Thukydides

Ah yes, now I am looking back I see you already attached the deck fittings, for some reason I was thinking you hadn't done this yet. You could go half way and just leave it as is, gluing the bowsprit into place to hold it. Then just stick the some metal bits in the sides of the bitts to simulate the look of the fid going through the bowsprit. At least then it would make logical sense as the wooden crosspiece keeps it form flipping up and the fake fid stops it from sliding back. That would be much less messy than doing what I did. Getting the holes drilled all the way through straight was a royal pain.

Fantastic, she looks really nice.

You can just look at my log if you want to see what it looks like. I have also taken a picture of the relevant section from Goodwin below if you want to see it.

Alternatively if you want to go for more of a simpler more artistic look you could consider using edge highlights to pick out the detail. Use a medium grey on the upper edges and a slightly darker one on the lower edges. You could also consider glazing in gradients, but that is a slightly more complicated process as getting the light placement right takes a bit of practice.

It is a bit odd, there is also the question even if it is just friction, what if they wanted to shorten the bowsprit. Alert has holes to allow them to shorten it presumably to use less sail in worse conditions. The fact also that the end is round instead of square brings the problem of it potentially twisting. If it were me I would probably consider squaring off the end and using some iron bars similar to the alert arrangement in Goodwin as I can't see how the arrangement from the contemporary model makes any sense. Maybe it was a simplification by the model maker? The plans show an iron ring holding the bowsprit against the stem which is not on the contemporary model either.

Log #65: Tying off the Stays and Shrouds I have been very slowly tying off the stays for the last week or so. The Mainstay was fairly straight forward, there was a clear diagram in Goodwin so I decided to go with it as it made reasonable sense. I tied the sizings with 10/0 white fly tying thread. Ideally I would have preferred to use an off white, but there was limited colours available and at least it does make the detail stand out. The preventer stay was sized in a similar manner. The shrouds were a little more confusing as the diagram in Lees seems to show them just wrapped around the shroud and then sized to it. However, when I did this I found that it would loosen and slide up the shroud to the point at which it was sized. To remedy this after wrapping them around the shroud as pictured in Lees, I slipped the end of the laniard through the gap between the sizings of the shroud. This held everything in place and then I just ran it straight up and sized it to the shroud. I first tried using the 0.25mm rope to size it (see the standing backstay on the right), but I thought that looked a little too big and so switched to the fly tying thread for the rest. I didn’t feel like going back and changing the standing backstay and since it is not really that noticeable unless you zoom right in I decided to leave it as it was. And with that the shrouds and stays are in place. Next I am on the the ratlines as I think I want to do them before too many more lines are all over the place waiting to be caught on somthing.

Your work is so amazing it is borderline depressing as I look at it and see how poor my own looks in comparison :).

Great job, she looks very nice. You are motoring through all the Vanguard kits.

Looking great. How did you make the grating like pattern for the windows of the pantry?

It is hard to tell for sure from the pictures, but think you are still going to have problems with your second planking near the stern. Try holding test strips against it to test how they should run and then sand some more to get the correct shape. Compare your shape to the one you are trying to achieve, there is a nice clear picture of it on page 29 of the manual. You may find that you will have to sand it down so much that you will need to re-plank parts of the stern, but this shouldn't be too much of a problem just a bit time consuming and if you want the final result to good it may very well be necessary.

The short answer is yes thin them, but not having used AL paints I can’t exactly tell you how much, but better to ere on too thin than too thick. Cheap brushes from walmart will work fine if you are just trying to base coat the model. I use cheap brushes for this sort of work all the time and only break out my good ones for the detail work. The longer answer: Acrylic paints are made up of three components: pigment, binder and solvent. The solvent in this case is water so you can thin your paints by adding more up to a point. If you thin them past that point, there won’t be enough binder in the solution to hold the pigment together. This is where acrylic medium comes in. You can buy this at any art store and you can use it if you want to thin the paint even more without losing its properties. For just painting coats on a model you will not however need to thin the paint this much. My suggestion is to test it on your palm. If the paint fills in the cracks (ie you can’t see the lines on your palm anymore) then it is too thick. It will not completely cover on the first coat (especially for colour such as white or yellow). You want two to three thin smooth coats. Make sure they are completely dry and sand off any imperfections between coats. What I will say is that if your paint is too thin you only loose time. If it is too thick you will ruin the model. For model paints such as vellejo or citadel, my rule of thumb is one part paint to one part water, but this will vary depending on the thickness of the paint. Make sure you have used a primer or a sanding sealer first and you have a smooth surface to work on. A good paint job can’t fix a poorly prepared surface. If you are painting both dark and light colours (for example black and white) paint the lighter one first. It will be much easier to paint the black over white than the other way round. Also if you are having trouble with a lighter colour covering you can build up to it by say for example painting on a light grey and then painting white over top. For brushes (I assume you are just painting the hull), I would recommend just pick up a pack of brushes from somewhere like walmart. That will give you a few sizes to work with and since you will inevitably ruin them anyways (I am assuming you are not familiar with painting since you asked the question), at least you haven't ruined expensive ones. In the future you can look into more expensive ones if you want to explore painting a bit more.

Yes you have it. By keel I am referring to just the straight bit along the bottom. So if you took the ship of the cradle and laid it flat on the desk the angle for the butts should be square with your desk.

