Jaager

I see that this is too late for you, but my solution to the clamp - sill construction is: to use the red line of the deck at the side for every station be the controlling factor. a cardboard pattern jig to locate the top of the clamp at every station cut the gunports oversize fix the clamp use a jig to define the top of the sill above the clamp - at each side of the port so that the slope of the sill matches that of the clamp use another jig to place bottom of the lintel A POF to framing clamping option: hardware stores have some very small threaded bolts - matching washers, wingnuts, hex nuts, grip nuts - I think most will order shelf pack boxes (100) which should be less expensive than one by one for the bolts, a long threaded rod - 12"- and Dremel cutoff wheel may be less expensive and offer more length options McMaster-Carr has quite a variety a diameter smaller than the space width should be easy to find two pieces of stick wood with holes the diameter of the rod I see this as a way to get clamping along the inside and outside face of a frame. Now that I think about it - for my above the wale solid wall - since it will be hidden, holes can be drilled for the rods. It will ugly things up, but it will be hidden, so no matter. A rule that is a compulsion for me is: for PVA - the stronger the clamping pressure, the stronger the bond - up to the point of crushing the wood.

A search came up with Xylol as the main ingredient for the 70's version. Xylol is listed as being a mixture of o- , m-, and p- xylene its advantage was a slower evaporation rate than mineral spirits or lacquer thinner or naphtha. its downside is that it dissolves polystyrene. A barrier coat was required. There are several organic solvents available that would substitute for brushing. A quick search found that xylene itself is still for sale. None of it is something you want to breathe.

PVA. Irreverent question: If there is to be a second layer of wood, what is the need to fill any gaps between the first layer of planking? If there are significant hollows in the run a PVA bonded wood scab would be better that a Bondo-like material? If there are minor dips, would the second layer even be able to follow? An experiment to try: coat the outside of the finished first layer with PVA and let it cure / dry / polymerize. After the second layer planks are shaped, coat the inner face with PVA and let it dry. Place the outer plank and iron it with a heat source that has temp control to avoid char or cooking. Instant bond. If you are compulsive, maybe a very thin wet addition before ironing as well as the PVA at the edge where the caulking would be.

Actually, I am primarily using the Body plan - and the breadth from that to determine the scale correction - I am aware that often the stated breadth is complicated (!). I ignore the possible complication and scale to match anyway. For the Profile - I use this same correction then compare the bar scale (if there is one) to my 1/4" scale - it usually matches. But plan aberrations often show up along the length. The data that I take from the Profile is only the location of the rails, wales, decks at each station. The WL Plan is only used for the bow plug and the stern shape - and for before~1780 the outline at the beakhead bulkhead. Most plans stop 2-3 frames short of that. I just use a single line at each station. There is no lateral distortion that matters on the Profile. I set the station intervals at what they are supposed to be. !! The complication with the stated breadth is that it often included the thickness of the bottom planking added to the frames. This is not even the actual hull thickness at the breadth - the wale was usually there and the wales were at least twice the thickness of the bottom planking. I suspect that the listed breadth was meant for use to calculate what was pretended to be the hull volume/displacement. Since it was used as a comparison factor between ships, the real world accuracy did not matter. It just required that every ship be calculated using the same formula. The error factor cancelled out.

These drawings (NMM) are "living" organic objects. Although now frozen electronic scans, they were not fresh off the drawing board when scanned. Even spotting the original draftsman as an invariant machine, time, humidity change, temp, tears, folds affected the plans, and often not uniformly. The bar scales can produce different results depending on where along its length a measurement is taken. I use a downloaded 1:48 scale in Painter to verify or re scale a scan of plans. An adjustment is necessary to make this scale useful in Painter. The white background must be selected and CUT. The layer must be transparent except for the actual scale. I have yet to get an accurate 1:1 scan on my USB stick from a shop. The PDF are ~ 60-70% enlarged. They may be able to give me an identical printed copy, but a digital copy for me to printout is anything but 1:1. The key with the printable scale was to get a direct printout of it to precisely match my K&E triangle. I do not care what the internal electron memory is actually using as long as a printout of it is accurate. As far as physical measurements of model parts, a 12 inch metal digital caliper set to inch decimals does most of that. I use the original real world feet/inches and use a Casio to divide by 60 to get my decimals. I am fortunate in that my method does not require the Profile or WL NMM printout plans to be precise as a whole. I just need the exact data at each station as a slice. It does not matter if time as made the intervals between stations variable. What it actually turns out to be depends on the accuracy and precision of my Byrnes thickness sander product.

