Jaager

Bill, You are potentially golden. In your place, I would see if the local club has a member with a large band saw. If there is one, see if he is willing to let you use it. If yes, find out the length of the blades on his machine. Go to Band Saw Blades Direct and order one or two Lenox bimetal Diemaster 2 4 tpi 1/2" by 0.025" blades. All steel have a short life and carbide does not last enough longer than bimetal to justify paying 3 times more for it. It would be pushing charity too far to use a donor's blade for a serious number of cuts. As a beginner in scratch building, it would be practical to forego using expensive fad/cachet species that are imported and use less expensive locally available species, at least until you have enough experience not to have to ask. I would see if I could make friends with Riephoff Sawmill or similar. See if you can get 4x4 or 8x4 domestic hardwood of the proper species. The commercial ones are Hard Maple, Black Cherry, Yellow Poplar, outside possibility Honey Locust. Kiln dried, If there is a local kiln that caters to civilians, you can get fast access to self harvested species. Otherwise it is billet, seal, stack, sticker in a out of the way sheltered and ventilated location, and wait years. Local species that are worth the bother = Dogwood, Apple, Pear (both fruit and ornamental) Plum, Hawthorn. The next stage is a thickness sander. I have homemade and Byrnes. Byrnes is worth the cost. Once you have one dimension from the sander, it is time for a table saw for planks, etc. Again, Byrnes is worth the extra cost.

Once you have the hatch coming piece positioned on the sled - against the stops - hold it down with a large piece of wood with a hollow that just fits the coming - maybe even involve double sided tape - to keep your fingers away from the blade. You can even form the hollow from two pieces of wood and the tape so that you can reuse the cover piece for different sized stock. A few extra minutes spent on safety can save a lot of time spent on healing. I think that a table saw is about as dangerous as it gets for a motorized cutting tool.

If the content is public domain, they could be scanned, converted to PDF and posted online. An online search lists the publishing company as being dissolved. Or, it looks like a job for Dover.

Tom, One thing to check = on many warships, the gun ports are parallelograms and not rectangles. The sides are vertical ( or in the plane of the frames ). The sill and lentil follows the slope of the deck at its location and not the LWL or horizon.

Gaetan, Back in post #657, you wrote about working at different scales. To offer an alternative way to look at this: yes, the model @ 1:24 is twice as long as the one @ 1:48. However, it is also twice as wide and twice as deep. S0, 2 x 2 x 2 = 8. The model @ 1:24 is 8 times larger than the one @ 1:48. Going the other way, when you were at true miniature @ 1:192 it is 0.015 the volume of 1:48. Even @ 1:96 , the difference is actual size is more than it first appears. The 1:48 is 8 times larger at this common reduction in scale I am sure that the 1:24 model is using more that twice the number of board feet of lumber. Maybe a little less than than 8 times more, since the loss to kerf is a smaller proportion,since that is a fixed amount.

Jarrod, Do yourself a favor, saving yourself pointless stress and buy a copy of both books. If 17th C. Dutch is a focus, then you will want both anyway. You are lucky if you can still buy a copy of The Ships of Abel Tasman. The time window is not as long as you imagine it to be.

I saw this somewhere recently: the bits/ drives are generally inexpensive - the suggestion was to have a copy of the proper bit/drive in each screw container. Maybe a piece of Gorilla double stick tape on the top or under it to hold the bit.

The type of headache may help in determining the cause. Muscles at the back of the head along the spine = tension Like a skull cap = the blood vessels Above the eyes and nose - sinus If the source is an organic solvent - which is a gas, I am not sure that a mask that excludes physical particles would be of much help. Activated charcoal might bind it, but that is a process subject to saturation. Isolating the paint to an air volume that is not one where you are breathing could solve the problem if that is the source.

PVA bonds by long chains going into pores and irregularities on the two mating wood surfaces. If there are no pores, there is no attachment places for the chains. A purpose for a sealer or filler is to block the pores and provide a smooth surface. Since two part epoxy is used to bond metal to metal or metal to wood, its method of bonding is different. The sealed surface should bond - to a point. The strength then depends on the attachment of the sealer to the wood. Epoxy tends to be kind of messy when compared to PVA for wood to wood. CA is not a tool that I use, but again, if used on a sealed surface, the strength devolves to that of the sealer to the wood. If you have ever seen paint or clear finish flaking from a surface, then you know this bond is not reliable on a planet with an oxygen atmosphere and water vapor also present. A tedious resolution is to plan ahead and use a masking agent to protect the bonding surface from any sealer or paint. After the fact, a solution would be to protect the sealed or painted surface with a masking agent and abrade the sealer from the bonding surface using a file or sanding stick or sand paper or scraper.

