Jaager

If you have not nicked the blade, or cut metal, it may be sufficient to strop the edge. A scrap piece of leather and a bar of green, gold, or rouge compound. "Color" the leather with the compound. Draw the blade away from the edge. It is good to do this after every few cuts. If you have really dulled the edge, a whetstone - most are now synthetic. - with these the edge leads the way. There are a ton of different but emphatic ways for how to do this out there for the Googling. It may be more time economical to discard the blades this time - tape them or something - to keep them from being porcupine quills thru the trash bag. With new blades, strop often and see if they last longer. There are #11 shaped knives with a wide range of widths - they are not disposable - they are also expensive.

I came across this company ( Wye River ) when I was looking to see if an old company that featured Bay centric small craft had come back to life - Midwest - I think it was. https://www.wye-river-models.com/shrimping-trawler.html I have no knowledge of its quality ( or lack of quality ) . The bow looks more open than the boats I saw at Morehead City, NC in the 70's and 80's.

I do not think I could cut and apply planks in a way that would match an optimistic subdivision for each plank width for the whole area from the beginning. If I was starting from scratch, I would start with two battens and define three zones. I may just use one side for both. It is tricky enough to lay the battens in a way that produces an elegant curve and divides the stem rabbet and stern rabbet with proper room for no drop planks being necessary. Time spent here at the beginning can save a lot of work and heartache later. If you were careful to have a symmetrical hull, trying to get the port batten to mirror the starboard batten may be unneeded. I would pick one side and spot - not bother doing the other one. The garboard would go on first. The P&S garboard. Then I would start at the wale and plank the upper zone P&S - using the same pattern for each strake. The planking fan is a convenient way subdivide. Rather than try to make the location for each strake at the start, I would begin anew at each strake. i.e.: If the upper zone is 8 strakes, use the fan to define 1/8th for the first strake. Mount it P&S. Measure the new gap and use the fan to define 1/7th, mount, measure 1/6th, 1/5th, etc. The last strake for upper zone could be where any difference P&S can be resolved, or go with matched pairs and fix it later. It depends on just how different they were. Next do the bottom zone next to the keel. The middle zone is where P can be measured and used there and S measured and done there. Either each strake or just the last one or two.

Make a few mock ups of planks and gaps. Test fillers on that. Then try your stain on the tests. A stain is a surface critter. It is pigment granules in a binder that sits on the surface. A semi-transparent paint. A dye is dissolved molecules that penetrate the wood and become part of it. If your wood is Basswood, a stain may be a good choice. The wood itself is not really something to celebrate with a dye and clear finish. If a filler and a stain do not work together, a shellac primer may turn the whole - filler and wood - into a surface that accepts a stain with no difference between patch and wood. For a dye, you may have to dye the wood flour before mixing it with white PVA (white drys clear) (yellow drys amber). Or, if the wood flour soaks up too much dye and is too dark, dye the wood before you sand it to make the wood flour (a pre-colored filler).

Thanks for presenting the option. This may be a reference in the future and I thought that a more complete map of this problem would be useful. I was not asking for me, The only anything synthetic that I allow myself is PVA and two part epoxy. I have always considered our project here to be a contest with myself. My rules being what I imagine was available to the English modelers in the 1670 era. But hot pot hide glue is just too much additional bother. No limits on power tools allowed though. The more tools I have- the better it is. I have maxed out on anything with a foot print though.

My first thought was either shellac or bookbinder's white PVA pH7. But I only consider natural fibers - mainly linen for my rope. I would guess that older kits featured cotton for rope material. Is not man-made synthetic polymer line making major inroads as scale rope material now? This material would lack the pores and gaps needed for PVA to bond. I know that shellac will play nice with polyurethane but will it hold as a layer on top of a plastic? What holds on a polymer line? @Univ of Saigon 68If your Bluenose is one of the old Scientific kits, the line is probably cotton, so shellac or PVA would be ideal. Has anyone reanimated the old Scientific brand name and started producing new material? The old kits were "mostly harmless" as a beginner kit and fun to build.