Looking good. A minor point, the butts of the planks should be perpendicular to the keel (they are attached to the frames on a real ship). So they will not always be at right angles. A relatively minor point that I also didn’t realize until part way through my second planking.

I unfortunately do not have anything to add to this discussion, but I wanted to pop in to mention how much I appreciate reading these sort of topics both as they happen and also when while researching some obscure topic I come across them.

Nice job. That is a detail I would have liked to add to alert, but I didn't feel confident enough at the time.

There is no easy answer to the question if it is already assembled. You can try smaller brushes, adjusting the angle you are painting at etc... In general my advice would be to paint off the model or paint earlier in the process before you make the area hard to access.

I have him too and I refer to him regularly. The problem is he doesn't often explicitly address cutters and so I have to take the principles and apply them rather than wholesale copying. Basically my order of preference is: Steele Lees (If he addresses it) Goodwin (if not in conflict with common sense or the above) My gut / what I think looks the nicest

This will happen with any epoxy pour. The issue is the epoxy is adhesive (it sticks to other things more than itself). So it has a tendency to try and creep up the sides due to a combination of the adhesive nature and the surface tension (it creeps a bit and then the surface tension pulls more up so it creeps more etc...) This is counterbalanced by gravity, but if it has lots of things to "grab" then it can climb very high. This a particularly pronounced problem if you have a small crack. I have had it creep up a thin gap so it was way above the rest of the pour and had to hide it with paint etc... You can try to solve this by: Designing around this (making sure there are no thin cracks it can creep up, leaving space so you can cut off the edges etc...) Putting your sides only to the height you want to pour to. This allows you to fill all the way to the top and the surface tension will hold it level. Pouring in multiple thin layers (still doesn't perfectly solve the issue) Sanding down and polishing the raised edges. Note: I have never tried this on something that I wanted to be perfectly clear like water, I have mostly used epoxy for ice and so I can just cover those bits with snow and make it looked scratched etc and it doesn't matter. EDIT: I can illustrate this by showing you some pictures of a figure I did a ice pour for. The picture below shows the figure before the pour. You can see how I have a lip I want to come up to. Then below you can see after the pour. I don't have a picture before I added ice, but you can see how the resin is level around the edge. However, under the rock, the reason there is so much snow there is because it crept up the bottom and I had to hide it with snow. In the following picture you can sort of see where it has crept up most of the back of the hand.

That is a question you would have to ask Goodwin :). In general I would say that there are a number of errors / inconsistencies I have found in the drawings for the Alert book (for an example of this see post 365 where I discuss the problem of the foresail halliard). As I note in post 367 there is also the problem that the preventer stay in that diagram is attached with an obviously thinner rope which makes no sense as there is a single failure point. My practice has been as much as possible to ignore the drawings for the purposes of determining the rope type and size and just go with the steele table for the ropes (Goodwin includes it in the book). In cases where the table is not clear (e.g. naming conventions are deafferent or a line is missing), I have tried to use common sense and refer to the drawings. So in my case I used cable for the stays and the shrouds as that is what the Steele table called for. The running backstays I used shroud laid as my best guess as to which was the correct rope in the table was shroud laid.

I have accumulated a few over the years. Some get used more than others. I just buy them as I have a use for them and over the years you accumulate a lot as apart from a few colours I rarely run out as I use them in such small amounts. Also the top shelf is made up of every additive under the sun which tend to come in large bottles and I use them by the drop:).

welcome aboard

I like the modification you added to the mast cap.

Yes it is surprisingly big now. Part of the reason I originally was trying to delay attaching the bowsprit was for that very reason. But given all the trouble I had with the bowsprit it is probably the way to go. I am to the point in the build where no matter what I do I am going to have restricted access. I try to keep it towards the back of the desk but yes I am a bit worried I will catch it at some point.

Thanks @Glenn-UK and @AJohnson. The glue set and so I took a quick shot of the whole thing now that the dimensions of alert are mostly set.

Log #64: The Bowsprit As I discussed in my last post, I decided that I needed to do the bowsprit next before I proceeded with any more rigging. As you will see this is another lesson in “it would have been much easier if I had planned ahead”. First step was to make the bowsprit itself. This was done in the same manner as the other spars with my drill. I decided to paint the end red as I liked the look of that better than the black suggested by the kit. This was done in a similar manner to previous painting. I highlighted the sides towards the bottom, the top I left largely one bright colour with some less pronounced highlights towards the inboard end and the edges. You can see a progress picture below after I had blocked in the main highlights before I started glazing to smooth the transitions. I also decided to rework a lot of the ironwork as in many cases the kit version didn’t really match Goodwin and also at times looked a bit flimsy. These were made using scrap from the kit PE. The eyebolts you see below that were attached to the rings were the ringbolts from the kit PE with the attaching point not cut off so I could insert them into a hole. For securing the bowsprit I scratch built using the edges of the thicker PE sheet from the kit. You can see it below compared to the kit version. After blackening you can see the result. I also drilled a simulated sheeve into the end of the bowsprit as per the Goodwin arrangement. For securing the bowsprit I first attached the plate. And then I attached the rest. Notice all the damaged belaying pins. The whole process of drilling the holes for the iron bars to secure the bowsprit was fraught with problems. At one point I completely broke the whole assembly and had to reattach everything and in many cases add some paint touches to hide the damage. It would have been much easier if I had planned for all this from the beginning. In the picture you can see me gluing the ring to the plate. I have a clamp holding the laniards away as I don’t want to get glue on them accidentally.