About the ship - Red Jacket at 1:96 was one of Wm Crothers - Sea Gull plans. Still available at Taubman (Loyalhannah Dockyard) B/W scan of original blue prints - time has made the contrast between the background and lines less than ideal. They are both outside the planking -for solid carved like the above - and inside for POF - much detail - probably too much for 1/8":1'. One aspect is that the original ship was huge. Crothers probably would have preferred a 1:48 except that this scale, not many of us could live in the same dwelling with a fully masted and rigged model that is that large. 1:16":1' is miniature scale and is probably too small for anything thicker than rice paper to be suitable as sail material. It would need to be wispy / ephemeral - the rigging line is challenge enough. It would almost take having a pet black widow spider to provide scale line starting material. (I seem to remember reading that the spider once was used to make crosshairs for optics.) The kit would probably be an excellent initial project for someone with an ambition to try scratch miniature. The pre-carved hull gets you beyond that first significant barrier. As is, this kit could probably produce a higher quality decorator model that could live in an office or library - in a case - always in a case.

If the ship is pre-1860 There is dark brown construction paper - There is stamp pad ink - black and red - a little black added to red makes brown - then any thickness paper can be dyed and thinner than scale paper can be used to adjusted for scale effect.

You really don't want to buy a low cost mini tablesaw. To ask this in eastern Kentuckian: Where are you at? (This is a geography question.) To assuage a compulsion I posit that no species sold as Mahogany is suitable for a ship model that is to be clear finished. Even the old genuine Cuban / Honduran is too coarse and has open pores, the stuff that is now passed off as Mahogany is less and is an insult to the original. If painted or for your proposed use, it will probably work. If this is only a one off project, seeking outside help may be more cost effective. A bandsaw with a Wood Slicer will produce a surface similar to a hollow ground Sears finish blade and the kerf is about 1/2. Find a neighbor with a big bandsaw and buy a blade that is the size that his machine mounts. If he has a bimetal, minimal set, you are golden. You will just need to use 80 grit as well as the 120/150 grit and 220 grit that the WS blade product will want. I propose that even now, a pristine used Byrnes saw will sell for about what you pay. When Jim retires from production, they will probably go for more than you paid for it. It is unique in quality, precision, and accuracy.

To be a bit heretical: In wooden ship models 1/96 is approaching the point where no species of wood will scale to a realistic degree. Smaller than this is in the miniature range. This is an area of art and illusion. For steel, the materials do scale more realistically. A steel ship built at a scale where wood works as a reasonable material (1:48, 1:64, 1:72) will produce a model that is untenable in size. Actual wood veneer on a steel warship at 1:700 or even 1:350 is using a material that is far outside its physical ability. It is being paired with materials that are within their physical abilities. It is more a job for paint. The inclusion of actual wood is an advertising scam. It should be obvious if viewed realistically.

For pure escapist fare Richard Bolitho (28 book series) Kindle Edition by Alexander Kent (Author) One plus with digital, all of the old pulp books and magazines are probably obtainable and not lost to time. It was before my time, but I see this as the material that was filling the space in the 30s and 40s later occupied by mindless TV series. There was aspect from back then, that I heard and enjoyed at their end: radio teleplays. There is a WHOLE lot on content on TV that would be better on radio. We could even do model ship building while occupying our ears with the stuff. You could also investigate audio books.

I am not familiar with this Proxxon but as a ~9" bandsaw for anything serious, it is probably prudent to think of it as a toy. Do you mean a 3" hardwood resaw? As for Oak (as well as Ash, Willow, Hickory, Chestnut, Elm, Sassafras, even Walnut) if you are making a display case, or mounting board, they are excellent. For a model itself, they have contrasty grain, open pores, medium to coarse texture. They are strong enough, but the wood will be a distraction if left clear, and require an additional pore filling step if painted. Their only positive is that they are easy to source. This process is already difficult enough if appropriate species of wood are used. I saw an earlier inquiry about using a bandsaw to slice off planking instead of using something like a Byrnes tablesaw. The majority of bandsaw blades have serious set. The less expensive the blade the more set. It takes several passes thru a thickness sander to remove the surface scars. A lot of loss to kerf and really boring to do. On saws that can take them, a Wood Slicer blade leaves a surface similar to a tablesaw blade with minimal set. The downside is that the blades are bit expensive and they dull fairly quickly. No resharpening. Blades with carbide teeth can have their teeth resharpened or maybe replaced, but the steel backing that has been heavily flexed may gain micro cracks that migrate and join together. I consider the tooth resharpening factor on a carbide blade to be a specious selling point to justify the significant extra cost of a carbide blade. They do last much longer. They are likely more economical than the cost of the total number of Wood Slicer blades needed to last just as long.