I am not a wood products scientist, I have not done the experiments to back this up. The available evidence seems to support: A strip of wood that is rectangular in cross section, does not "want" to bend in the thick plane. It will twist instead. The solution is to spill the plank. Start with a wide board and trace out the "S" shape of the plank shape needed on it. It is then cut out and the rest is spilled / spoiled in Cockney(?) -wasted. The wood species that you are using is a poor choice. The stock that you have is not wide enough to do its job. To bend wood, the lignin binder needs weaken its hold. Lignin is insoluble in water. What weakens its hold temporarily is heat. With a thick piece of wood, steam is an efficient way to get heat into the interior. At model plank scale, steam is usually not necessary. Heat alone will do the job. Water just swells the fibers and messes up a smooth surface. Soaking a plank may refill the cellulose tubes with water. What that does is undo all the time spent in seasoning (drying) it. Water will not reanimate it. It was actually dead while it was a part of a living tree. Wood will equilibrate with the water concentration in its atmosphere. Humidity varies with the weather. So does the water content in lumber but with a significant lag. It will not get drier than this, unless forced. Old brittle wood is just wood that has always been brittle. It was crap to begin with. Wood fibers are cellulose tubes. They really do not slide along each other all that much. They stretch and pull apart on one side and crush and kink on the other with a bend - if it is still growing the new layers can adapt. Some species are more forgiving in how much bending that they will allow. There is a limit for any species.

The second quote was not any sort of criticism. I was trying to say that the plan may be also valid for a shell first construction. In their zeal to protect their rice bowl, the shell first guild may have hidden methods that were sophisticated and technically complicated. The plan may actually reflect what they did. They did not need to do the work to draft a preliminary plan. On the first quote, I was in agreement with you. When I first read what was involved with shell first, I saw the initial form of the hull bottom as having a random factor - a -what Nature allows you- factor. The keel, stem and stern planned. The three frames planned. It obviously worked for them and they resisted fixing what was not broke well into the 18th century. I do not expect that the random possibilities for model scale wood planks to be a good predictor of what wood will allow on an actual full size build. I reacted to "experiment". I have a background in wet bench basic biochemical pharmacology. Experiment, to me, means a certain discipline is involved. (I was wise enough to realize that experimental science was a bad fit for me and I was fortunate enough to have a fall back gig that was lucrative enough.) If the term is meant in a colloquial sense, that sort of "experiment" does not have a p value to support the result. Someone who repeats it in exactly the same way, is not likely to get a different result. For a speculative model: When what information that does exist is used in an organized manner and best guess assumptions that are compatible with existing evidence is used to fill in the gaps, then valid or reasonable results are possible. The assumptions used to perform it need to be documented. It just takes the falsification of a basic assumption to invalidate. One of the assumptions would be a planned prediction of the bottom planking would do, rather than accepting what it does at model scale.

You may consider using a 2 inch thick "brick" of rigid Styrofoam wall insulation. PVC glue it to a plywood base and punch holes for your tools. Having multiple bricks - each oriented to a general task - they store on a shelf. Sharp pointed or edged tools are held vertical and the material does not affect the edge.

I was envisioning this key first step: the garboard and first belt of planking that would then be fixed in place using the floor timbers - as having its shape determined by the bending of the boards. A model can mimic what is thought to be shape of the original. Using it to predict what could have been allowed by full size planking pushed to its extreme is not likely to be a good technique. I see that assumptions and fudge factors come into play with a model. I was being somewhat absolute about the input for a true experiment in possible hull conformations allowed by the original methods. I see models as being excellent at replication. I see them as being limited as being predictors of the behavior of full size materials. Shipbuilding in the Age of Sail was entirely a series of one off experiments that had no real controls. The bad practices were obvious enough. Getting a hull with maximum efficiency was something that was only chased.

