Srenner

Hi hamilton I have never liked the metal parts of this kit... you have inspired me to pull out those bits and replace with some 0.7mm basswood and paint red colour. My thoughts as always turn to the horrible stern piece...

Another wet Sunday in our summer here in nz... this time a tropical cyclone coming down from the tropics... but good modelling weather again! I'm making progress with the walnut strips and lime around the gun ports. The really tricky part is the hard bends at the bow. I've tried soaking them and bending them without heat which works well with the walnut but not with the lime... on one of the photos you can see the outer fires of the timber strip has cracked... im thinking just sand it off and there could be some filler in around there. The instructions aren't very clear where the second planking goes... I think that plank will be covered with 1mm walnut but not sure. The other thing is the cutting out of the ribs from the inside to make the rail thinner.. final scale thickness will still be 500mm which is massive. I'm contemplating trying to sand it down to 400mm scale (4mm) only because the rail timber I have is 4mm.. or I could cut some new rails from mahogany I have.... need to think on that.

Have you got your belaying plan clear ? On my jolie brise the running rigging for the gaff needed to be threaded through the same side as the belaying point and through the shrouds.

I am loving having time this long weekend to do some modelling..... its way nicer to sit down for a good 6-8 hour session and make some good progress. The bow curved sections of the inner rail were not as hard as I thought... I soaked the pieces for a good 1 hour and carefully bent them using my fingers and a pair of pliers. I also tried the plank bender but being only 1mm thick there was a danger of cutting into them too much. Once I glued them into place with pva I used the heat gun to dry the wood out faster and also to get the glue going off faster... as it was awkward to clamp up near the bow. I have also cut one rib out from the inside to see how difficult that would be but also pretty easy with a dremel and cutting wheel and then a bit of dremel sanding and looking pretty good. Happy with that result so will continue with rest of ribs same way.

I'm trying to work out how to bend 1.5mm mahogany strips around the bow... soaking and heat gun has been tried but it still wants to crack. You just need to be very careful when you bend it. Would a jig help or not? As a result I am building up the timber above the gunports in parts and gluing together. Later on I'm going to cut back the bulkheads from the inside and then do the final horizontal strips of mahogany on the inside. It's taking time waiting for glue to set but they say patience is a virtue.

After screwing in a steel bracing element and gluing all the spine is not too bad... pretty straight and level. I've done all I wanted in terms of mast seating blocks and getting the bulkheads all even at the bottom so I've gone ahead and glued the deck down with some pins to hold it all together while it glues. I will just grind the heads off when I lay the decking. Painted the frames black so that when I put the hold covers on you won't see any lighter colour in there. Going to build the timber upto the rail from the outside in and then cut off the thick ribs and deck over the stumps.

I have bigger problems right now I was working in several things.. slots for rods for display going into the spine, rebating the rabit line with the dremel, that's nerve wracking and then I stupidly leant on the spine with my elbow and snap! It broke in half... So right now it is being glued back together with blocks of wood over the break line and a ton of pva... lucky it was quite a jagged break and the bits slotted back together well... Once all the planking on and the deck glued down it will be back to a strong structure but you don't need hassles like this with a fiddly build.

Good idea.. maybe you can even not glue them on to the frames just pin them and then build the inner timbers as the part that glue it all together then cut the ends of the frame off and close the gaps.

Am I doing the scale conversion wrong? 2.25 inches is 56mm divided by 100 is 0.56mm ?!? Off the model plans the 4mm x 100 is 400mm which is 16 inches approx scaled up?

Yikes I just read on in the instructions and it's very scant on the details around the area of in and around the gun ports and the railings and it took me 20 minutes to work out the diameter of the bowsprit dowel... 6mm if you want to know. And then the bowsprit won't fit in so I'm going to have to drill and ream out a space in around the bow for that lucky I haven't glued it yet. The rails are 4mm and that means I need to take the ribs very thin indeed to fit in... will think on that one.

I plan to go 6th rate, 5th rate scratch build down to first rate all RN around 1700ish I'm only going with what the kit gives me... will look at the rail timber and scale it off that. They will be lined on the inside as well as the outside.. good catch though

Dry fitting continues and happy with how things going. Fitted some filler blocks at the bow and still working on tweaking the pre cut pieces here and there. I'm not going to rush to glue pieces in until I'm happy with the hull lines, the fairing and cut the line the planks fit into. One question was putting a camber into the plywood veneer deck. I can see it will bend slightly so I took some slices out of the bottom side to help with bending but should I glue it down and nail it with the panel pins then remove the pins once the glue dries? Or wet the plywood bend it and then dry it again like planks of wood and then glue?

You know what I'm pretty happy with how my blender adjusted bulkheads came out... I printed them off and cut them out of basswood first and that wasn't as satisfactory as using plywood... its pretty soft and bendy and so I printed another copy of the bulkheads and cut them out from 3mm plywood instead. I cut on the outside of the line so I can fair them in with the rest of the bulkheads and I'm happy they all line up at the bottom by the imaginary rabit line. I've been trying some bits of planking and testing the natural lines and think I can work with them as I fair it all in. The decking plywood needed some filing of the precut holes but that all fitting now too. So this is all dry fitted at the moment. Will be time soon to cut the rabit line and then do all the fairing and make sure the deck looks OK. I'm think I should put in any filler blocks I want now before doing the fairing? Need to square up bulkhead 4 so it's vertical.