With at least one other French liner, the sill was curved, with a dip at the center. Here, this is a step rather than a groove. It probably has something to do with the heavy barrels of the large caliber main guns. I would probably do Le Fleuron lower deck sills as a curve rather than a step. I have no idea if these guns were ever traversed. Given their weight, it would take something like a substantial peavey. I suspect that the sill having an arc was a solution to something that was not a problem to begin with. As drawn, the open end grain at the step would increase the possibility of fungal rot.

Yup, it is highly probable that the cause of your problem is using an improper blade. A rip cut of relatively thick ply is best done using a blade with many fewer teeth with much deeper gullets. This will require the blade to be thicker. The kerf will be wider. If you tried this using the significantly more powerful Byrnes saw, the ply would probably be scorched along the cut and the blade getting hot enough to affect its tempered strength. The physics of it would be the same and the teeth would still not cut thru much of the wood. I guess that you could feed the ply slowly enough not to fill the gullets. It would be no fun atoll to take that long for a cut and be an example of false economy.

How many teeth per inch on your blade? Trying to cut a 1/8" sheet of ply with a slitting saw would have too many teeth in contact with the stock = prematurely filled gullets and increased friction. The ideal is something like 3 teeth in contact with the stock. That can vary on any single blade depending on how high the blade is raised and thus - the angle of attack.

Alan, Yes. I think that it is possible that the acidic pH could affect natural cellulose based rigging. By this, I mean linen and cotton. Titebond II is pH 3 and Titebond III is pH 2.5. In a wood to wood bond the volume and density of the cellulose should minimize any pH effect. Rigging line is neither dense nor high in volume. The lower pH could accelerate the adverse reactions with 02 and UV light over time. This possible problem is avoided by using pH 7 PVA. Bookbinders see a need for it to preserve paper, which is also cellulose. I take their hint to heart. As for beeswax, I think it is also acidic and also may have trace amounts of digestive enzymes. I think Renaissance Wax is a safer option. Except for PVA itself, I avoid any use of man made / synthetic materials, so I have no idea about the effects of pH on synthetic fibers. I suspect that like PE, it is possible that the original polymerization reaction that produced these fibers may continue at a low rate over time in the presence of 02 and UV. The increased cross linking would make it rigid and brittle and subject to being shattered under any stress.

Before you hang it under weight, wet it lightly using a cloth soaked with a ~50% solution or lower concentration of bookbinders glue - neutral pH PVA. It will stiffen the line, is archival quality, dries clear and if the amount used is not excessive, will not leave an outside coating. Woodworkers glue - white or yellow PVA is very acidic and the more water resistant the type the lower is its pH.

Randy, http://www.taubmansonline.com/ plans Historic ship plans Red Jacket The parent is Loyalhanna Dockyard. As far as I know William Crothers was Sea Gull plans and he developed all of them. If you have CD 1 of NRJ you can see the add for Sea Gull Plans as he was an advertiser.

These should not yellow, although I will probably go thru a couple of packs to obtain the skill necessary to get the shape right in breaking this thin fragile glass to size.

Controlling any yardarm is quite easy. The yardarm is the very end of a large yard. It is usually a smaller diameter than the yard it is a part of and there is a right angle surface at the transition. It allows for a secure attachment for the rigging/blocks that control the angle of the yard. I think I have seen drawings of possible temporary jury rigs for a broken mast in rigging books.

I just flashed on this: there are razor saws that are thin enough and with a large number of teeth and minimal set. With a carbide cutoff wheel, a blade might be reshaped into a dagger conformation and do the job. It would be messy to cut and kinda ugly, but it may do. example = Zona 35-050 Ultra Thin Razor Saw, 52 TPI.008-Inch Kerf, Blade Length 4-1/2-Inch It would cost you $12 and some time to find out.

Ed, Before I left 3DCG and returned to wood, I had Blender on my look into list, being free. It has polygon and NURBS modelers. I do not see any purpose in adding a program like CAD into your process. I suspect that CAD has a steeper learning curve for modeling. I am betting that any additional precision that CAD offers will be lost when translated into something that Blender uses. The rendering and lighting will be a whole nuther thing. I suspect that actual physical modeling may be a faster process, especially if a wood model does not involve the hidden innards.