If the model was built the same way as the actual ship was built, a free floating shell - the result would probably be unreliable at best. The material - wood - is the same - more or less. The bending and other physical characteristics would not scale. Since Nature's math is Calculus, the differences due to scale would be more than a linear proportion. Trying to use the technique at scale as a predictor of full size behavior would probably yield a failure. If the full size shape was drawn, and scaled, and molds or frames made to that shape, these would be able to provide for a model that Was an accurate representation. England was using plans at this time - the method used was one of various derivatives of whole molding. The example with three frames and the stern structure is what was used to get the mathematical data on paper in whole molding. The batten part that came next was art and finesse for getting the lines. Those preliminary whole molding plans were probably enough to get the bureaucracy off their backs. Rather than try to get wood to match some planed shape, they took what the wood allowed them. Their battens were full sized on the ways, instead of slivers on a drawing board. It would be constant frustration for the customer that was a bureaucracy wanting cookie cutter predictability. It is frustration for those who wish to replicate in miniature what they built . Whole molding uses very basic geometric tools - straight lines and arcs. These guild based shipwrights were probably doing basically the same things. Instead of committing it to paper before they started, they probably did it either in their heads, or did drawings that were one off for each part and that were discarded after use. My bet is that the plans version of whole molding came from someone breaking the rules and committing to paper what the guild had been doing for quite a while. It just took a Royal to get too involved in the actual work for someone to gain profit by revealing guild secrets. For the actual ships at the time and in the place at issue here, we have no evidence that significantly sophisticated plans were used. The problem is: it is necessary to have these sort of plans to build a ship model that is an actual 'model'. It is a great gift from Ab Hoving and to our advantage that a way has come to us to generate plans for these otherwise lost vessels that way produces a reasonable approximation of their form and shape.. About Ab Hoving's place in this: To repeat myself, the skills and mental prospective required to be a pathfinder is different from the telephone sanitizers who follow on to tighten things up, apply the polish, and make a big deal of deficiencies the original path did not include. Pathfinders deserve honors and respect. They are rare and cannot be willed into existence. The education system is geared to produce an endless supply of telephone sanitizers. Their contributions are obviously useful but are only incremental.

Well, should you be mad enough to do it using the Station Sandwich Method, the likely response would not be wrath, it would be ....crickets.

I use the HF 4" ratchet clamps with the large grey wing nut - and as many as possible - because they can apply significant pressure. This for the frames within a section. A book press and plate press to join sections - helps but is not perfect - The surfaces at the FP and AP are often not directly opposite so the force lines do not play nice for final assembly sometimes. But then, there are many areas on any ship model where significant clamping pressure is difficult. I can use a basic raster drawing program to get my patterns. The curves are line segments instead of smooth curves, They look like curves and the sanding makes them smooth curves. The process is hands-on with very few commands - only the basic - DRAW, CUT, PASTE. An almost flat learning curve.

I use a 9" bandsaw with a 1/4" blade and a Carter Stabilizer. The blade swings on its back edge like a screen door. What I am suggesting here allows for a more refined cut for the outside face. There are no alignment pins outside the body of the frames, so the actual frame shape can be got at. For real POF the stack of frames between each station is thick. For the station intervals other than the dead flat - the curve of the hull has almost no areas where a perpendicular thru the stack would be inside the body of the frame. The alignment pins must be outside the frames. The scroll cut is then sort of close enough not to be toooo fat - but not slice into the pin sites. The timbers are mostly sort of rectangles. The cut goes quickly. When a stack of frames is glued up, what you do with hand tools, I do using a belt sander or drum sander with 80 grit medium. The identical pattern is on both faces of the stack so I can get fairly close and have an accurate bevel. The fine work is 220 grit on the drum. Now, at the two or three stations at the bow and stern, the bevel is impressive. The amount of extra wood to remove takes time and the volume of dust makes for a good desert sand storm. I had M-95 masks on hand when SARS-2 hit. The outside is never all that difficult to shape. It is the inside that is challenging. At the ends, especially the stern, where the slope gets acute, getting at the area of the keelson requires hand tools. It takes time and gets frustrating. Because I am working with segments, I can take the work to the tools. I can manipulate the work at a stationary tool. For this project, the stern is not like that and the inside is mostly not needing much work. It can be most anything - since it will be hidden. Only if RC was the goal, would the inside need any attention. The inside can be left fat enough for the alignment pins to be inside and be inside all the frames in a section. I would even use bamboo skewers inside of steel quilters pins and glue them in. One factor with the Station Sandwich Method is that it is power tool heavy. Because the frame thicknesses must be precise and uniform, because there are so many frames, it requires a lot of wood. It almost makes it necessary to be your own sawmill. But I guess any sort of scratch POF requires that.

