Butting in here where I have no right to be, but, maybe my low-tech engineering will help some!
I am building a very humble ship: Soclaine's French oyster-lugger 'Trois Freres' kit. She is pole-masted with no standing rigging, but she has a lot of thimbles for her size.
Designed for the Bay of Morbihan rather than the open sea, and for an era before refrigeration, she had to be fast home with the catch, so the two lugsails are big. Caught in a squall, she needs to reef down fast, and there are usually only two men and a boy at most to handle her, and one of those is at the tiller. So she has some ingenious labour-saving devices: The leech of the sail has brass rings seized to the bolt rope, in line with the reefing-points. As the sails come down the relevant ring is simply hitched to the sheet tackle. The downhauls for the noses of the yards have corresponding eye-splices lined with round brass thimbles. (both sail's luffs are also bent to the downhauls with unlined eye-splices in the bolt-rope.) So, that's eleven thimbles in all, at about 5mm diameter (external) for the scale of this model.
My first thought was to make them out of KS brass tube or similar, so I sawed off some 3mm approx slices and tried some experiments:
I had some old stainless steel rivets with domed heads that I though might do the job, but I found that using one as a punch it was impossible to keep it centred. Next attempt was to use one of those multi-head lever-type leather punches, with the rivet slipped into the nearest size punch, and the tube slice resting on the 'anvil'. Wow! The flange popped into shape with a satisfying 'click'! Reverse the slice on the anvil and . . . no good. The punch, offset by the height of the slice of tube and the rivet head does not land quite straight, so the result was a nice flange, but at an angle to the first one!
Thinking again, I pulled out some rectangular T6 aluminum bar (originally bought for a 'studio scale' model of one of the 'pods' from 2001!). Sawed off two sections about 5cm long and drilled a hole in the centre of the widest face of each to take a rivet. I fixed these to the inside of the jaws of my bench vice, using double sided tape, taking care to line up the two rivet heads. This should work! Held a slice of tube in place with needle-nose pliers, nipped it between the rivet heads, then carefully wound the vice jaws in. Horrors! the tube slice just slipped sideways instead of remaining centred between the two domes. -As I should have known it would. OK, whipped out the two rivets, chucked them up in a drill and filed the heads to a cone. Back in my improvised press, offer up a slice of tube and . . . a perfect tiny brass round thimble!
Now for mass production! to create the tube slices I will be recreating a lashed up Dremel rig I last used to make porthole liners for superdetailing the Revell plastic kit of Cousteau's Calypso -but that's another tale. Sorry to go on so long. Hope this encourages others to improvise and experiment.