Mark, I completely agree. Following the Dutch methods as they evolved shell first to frame first construction shows how the framing style evolved. The timber ventilation problem could have been somewhat abated by using 1"-2" chocks to produce a space. I have seen RN plans where the bends had a gap. But it is not something I would care to replicate in a model. There is another possible reason that the overlapping floor and first futtock style was abandoned. In investigating framing Le Saint Philippe using the Navy Board pattern, I found that both the floor timbers and the first futtocks would have been impossibly long. The arc that each described would require that the stock be unrealistically wide. Oaks do not generally have 15-20 foot diameter trunks. (The monograph shows a modern framing style using bends. I suspect she was an experiment. But, in an attempt to solve a strength problem that did not require a solution, the designer doomed the ship to accelerated fungal rot. The timbers did not just meet at the mid line, there is an alternating table joint.)

Ummm..... did not the guys who essentially started all this in the 17th C. often build models with exposed frames, with framing that was highly stylized ? It all comes down to what is your purpose for a particular build. It may be satisfying to produce an academic model, but the museums that would appreciate the effort do not seem to be very interested in models. A fictional Lexington would be a poor choice in any instance. An obviously stylized POF effort using a plans documented subject, should not confuse a distant future historian. I see no problem with duplicating what is known and filling in the blanks with what is probable based on available evidence and adding a bit of art as regards the framing. The open framing of an actual ship was likely very ugly and irregular. About Davis, to repeat myself, I think he represented a building method that was heavily influenced by the methods needed for iron and steel hulls. The chain of knowledge for all wood construction of master to apprentice was broken about 1860. The old methods were lost.

I use 9x11 sheet sandpaper. Use the disk as a template for a knife. Coat the disk and the back of the paper with rubber cement. I use Besttest, but Elmer's should do. It holds just fine and rubs off the disk with your thumb when a new disk is needed. The rubber cement precludes using 10X sandpaper. The 10X has a no-slip coating that is not compatible with rubber cement. The 3X paper is plain paper. There is a cloth backed that comes in 5" wide rolls from Klingspor. My local Woodcraft sells it by the foot - I think the 5 1/8" may be part of their stock. It is a bit more robust than I need.

I have been collecting data for a while. My attitude towards this is - close enough is good enough - I will take a sword to this Gordian Knot rather than let usually insignificant detail deter me from undertaking a project. The material in question is wood. There are limitations on strength vs load and the dimensions needed to obtain that strength that have not changed. Unless you are building a cross section model, it is very difficult to see minor differences in moulded dimensions. Sided dimensions - in the usual situation where the numbers are not available, I use tables of scantlings that as close in time as I can get. If you have room and space (R&S) - those are the outside limits. This usually a bend (two frames) and the open area to the next bend. The scantlings usually give you the sided dimension for a frame. R&S minus 2xframe = space. Worst comes to worst and you do not have R&S, the distance between stations is an integral of R&S. That integral varies with the style of the designer of the vessel. I have seen that integral go from R&S x 2 to R&S x 8. (HIC copied what the original draftsman provided and I feel that the original draftsman for USS Falmouth was lazy. For the plans for that ship, the stations are too widely spaced.) 1670 - DEANE'S DOCTRINE OF NAVAL ARCHITECTURE 18th C. Yedlinsky's collection - Mungo Murray 19th C. Richard Meade's Treatise American Bureau of Shipping Rules I have 1870, 1885, 1903 John Griffiths Ship-Builder's Manual

An efficient way would be to scab on pieces of wood veneer and sand it to shape. A question that I have from time to time = If it is a first layer of planking on a POB built and the gaps being filled are between planks, Why even use a filler? The real planking will cover the gaps. If there is a significant hollow, the molds being too widely spaced, scabbing wood there would provide a more secure surface for the real planks.

To confuse the situation, digital calipers and electronic calculators allow the choice of scale that is not limited to integrals of the Imperial scale. Facing your same dilemma, I looked at the model as a 3D object. I also like the level of detail possible with museum scale (1:48). I also wish to have my "fleet" all at the same scale. Ships of the line tend to of an imposing size at 1:48. I did some back of the envelope calculations, using 1:48 as the baseline. 1:60 = 50% of the volume 1:70 = 33% 1:76 = 25% 1:96 = 12.5% I chose 1:60 in the hope that the level of detail would be close, with a less imposing size. I framed the 118 gun Le Commerce de Marseille wishing to do both proof of concept for my method and see the size. I admit, the size still has me a bit addlepated.