I can't get anyone else to eat the mushrooms or drink the Kool-Aid, but the Station Sandwich Method can be a fairly rapid way to construct a hull. In this instance the troublesome factors are not a part of it. That would be worrying about the spaces - there are none and making the individual timbers match the lengths of the prototype vessel - all that is needed is for the grain to be as straight as practical in each segment and making the moulded dimension match the original and the inside be faired - fatter is better since the alignment can be here and rough does not matter. It might need some attention if a motor and radio equipment would live there. The method that I am suggesting does not need a building board or alignment jigs. The pieces internally align themselves. The size of bread and butter or buttock layers makes for more hand chisel and hand power sanding. A body station section of layers is small enough to take the work to a belt or drum sander. I was guessing that the OP was interested in multiple copies or providing a data file that would direct a laser cutter for customers. Both of the other solid/hollow hull methods use stock that is too large for a laser cutter. If a laser can cut 1/8" Pine, then each frame would be - what? 16 feet in scale? It would be about 50 layers for a 850 foot hull? With straight timber segments, fairly efficient use of a board could be laid out. I suspect that the laser could "paint" the sand-to lines and alignment hole drill points directly on a board.

Perhaps you should back things up a step or two. Although I admit to seeing POB as being too hideous to be used for much of anything, in this situation I think the problems with it transcends my obvious prejudice. It does not fit will with iron or steel construction. A scale of 1:192 is beyond the capabilities of the technique. Trying to fight Nature by over scaling the materials to try to force strength where it does not reasonably fit is why you are proposing an under size for mold surface area and overly thick shell material. A POB wooden hull has a longitudinal shell (planking) that spans multiple molds. The shell members butt on alternating and widely spaced molds. You may have to use planking strakes to pull off what you propose. The problem is that your hull is 4-8 times longer that most wooden hulls. If the molds are close enough together, a single layer of planking should suffice. The length of the hull will have it wanting to bow and break. The stress will probably require a total planking layer that is inappropriately thick. That it is planking will make it difficult to get the flat planes that are desired. The old wooden hull guys probably would have wanted to have a longer hull. The physical properties of wood limited their possibilities. There is no answer in the back of the book for your question. If you are determined to continue on your proposed path, the likely answer is that you will have to do the experiment yourself. If you can find find a practical combination of spine thickness, mold thickness, shell thickness, then you can tell us The real answer is to build a solid hull. A hull that is exactly the finished dimension and use as thin a material as can be had to cover it. @Roger Pellett both of our methods fail the Navy standards according to what @Bob Cleek presented. Your two half hulls makes it easier to manage, but the Navy does not like the midline seam. My method is beyond their imagination - probably because it is WWII era and PVA had not been developed. The species of Mahogany that they want has been loved to death and is no longer available. Boo - on the Basswood.

In which case, a straight forward hull construction would be to use a version of POF for the smooth hull. The hull would look like a loaf of sliced bread, upside down and hollowed out. It can be as hollow as you wish. It is easier if the moulded dimension is thick enough for dowels (bamboo skewers) to be used for alignment. Clear Pine that is maximum thickness for a laser for the "frames". The frames are more economical if they are three 'timbers" alternating with five "timbers". No spaces. The "frames" first assembled as station sections. The sections shaped and then joined. Clamps and beams added later for the deck. If Titebond III and the plating bonded and coated to be waterproof, nothing major extra would be needed for an R/C version.

Your subject is steel navy? The lines are the outside dimensions? The hull would be steel plates, not wooden planks. A double layer of strakes of wood = not an authentic look. If there are enough molds, one layer should be enough. The plating can be 3x5 cards. A primer that soaks in and sets up hard = stiff enough to resemble steel? In this case, the thickness may be adding so little that the outside lines can be used as is. The actual ship plans should provide plate diameters. A riveted or welded seam would have a support behind it. The thickness of the molds = how thick will your laser penetrate and not leave a wedge behind? In the situation of a double layer of wooden planking and starting with outside lines, Once you decide on how thick you want each layer to be, the sum of the two is how much is subtracted. If it is a kit that you manufacture, the species for each layer, the thickness that you can obtain, and be sure will be available for as long as the kit is being manufactured - the price - your choice. If it is just plans, and a builder must source materials, the thickness is determined by what can be easily obtained. A wooden sail vessel at 1:192, This is miniature scale. I would question POB being at all practical.

Theory here: It is difficult to get an acceptable finish on a gunport by cutting it and finishing the sides of the cut. It may be a successful procedure to make the opening oversize and inserting a frame of a sill and lintel and having a veneer layer where the frame timbers would be. If you are set on all rectangular openings, the same jig can be used for every port on a particular deck to glue up the framing. It is then a matter of shimming each frame. If the frames are mounted before placing the outside planking, .....