A mask is still pretty much a necessity. The cloud of fine particles is impressive. You still want a shop vac sucking up the dust. At least in a garden, the vac will not make you deaf. I think that the sweet spot is ~1700 RPM for the drum. Faster will probably char and slower will make an already tedious operation last much longer. It would probably take a motor of 1/2 HP or greater to avoid it getting hot.

Endsor discusses lofting in his 17thC ship building books. Everything that I have read about lofting from then until ~1860 indicates that the same process was continuous or this whole range of time. The process is: Only the station cross sections from the Body plan were expanded from the design plan -usually 1:48 up to 1:1. The molds made from the 1:1 pattern contained "sirmarks" for the shape of the frames between each station. The shipwrights in the yard did not need to have their hands held to shape the intervening frames. It was master to apprentice - generation to generation. Now, Desmond and Estep come out of the insanity or scams for wooden merchant ship building because of Uboat losses that the new world of warfare that was WWI. They feature at least two practices that are a total break from the pre-1860 tradition. One is all bends with a space between each bend that is equal in width to be bend. Now, French and North American ship builders pre-1860 used all bends, often, if not most of the time. But the spaces were smaller. The most that I have seen is 2/3 timber and 1/3 space. More often than not it was less. At the time of the American Revolution the space was ~1" and often a pair of frames in a bend had 1" chocks so that there was a space in the middle of a bend. Two is that the outline of both faces of every frame was drawn on the loft floor. Instead of maybe 30 molds - there was a couple a hundred or more. Why this labor intensive extra work? I connected the dots: iron and steel replacing wood about 1860 iron and steel requite engineers and engineering precision that wood does not. the master to apprentice chain is broken because the new tech required different skills the new mould lofts translated the engineering practices over to the war emergency wooden ship building for lofting the timbers. No references - just speculation. How this applies to ship modeling: Charles Davis introduces POF to model shipbuilding and presents the methods and styles that he learned in the WWI shipyards as being the style of the 18thC and early 19thC. The earlier methods and builds were an entirely different tradition. He deserves all credit for encouraging POF, but we must go somewhere else for the proper what to do. Harold Hahn also used an all bends and room = space. I do not think that he did this because of what Davis wrote. Hahn was focused on the time of the American Revolution. The framing at that time had almost all wood. The spaces were 1-2" air gaps. There is not much visual interest in showing a POF hull with no below the wale planking if the frames on display are a solid wall of wood. If every other bend is omitted, the frames are a more interesting display. It also saves half the work and half the wood. Compared to planking a carved or POB hull, the volume of wood needed for frame timbers is 10 - 20 - 30 times that amount. The calculation is BF ( board feet ) not the number of strips. The loss to kerf and strange shapes cut from the stock is maybe 50%.

I think that Desmond describes a different species of wooden ships. The 1850s were the end of a long era of guild style shipwrights. It seems like there is a wall not too much later. The main stream changed to composite and then iron and steel. The generation to generation chain of passing of knowledge about wooden ship building was probably broken - except for minor and independent yards. The old lofting methods replaced with a translation of iron and steel lofting over to wood. The lofting of every frame was a new practice - taken from metal methods - metal is not open to variation on the fly. The all bends with intervening spaces equal to the bends in width was new. I would not trust Desmond to be relevant to any ship built before 1900 or so.

from American-Built Packets and Freighters of the 1850s Wm Crothers MacFarland & Co. 2013

For a water rinse, if your supply is hard water, it may be wise to use distilled water.

Would a clamping jig on a sliding table and a gang of slitting blades to make a dado be an easier solution?

I had an extra deep basement dug in July during a drought. It was stopped when limestone shale was hit in one corner. In the Bluegrass region of KY, the underlying rock is an an ancient sea floor and just as flat. It is a giant swimming pool. Turns out that for six months of the year, the water table was well above the floor of my basement. I became quite experienced with sump pumps, pipe flow volumes. It seems that constant pumping generates favored flow channels. The more you pump the more likely is ground water going to flow towards the pump. Larger volume pumps, larger diameter discharge pipes - where to place the outlet? a viscous cycle! Then there is the problem of electric power interruption during storms that are recharging the ground water. A generator. A normal home generator has a gas tank with limited time. An ice storm that crushed a lot of KY and had long transmission lines in Alabama snapped off like a row of dominoes and drawing off the repair crews from KY is going to require more time than you have gas for. I feel your nightmare. I do not miss living it. A wish for a basement decision do-over is something that I will take to my grave.

