Thukydides

Log #58: Revisiting the Rudder and the Windlass

I seem to have a bad habit of deciding not to do something and then some time later, when it is much harder to accomplish the task, decide I want to do it after all. Inspired by @dunnock’s excellent job with the rudder cover, the more I looked at Alert the more the omission bothered me. And so I found myself attempting to install a cover on the tiller and the rudder.

I sketched out the rough shape for the horseshoe on an off cut of 1mm pear and then carefully cut it out and sanded it till it was approximately 0.5mm thick.

I then attached a bit of the same material I previously used for the mouses (a bowling alley sock similar to tights). This ultimately proved to have too pronounced a weave which I had to correct for later with many layers of varnish and paint.

I then glued it to the lower counter and folded over the excess to tuck inside to give it bulk. This ended up not being quite enough and so I slipped an extra bit into it as well.

I then glued it in place with wood glue and manipulated it to get the appropriate shape.

Then came many layers of paint and varnish to give it a sort of tarred look. I also painted the horseshoe with a bit of a metalic look to give the impression of metal. This is a similar process to how I have previously described, just for metal you make your transitions much more dramatic and the reflection points more pronounced. The only thing on this I will note is when painting reflections it is important to make sure they all line up and so the reflection points match where the highlights on the counter background are.

I also made a quick tiller cover using the same tissue paper I used for the rope ends. This time I just painted it the mix of black and dark brown that I used for the mouse to give it the impression of being tarred.

I have long been looking at the windlass as the kit arrangement (though much easier) does not look quite as nice as the Iron bars laid out in the Goodwin drawings. So after looking at it for a while I decided to attempt to modify it.

This involved very careful sawing and then sanding and painting the area. The painting did not take long and most of this area will be covered up and not be visible once the bowsprit is in. I mostly painted it a darker red to accentuate the shadow the area will be in.

I do think the effect of these two changes really adds to the look and I am pleased I went back. Also I am pleased that nothing broke of fell off when I flipped it over :).

Great progress Glenn, it is looking good.

Very clean work. I am always impressed by the care you take with your work to get it just right.

It's looking great, that is some very fiddly work. I am not sure how you do it at that scale. I have enough trouble with blocks on a 1/64 model 😄.

Log #57: The Shrouds Part II

Work has slowed down a bunch mostly due to difficulties with the rigging. I have made at least four attempts at the pendents for the spar halliards and though I think I now have a acceptable solution, I don’t have much yet to show for the work.

Despite this I have also been making slow progress on the shrouds. This represents work that has been going on in the background for the last month or more.

First step was to make a jig to correctly space the deadeyes based on the plans.

I used a fair bit of tension for this step to ensure that when I come to attaching the deadeyes I have wiggle room without pulling them too close together. A small bit of super glue was used to hold the deadeye in the correct position. As a note of caution I used it in too many spots and it caused some issues later when it came time to seize them. I would recommend just a small drop at the bottom, this is not for securing them, rather is just to hold it in the correct position until the seizing can be added.

After doing this I labled each of the shrouds (as now the order they go on matters since I have set the lengths) and removed them from the model. Using my knockoff quad hands I got of amazon I held the deadeye in place and then pulled the two ends of the shroud tight.

I then seized them together using a sewing needle and some 0.2mm thread I got @BenD to custom make for me.

As a note I turned my deadeyes right handed as I used cable laid rope for the shrouds. If I had used shroud laid rope the correct method would be to turn them left handed.

With the seizing done I made the decision to also add the canvas caps to the end of the ropes. To do this I took some tissue paper (the kind you put in gift bags) and painted it an off white to look like canvas. In case anyone wants the specific colours I first painted it with citadel’s palid witch flesh and then with karak stone. I did this in a haphazard fashion to not fully cover the previous layer to give colour variation to it. I cut out a small ‘L’ shape to form the cover.

This was carefully folded over the top of the rope end using a very small drop of super glue to hold the center in place and then watered down matt varnish to adhere it to the model. I then did a quick whipping with 0.25mm rope and covered the whole thing with another layer of matt varnish and left it to dry (note: the picture below shows the state of affairs right before whipping).

