Jared

Wishing you the best for your pet George. Best wishes for the holidays ahead and for a great 2026. Jared

A beautiful model and fascinating story as well. I look forward to following the rest of your FF build.

As much as I would like to blame lens distortion for this "optical illusion" I can't. As I mentioned several times in this blog, the requirement to drill sheaves in the thinnest spars made these areas extremely fragile and a few snapped during the subsequent rigging process (see #230 and #373) when I was attaching the lift grommets. Where the observed "bow" occurs, I used epoxy for the repair but had difficulty aligning the spars. The bowing actually looks worse than it actually is, because of the way the chain crosses over it. At the time if this break a lot of the rigging on the lower sections of the foremast had completed so I made the decision to leave well enough alone as alignment looked fine from the port and stbd. views. For the break discussed in #373, the broken pieces were pinned and glued together, ensuring good alignment.

Here are the last of my focus stacked images on my completed Flying Fish. The images were photographed on large sheets of white paper. The most difficult problem I encountered with this technique was trying to cleanup the background of the images in Lightroom, where the sheets overlapped or crinkled. I was pleased, however, that the focus stacking produced sharp images of the ship throughout the images. It took between 12 and 30 raw images to create the various images. The images were stacked using Helicon Focus. I used a Nikon D850 camera mounted on a sturdy tripod, with 24-70mm f2.8 and 105 mm f2.8 lenses.

I will try creating some more Ai images broadside, soon as I finish making a few more focus stacked images. With the Ai images, your images are only as good as what you can instruct the Ai generator to do. There is a lot of luck involved to this.

Feeling the need for some creativity in image making, I fed one of the photos of my Flying Fish model into Google Gemini and asked it to create a photorealistic image of what the ship would have looked like in Boston Harbor in the 1850's. I was blown away by the results, which I share here:

I have finally gotten around to photographing my completed model of the Flying Fish, using the focus stacking technique to show the entire model in sharp focus. Here are my first 4 images showing the starboard and port side view of the ship, a stern view and a 45 degree view.

I agree with Alan. Drill center holes in the 2 broken pieces where they joined and insert a steel or brass rod then epoxy them together. I broke a very thin mast on my Flying Fish and this method saved the model. Yiu can see this with photos at #373 on my Flying Fish build log.

It's looking great Alan.

You have made a lot of progress over the last 4 weeks while I was away Rob. Beautiful work! How did you make the name boards?

It is such a relief and really satisfying when you finally are able to declare the model finished! Keep up the great work

Beauriful work!!

Your shop looks pretty normal to me Rob. Whatever works is good!

Now that I have completed my build, i thought I would share some truths I have learned about model ship building: 1. Making mistakes comes very easy; fixing or redoing them not so. 2. When you hold difficult tiny pieces in place, glue never dries quick enough. 3. Check your plans again andvl again. Measure twice, cut once. 4. Most small parts that you accidently drop onto the floor will bounce and roll in the direction you will least be able to find them. A vacum dustbug is your best friend for finding them again. 5. Fine rigging lines and chains are designed to snag, kink and entangle on all pertruding parts of a tall ship model. Untangling them requires careful fine movements, lots of patients and a few choice swear words. 6. Glued joints and soldered joints have a tendancy to come undone at the worst moment possible. 7. No matter how careful you are when rigging, count on you hands to accidently bang into the pertruding lower yards and other rigging many times. After a few breaks, you will learn to move you hands very slowly when rigging. 8. Missing something critical in the complex ship's drawings is not hard or infrequent, necessitating unanticipated fixes and more swearing. 9. During the course of a build, the most common comment you will hear from your friends is "I don't know how you have the patience". 10. Once your model is finished and admired, you will begin to forget about all of the above mentioned moments and start a new model. 🤣🤣

Here is a higher resolution photo of my completed Flying Fish (not focus stacked).