I had done. I think maybe I did just a bit better at getting everything to lie flat for the real push. We will see tomorrow when I start yanking on all the strings. If it doesn't work out, I will be adopting the same nickname as the captain of the Aurora - John King "Gloomy" Davis. On another note, a dear friend of mine had a brilliant last-minute idea. I was telling her about my anxiety with the frail smoke. She suggested using hairspray on the yarn to give it strength and keep it from fraying further. She gave me a little spritzer bottle of Paul Mitchell Freeze and Shine Super Spray to use. Of course I'll find out for sure tomorrow, but I believe was a great solution. Anyone else have hairspray in their toolbox? Hard to see it in this picture, but I also added some white in the ship's wake for some slushy, prop churn.
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OK. Despite shaky hands from thinking about polar bears and penguins, I managed to get all of the pack ice in place. And BTW, thanks to @Joe100 for the idea of using putty for the ice. I will let things sit for a day to make sure everything is set. Then we're gonna see if this whole thing will work or not. Moment of truth coming up!
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At 1/500, I think if I glue a couple pieces of salt and pepper together it will look more like a penguin than anything I could carve!
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OMG!!! NOOOOOO!!! OK. First of all, the ship is in Antarctica so thankfully there are no polar bears. There are mainly penguins. And second of all, uh.....crap! 🐧
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Hey Roger - Thanks for the suggestion. I will consider that after I see how things look when all the chunks of ice are in place. Quick in-progress update. I've begun putting the ice chunks in place...very carefully and very slowly! So far I've only dropped 1 by accident inside the bottle. I got lucky and it landed glue side up so was able to retrieve it for another try! Only about 50 more pieces to go!
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Dang, Mark. Very sorry to hear that. I hope that you can quickly get new glasses and that they fix things for you. I look forward to you being able to resume this cool build.
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Keith - Hmmmmm. I'm with Mark, I think that vacuum tool could have a lot of uses for a lot of things including SIBs. Hmmmmmm again.
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Keith - I appreciate the questions because they are the same ones I'm trying to answer as this thing moves along! I come up with these ideas of how I want things to look but don't really have any idea how to do it until it's time. That's the challenge being a newbie modeler trying to do this from scratch. I have no instructions or plan!! But that's also what makes this so much fun! So here's what I'm thinking - first, take a small piece of wood that's the size of the ship's bottom and place it where I want the ship to go. Next, dab some 30 minute epoxy on the bottom of each ice piece and place them inside the bottle around the piece of wood. After all the ice is in place and the epoxy dry, remove the wood and replace with the ship. After reading you question, I went and did a short test since I had not actually tried the long tweezer/ice idea yet. It went ok as you can see in the pic below. It's going to be tedious with so many ice pieces, but should work. I may err on the side of somewhat bigger pieces just so I don't have so many to deal with. Plus, those long tweezers are pretty large - they handle larger things better than smaller ones. I will do some testing with different size pieces and then make a final decision on what to do.
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Thanks, Mike and Keith! Keith, I hear you about the slush but I think it's beyond my capabilities. It's going to be hard enough for me to get those pieces in their proper place by dropping them in with long tweezers. I'm definitely going to do some unglued, practice drops! Below is kind of what I have in mind. Probably a little more space between the pieces of ice and no slushy stuff in between. And yes, almost time for the big push. Anxious moments ahead!!! 😳
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It takes 72 hours for max hardening of the resin. In the meantime, I decided to jump ahead and work on the very last step of the whole project - how to secure the bottle to the sledge. The Museum Discovery Centre of Sydney, Australia has one of the sledges from Mawson’s Australiasian Antarctic expedition. On their website they have a picture of the sledge with a bunch of straps which they describe as follows, “Leather straps are wound around the top rails. These have holes and buckles and were used to secure the load while in transit. The leather appears to be vegetable-tanned cowhide.” I decided to try and secure my bottle to the sledge in the same manner. I found some strips of deerskin leather that I thought would work well for the strap. For the buckles, I bent some .025” music wire into a rough square and soldered the joint for the frame. For the prong, I used some soft brass wire of the same diameter so I could attach by twisting the end around the frame. Looks like this will work ok.
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I finished up my YouTube U classes on epoxy resin and did a test run in a red solo cup. I also rolled out a small piece of white modeling clay and cut it into a few pieces for broken pack ice. When the test resin was dry, I popped it out of the cup and placed the ice and ship on top to see what kind of look I had. The ice looks a little thick and maybe the pieces are too large, but overall I think I’m on track. So I went ahead and poured the resin into the bottle for real and set it aside.