Once dry I cut the ends and then again added another watered down layer of varnish.

At this point I also decided to make some modifications to the shroud cleats to make them look more like the diagram in Lees. This was a slow process of sanding and carefully cutting notches with my craft knife and then filing the grooves with a triangle file.

Once complete I used a small spot of super glue to attach them to the shrouds. Once the fully dry I can remove the shrouds from the model and add rope to attach them as well.

As a final note I also attached the plates for the running backstay. At this point I only attached the bottom bolt as I want to be able to adjust their angle depending on what exactly I do with the running backstay.

26 minutes ago, chris watton said:

On a personal note, I really have never cared too much about the material used for parts, as long as the end result looks right.

I am of the same mind. In fact I often prefer plastic to represent metal as it is easier to get things to scale and then I can paint it to look like metal.

You are doing a great job Chris, I have nothing but good things to say about your kits speaking as a first time builder. I am glad to see that you are having so much success as demonstrated by the high demand for your kits.

Looking good, it is always nice to see things finally attached after you have been working on them off model for so long.

I like it, small things like these are great ways to upgrade the model. I have no idea the upper cover is the correct shape or not, but I believe BE in his alert log used a square one. Not sure if this was based on intuition or historical evidence. I suspect there was no standard way of doing them.

Looking good. You are making fast progress.

36 minutes ago, dunnock said:

Thanks Andrew. I wish I had thought before I had finished planking and painting the hull though!

David

That's the problem, if you could do it all over again you would be much more organized. Also you don't have the benefit of many ideas from other build logs (as you are leading the way here). I would say that almost every change I made to alert that the idea didn't come from another build log I did later than I should have and consequently it was more complicated than it needed to be.

Welcome to MSW

That's looking really good. Great job.

13 minutes ago, Theodosius said:

With all this great progress, I want to ask you, if there is allready a thinking process started for a "next project" after Alert? 😉 

I do have a tentative plan, but I don't want to say anything until I have the major parts of it figured out and I am sure what I am going to do. This was always planned to be my test run in the hobby and I have largely tried to stay pretty close to the kit arrangement. I want my next one to really push the limits of what I think I can do with a kit. I am doing some research in the background, but there are enough unanswered questions yet that I have not absolutely decided. Realistically even at my current pace I won't have alert finished until mid to late 2024 so lots of time yet to change my mind.

Minor update, I got the iron bands on the gaff and the boom as well as added the eyebolt to the gaff. Both Goodwin and the kit plans have the eyebolt further from the jaws, but Lees seems to suggest that this was only the practice after 1818 and so I went with him. I also painted the bands to try and help them stand out and give the illusion of metal. One of the challenges with close up photos is that the transitions for the colours look very abrupt when in real life they blend together much better.

It is looking really nice and smooth now. Great job on the painting.

2 hours ago, Blue Ensign said:

Personally, I didn’t fancy creating such a complex shape on the model using putty, particularly in the awkward place it is.

Others may have a higher skill set.

This is not as hard as you might think especially since you would mostly just be filling and smoothing the gaps between the wood pieces and the resin balls. You just need one of those silicone clay shapers so you can easily push it around into the cracks. Given the care and skill you have demonstrated I would think it well within your abilities.

In any case the build is looking great and whatever you decide to do I suspect it will turn out well.

Looking good Glenn.

Log #56: The Boom and the Gaff

Despite the lack of updates, I have been making progress on the model. I am currently in the process of trying to get everything associated with the mainmast that I can done off the model to make things easier. This however means that despite doing lots, I don’t have many things complete and ready to show. Much of what I will discuss in this log has been in progress for several weeks and I have many other things done, that I have not yet mentioned as they are not in a finished enough state to show. I say this mostly for the benefit of any other first time builders as the order I present stuff in my log is not necessarily the same as the order I worked on them.

A significant amount of my time lately has been spent on the boom and the gaff. For the shape and length of them I followed the excellent directions in BE’s log. You can find them here. I achieved this by turning them on my drill much the same as with the mainmast. I also decided to adjust the kit arrangement for the jaws as I felt that with a little bit of effort they could be made more historically accurate.