Now I'm mostly moved I have started to set up my workshop so I can start hms greyhound. I know what I need to do to fix bulkheads 9 and 10 so I will glue a paper copy onto a piece of 3mm plywood and cut them out separately before dry fitting. All the other pieces weren't cut out that exactly and needed a bit of filing to get them to fit frim the manufacturer. I can see bulkhead 11 and 12 need to move down 2mm and than I will need to bend the deck they provided into a slight dish... Do all ships decks camber and bend like a u? Because it looks like mahogany its going to be very brittle to bend and the ribs dont line up with the holes precut.

I would have said for a one off project just printing them out and sticking them onto the plywood and then cut by scroll saw would be easy enough. But the costs of hobbyist 2d plotters with laser say in the 20 to 30w range would be enough to cut 5mm plywood.. I saw someone on this forum who has 40w laser and that cut one sided... almost too strong it burnt it quite a lot .. or you flip it and get less powerful laser. The motor controls on the 2d plotter and width of laser dot would be considations.

So now I have a mesh I was happy with, I wanted to export it back to Inkscape and overlay it with my traced bulkheads 9 and 10. Not as easy as I thought. The way I did was the following: 1. Selected curve 9 and took a duplicate. 2. Separated that duplicate from the mesh 3. Converted it to a grease pencil with width 0.1 which is 1mm 4. Exported the selected grease pencil as a grease pencil svg 5. Imported the svg back to Inkscape The hard bit is to keep the aspect ratio so I was careful while overlaying to only use the corner sizer and I was aiming to get the width the same as the bulkhead width. The resized depth then is the outline of a new bulkhead I can print out and cut out from basswood on the scroll saw. I exported the file on a4 format so easy to print out at work. I also checked in with the actual pieces from the kits remeasuring and seeing if my resized bulkheads look OK. I now also have a theoretical rabbit line I can use to position all the bulkheads too and that may require some trimming and stuff when I dry fit them. I can't do any actual building I am moving in two weeks and need to reset up the workshop... then all my theory can become practice. A good learning experience... the first steps in 3d modelling.

So into blender I went with my frames. There is a nice video done by krutis under the computer threads and my thread on what is easier on how I created a mesh over the top of the frame. Essentially you convert each frame into a curve and then duplicate a plan on each curve. I made my plans 1mm high so that increased the smoothing. Then you join the end loops together. Creating the mesh you see on the attached. You can edit individual vertices and edges to do further smoothing. I fixed up the mesh around bulkhead 9 and 10.

So I used the directions and everything worked out well.. I liked flying through the mesh and plucking vertices and moving them slightly to get a better smoothing... that was fun and even did some vertices merging and adding bits on. That was fun first attempt. The hard part seems to be exporting in svg, the only option is through the grease pencil which seems a bit odd. Anyway I enjoyed the process and the learning over the past 2.5 days

Wow Kurtis that was amazing fix of the files there... one day I just need to keep using it and practising.... You noticed that it looked pretty wonky - that's the problem with the HMS greyhound 1:100 corel kit - if you dont modify in and around ribs 8,9 and 10 the hull bulges up higher than it should to make a nice line from rib 5 and 6 to the stern. So I was going to muck around with the smoothing and lighting etc to get a better shape then take sections back to inkscape and print them out so I can cut out new bulkheads from some ply or basswood... in the future yes eventually I would like to get good enough to 3d lazer cut the rib from plywood. you started that modification process and that is where I am heading. Thanks very everyone for the help - I'm an engineer but cant use drawing packages for anything - been too long in management! Cheers Stuart

Hi Kevin Yes ultimately I want to get into 3d printing but first I want to fix up a model from Corel that is way off and I'm doing a novel approach by using computer tools to help. Yes I could just do it by hand but I also want to get into 3d printing and cnc construction in my older life.

Hi Kurtis, I'm trying to fill in the curves I guess... I read the other post about creating curves and then diving them sounds complicated but could give it a go... Hopefully this link works to my drop box https://www.dropbox.com/s/9dvm2siginlr063/greyhound.blend?dl=0

Hi Kurtis, I'm trying to post the blend file but the server doesn't want to upload? Any ideas? Thanks

Hi... new to 3d modelling software... I have a wire frame now of the ship with plenty of nodes etc but struggling to join them into a solid mesh. Is it easier to "drap" a surface onto the outside of the frames and essentially cover them in solid or it be better to create lots of cubes and join the Dots on the nodes so to speak a bit like a Lego set.? With the compound curves in 3 dimensions its hard to get the surface to shear and bend at the right places but mega time consuming to create individual cubes to fill in spaces... and won't that also look quite blocky?

It hasn't been so hard so far with blender and getting the different bulkheads in position... you just need to get used to using the rotation tools and setting up the orthogonal views. I think it maybe back to front but that won't matter for what I am going to use it for. The next part is getting the mesh onto the outside of the curves.. anyone have helpful tip here?

Merry Christmas to everyone and it's hot here in Auckland but I have two days to do some decent computer stuff. So I copied the plans in 600 dpi and imported them into the base layer of a Inkscape drawing. The download was quick and the package works well on my gaming computer which is amd with an graphics card and 16 megs of ram Then the playing around started... I tried to trace it as a bit map but that created literally hundreds of nodes which were a pain to edit.. what I did in the end was go into using a pen and tracing the line using a bezier curve and then dragging the node points until they were on top of the lines from the plan. I have created layers for the spine, each bulkhead and the deck. The files I have attached show the different layers and one with them all ontop of each other. I have also added guide lines to help me align the layers in blender... Tomorrow I will import this file into blender and see of I can align each layer into orthogonal layout...and then lay a mesh over the top and see what happens. I spent a bit of time rotating the scan file from the copier... it was out by a few degrees but you can do some quite fine rotations by layer using the transform function. I know from the measurement tool there is differences of up to 0.5 millimeter between the bulk heads and a theoretical bearding line but bulk heads 9 and 10 are out by 4mm.