You may wish to explore what is realistic as far as what is the compensation for a ship model built from a kit. The impression that I get is that they sell for about what is retail for the original kit. It is possibly different for a scratch built model of a unique subject built by someone with an existing reputation as an artist, Even then, based on a dollars per hour, it is unlikely to match what a skilled senior professional in the trades would receive. For a kit, red state minimum wage is probably a dream.

An aspect of gunports that seems to be often missed: The sides of the ports are parallel to the frames, not perpendicular to the LWL. The sills and lintels are parallel to the deck at the port location. In the middle there is little or no difference port to port. At the ends, each port is individual in shape. The ports are parallelograms with vertical sides. A stick used as a gauge for every port on a particular deck produces an inauthentic result. The gun truck or skid sits on the deck. The barrel tracks parallel to the deck.

A traditional froe is a wooden handle with a right angle straight blade at the bottom. It was used to split out Cedar shingles. The blade is a wedge that splits along the grain instead of cutting the wood. The wood peels apart. I have a smaller version - sort of looks like a paint stirring stick in shape - from a Japanese tool site - it was designed to split Bamboo. You make a new yard - it is straight when finished - the wood was from a dowel - the dowel came from the outer part of the board and the grain is curved - over time, the yard seeks equilibrium - the rest of the board is gone, so no restraint - and it follows the grain - I am just calling the bend "a dog's leg". I do not know of any actual spars that are anything but straight - so dog's leg is slang for an unwanted bend. Spar is the umbrella term for masts, yards, and booms. I do not know if it is official, but it seems to be. I do POF. I use all bends - (two paired frames with each overlapping each butt joint of the other) - I like tight gaps - the closer the join, the stronger the bond. No wood to wood joint will have enough PVA squeeze out to starve the joint (in a healthy situation)- especially if both surfaces are 100% covered first - wood is hydrophyllic - unlike metal - and too much clamping pressure (unhealthy) would crush the outer wood fibers before too little PVA is left . I guess Basswood could too easily crush, but I class that species as being inappropriate for much of anything important. For my needs, the Irwin clamp was a failure. Another factor is to not use too fine a grit sanding medium on a wood surface that will be at a glue joint. I like 220 but that is right at the edge of being too smooth. The wood wants some "tooth". Too fine a surface and it becomes metal-like.

Dowels are made using a punch type cutter. The grain is often not dead straight. If the grain is at a slope or angle - over time the dowel may follow the curve of the grain. Using a froe on a straight grain board to split out straight grain sticks to turn into spars may save having a model with dog leg spars. I use a lot of 4" ratchet clamps. I want squeeze out pressure. The Irwin clamps that I have are poor at generating any sort of pressure. The only ones that I found that work to my needs are the HF clamps with the big grey wing nut. The Widget Supply, MM, and small grey nut HF clamps have not done the job for me.

Unlike plastic, it is neigh on to impossible to totally ruin a wooden ship kit. Worse comes to worst, all of the material can be replaced with the natural material from outside sources, and started over as scratch. It is better schooling too. One of the tricks with carving is to use tools that work well. For more than light removal, StewMac has a pair of small razor files that are peachy keen. For the sort of sanding that the hull needs, it is probably better to always have a wood backing on the sandpaper. Rubber cement - both surfaces coated, allowed to dry, and joined, fixes the paper to the backing and makes for easy renewal. No matter how badly the hull looks, it will still look better than any POB hull - unless the POB hull is totally filled between the molds. And if that is done, it is essentially the same as a carved hull. It is difficult to irreversibly damage a solid wood hull. If too much is removed, the loss can be replaced. If it is just a little, wood flour mixed with PVA makes a very strong layer, but it will be tougher to remove than the original wood after it sets up. For a deeper patch, scab a layer of wood veneer - Pine works. When you get the shape to match your templates, even if it is ugly, that is easy to hide. The kit may offer this suggestion, but a solid carved hull makes an excellent support for a layer of actual planking. The planking wood should be thin and of a scale appropriate species of hardwood. Being thin, the planks can be properly spilled by using a steel straight edge and a sharp knife. Since the hull is being gridled beyond its dimension, thin is best. Using an appropriate species of wood can turn a chore into a joy. The model will look better.

Before there was synthetic organic chemistry , begun in Germany in the latter part of the 19th century, paint pigments were naturally occurring minerals. The minerals are the same color today, so there is not much guess work about the colors and the pallet is somewhat limited. In their early monographs, ANCRE included a page with patches of colors.