First I cut the two halves of the jaws in two and for the boom I doubled the thickness by gluing them to another piece of off cut and carefully shaping them.

The gaff I left the same thickness. I then attached them to the boom and gaff and proceeded to give them a coat of black paint.

I also took this opportunity to taper the edge of the gaff to let it sit more naturally. This taper is clearly marked in both Lees and Goodwin.

After giving it a coat of black and sanding it back I decided to relocate the holes to more accurately reflect the diagrams in Lees. The old holes were filled with putty.

Painting was a long slow process. I first coated them in black then sanded it smooth then coated then sanded and so on. Once I had a solid base I highlighted with one reflection point similar to how I have previously described.

As a stylistic note I decided to leave all the cleats natural pear coloured with just a bit of WOP. I like the contrast this produces and also that it highlights the details. As a final touch I also made some changes to the end of the boom to simulate the pulley in it and also to make the end of the boom and gaff reflect what Lees said the practice at the time was (metal plate and eyebolt).

For the gaff I used a leftover top of one of the extra stantion tops as the plate and one of my amati eyebolts. For the boom I used one of the leftover chain plates for the shrouds and one of the extra hoops that the running backstays attach to as the eyebolt.

I still need to add the iron hoops that hold the jaws to the spars, but I needed to let everything dry completely before I start messing with that.

And here are the two of them on Alert.

Fantastic, that is quite the model.

I really enjoy these posts where you talk through your thoughts process. I think these such posts on your alert log have been the most helpful to me as they allow me to see the why not just the what.

Good job on the furniture, it has nice colour variation.

Great job

Looks great, good to see you back at it.

Log #55: Preparing the Mainmast

While I am waiting on more rope arriving I have been doing the final preparations to the mainmast so it is ready to have the shrouds attached to it. First up was to create an iron hoop to serve as a stop for the shrouds. Based on the goodwin drawings I estimated this to be around 2mm thick. My previous tests had told me that tension alone mostly holds the shrouds in place so I decided to use the shrink tube held in place by epoxy.

I placed the shrouds and stays on the mast to determine how much space I needed (leaving a bit of extra room for the 4 thinner ropes that still need to be served around the mast). I then marked the location and used epoxy to hold it in place and a hairdryer to shrink it. Note it looks closer to the top of the mast than it is as I had to paint my black line around 1.5 mm lower than desired due to an unfortunate accident with paint running. As this will all be covered with rope anyways it doesn’t really matter.

I did not take a picture of this next step, but I coated it in a mix of flat black and metal colour dark aluminum as I did in the past on metal parts to give it a slight sheen. I then turned my attention to the bottom of the mast. I didn’t really like the PE ring provided in the kit to hold belaying pins (too thin), so I decided to follow BE’s method of using cleats instead. The problem is I had none so I decided to improvise. I had already decided to replace the PE shroud cleats provided by the kit with some pearwood ones and I discovered with a bit of modification these were just the right size for the base of the mainmast.

However like many PE parts they were too thin so I glued them together in pairs to form thicker versions. I then filed them down to get them to look less like metal and more like shaped wood. I have discovered that PE in most cases need a lot of filing to make it look correct to scale. You can see the comparison of before and after below.

I then prepared the mast by drilling two side by side holes to make a notch for the cleats. I determined the correct location by taking some masking tape, marking the place I wanted the first cleat to go and then spreading it out and marking the spacing for the remaining six. I then put the tape back on the mast and drilled just above it and just on the tape to make the notches.

Meanwhile I primed and added several layers of paint and varnish to the cleated to try and make them look more rounded. I then attached them to the mast using epoxy resin.

Then on to painting. I will not go into detail here as I have covered this in the past, but I used the same principles and colours I did for the red and black parts on the deck.

Though some of this detail will likely be covered up, it is always safer to paint it all carefully and then any that is exposed will look right as it will be much harder to touch it up once it is on the model.

1 hour ago, jpalmer1970 said:

Thanks Thukydides. The line appears to be an slight indent so I will give your varnish trick a go. I am grateful to you for you advice on this.

Just a note. Depending on how deep the indent is you may want to try more than one layer of varnish before moving on to sanding.