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Hey Mark, in my short modeling career, I've lost track of how many things I've messed up, glued wrong, pried off, cleaned up, re-glued, etc. I learned early on that you cannot do this hobby without being creative and constantly solving problems to get past obstacles. This is just another one for you to conquer. You got this!!! And I predict that when you are done, the only people that will ever know you messed up are those of us on this thread!
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The railings continued to give me fits but I finally got it worked out. The tiny RJ45 wire and other small strands of copper did not work. Just too flimsy. So I went back to the .015” music wire. I tried cutting a straight piece for the rail and soldering all the stanchions to it. Fail. If I used enough solder to make the joints strong, the joints looked fat and wrong. If I used a tiny bit of solder for a clean-looking joint, it was too weak to hold when inserted into the pre-drilled holes. So the solution I came up with was to take a straight piece of music wire for the rail and bend down the ends for the front and back stanchions. I glued it in place and it was solid. I then inserted all the in-between stanchions with a touch of CA glue on their tops. Certainly not perfect, but as good as I can do. As Dirty Harry said, a man’s got to know his limitations. As for the smoke, I did one last test smash and ¾ insertion with the smoke in place. The railings were fine and the smoke survived. It will still be a delicate operation to avoid distorting the smoke when raising the smoke stack and masts, but I believe that will be far easier than trying to insert it after the ship is in the bottle. So the ship build is complete! Next up is making the ocean and pack-ice. I’m going to try epoxy resin this time for the ocean. I’ve never worked with it before so it’s back to YouTube U and the practice bench.
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This is going to be so cool to watch from the start. In my short history of ship modeling, I'm getting to be a real fan of these steam/sail ships and how unique they are. Let 'er rip, Phil!!
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Hey Roger - you nailed it! That's exactly what I'm trying to do. As soon as I finish with the railings, I'm gonna put the smoke in as you suggest and give the whole thing another test smash to see if it looks like the smoke will survive. I need to be able to position the smoke where nothing has to lay on top of it and also where none of the lines grab it when I raise the masts. Plan B is to thread the needle and place it inside the smoke stack after the ship is inside the bottle. One way or another, it's gonna get in there!
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Thanks, Keith! Regarding the fate of the brandy, I did sample it. And let me tell you, there's a reason it only cost $8. 😝 I had to go watch a video on using a housing spreader since I've never rebuilt a differential before. Now I understand your comparison with SIBs. Dang, that would certainly be a handy tool for me and my habit of making things too fat for the bottle!
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Now, the only thing left for the ship build is the handrails. But before I launched into that, I decided it was time for a test smash and see if I had any chance of fitting all of this inside the 11/16” neck of my chosen bottle. And…. Nope. Not even close. Crapola! So I shaved the bottom of the hull to just a hair below the waterline. That helped some but not enough. The only other thing to look at was the masts since they are the highest points when everything is smashed down. I had made the wire part of the mast hinges the width of the deck. This allowed me to stagger the masts so they would lay side by side when laid over instead of being on top of each other. I also had “lanes” cleared so the masts would lay as flat as possible. After looking at all that from bow to stern, I could not come up with anything to give me more room other than removing all the deck structures and lowering them. Time for a big decision. Do I take a ton of time to rework the whole deck structure or do I jump in the truck and make a quick trip to Total Wine and find a different bottle? That decision was even easier than the kid in the commercial who picks Charles Barkley for the pickup basketball game! I found a bottle of $8 brandy that looked like it had a bigger neck. When I got the bottle home and emptied it, the opening wasn’t as large as I was hoping. It was only 1/16” larger in diameter than my other bottle. Uh oh. However, turns out that was all the room I needed!! I did another test smash and the ship was a snug fit, but a fit nonetheless. They say football is a game of inches, I guess SIBs are a game of tiny fractions of an inch.
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The rework on the guy wire, whale boats, and fore sail was successful and not too time consuming. Two steps forward and one back. Next up was putting the little anchors in place. They are probably a bit oversized but I don’t think they are too egregious. After that, it was making the dolphin striker and fitting it with its chains and cables (black thread/fly tying thread in this case).
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Thanks, Grant. They are pretty minor problems compared to the last build when I snapped the foremast inside the bottle! It's always something, isn't it! You starting on that Amati Hannah sometime soon?
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