Here is a link for some supplementary information about skipjack construction: https://modelexpo-online.com/assets/images/documents/MS2032-Willie_L_Bennett-Instructions-web.pdf

It was a long while ago, but I a photo of an open sided assembly line decorator model production in Vietnam. The think the formula is: a country with a skilled, but under utilized work force, willing to work for much less than their skills are worth because their economy is temporarily stuck on a sandbar. When the economy recovers or has its initial bloom, this sort of operation probably has to reappear in the next country with the proper factors. There used to be something named Starving Artists - a large room with a lot of people, each behind their own easel, all copying a master painting projected at the front of the room. I imagine something similar for mass produced decorator models. I do not imagine someone just looking to earn enough for their next hit could be a satisfactory worker. Your two have something extra - the designer had an eye for elegant design, the lines have artistic curves. The wood is not pallet quality crap. It looks like Acer, or Beech or Birch. They are not actually ship models as we would define them here. They are simulacrum of ship models. Tasteful background decoration.

As for the request in the title of this post: rather than use something that is a cartoon and out of scale do a site search = silkspan low cost - it used to come in three weights - it or similar products might be available with those options from dealers catering to fabric covered flying aircraft builders. Those dealers may even have the heating irons with a curved surface and a power control knob which would be about the ideal tool for bending wood.

Underhill probably had the most influence on me. It is not just about scratch building. Beyond the hull fabrication, - the framing, what it has can be used to improve the various components that come with kits, too. When you build the various parts of a ship from raw materials, instead of using the kit supplied parts, you are well on your way to becoming a scratch builder. The final step makes you independent - except for obtaining suitable plans. There are a finite number of them, but more than enough for several lifetimes. That our subject is finite instead of open ended makes it approachable.

If you have a scroll saw, a bandsaw, or a hand frat saw, and a disk sander a near infinite variety of sanding block shapes and sizes can be freed from a cork yoga block. They are sorta large and cost ~$20. The sanding media can be attached using rubber cement or even with staples.

Actually, that is my view of the progression too. I think you have misread me. I see kits as the gateway. When I started, it was everyone for himself - find your own way. Early 1970's. There were hobby shops with owners who could help some with suggestions about subject choices. I sought no help, so I started with the Scientific kit for Sea Witch. A clipper is a very poor choice for a first kit. But the Scientific kits were not kits of serious models. They were decorator models. Simplistic in their components, and mostly impressionism when completed. I did not realize that at the time. Follow on was Eagle/Arrowsic topsail schooner - a rewarding build - augmenting it lead me into scratch. The Shipwright Series of kits is a very gentle introduction that does not cost all that much. It does not take long to get a finished product that provides positive feedback. Unless you have a professional background in fine woodworking or a youth or family involved in it, starting with scratch is a long shot proposition. A factor here, and one that I did not predict, is that a significant proportion of the members, probably a high percentage - see kits as an end in themselves. Their imaginations stop there. I can see why this is so, given the very high attrition rate with scratch and the strong current fad of including internal structures that are hidden with a fully planked and decked model. There is also a shared collegial aspect with the kit-centric community. Scratch builders tend to be cantankerous, independent, and more than a bit eccentric. There is probably a Masters if not a Doctorate in Psychology buried in defining the personality differences in these two groups.

Antonio, If you find yourself becoming a bit overwhelmed and frustrated, a broader perspective may help cement your interest in exploring all this. This is strictly my biased and outside observation, but I have a poor opinion of the old Mamoli kits. You are swimming with an anchor hanging from your neck, given the quality that you are working against. (the Mamoli name is under new management and is a subunit of a larger concern now I believe.) If wood and sail is to be your area of focus: It may give you a more realistic expectation if you ignore anything from plastic kit modeling except the painting skills. Those specific skills might put you ahead, since may of us view painting as a chore and afterthought. Often, any painting is done with wood. A firm grounding in our specific modeling skills can get you past frustration and perceived barriers. Consider starting from scratch. The Model Expo - Model Shipways -Shipwright series looks to be a low cost and rewarding path into all this. When I consider the possibility of a new scratch build, I check the build logs to see if anyone else has selected the ship. What I see is a casualty rate that makes what my Virginian forebears experienced with Pickett's Charge look like a walk in the park. I do not know about kits, but my guess is that it is also a heavy casualty rate.😉