Jaager

This may not apply to your drill press, but then again it may, and for a mill design even more so: a limitation is throat depth - having more than you need is better than not having enough. Material cost, racking forces, and machine foot print are practical restrictions, but I like to over engineer things.

I remember a long ago suggestion: Cut off the tip of a nail and secure the butt end into the center of the mast step- with just the tapered tip of the nail showing. It holds the heal of the mast but allows adjustment if needed. The wedges and shrouds should suffice for the correct angle.

Since you are in a more tropical region, your choice of local hardwood will probably be different from what we in the temperate zone have available. If you have a local hardwood merchant with milling services you may be able to obtain timber stock at a lower cost than mail order import. Acer sp. (Maple), Pyrus sp. (Pear), Citrus sp. (most trees are too small to interest commercial interests, but you may get lucky. Malus sp. (Apple) is ideal but you may be too far South. Ideally, you want : hard, tight grain, closed pore, straight grain with little or no contrast. The more boring, better it scales down. A dealer should be able to help. Check with local woodworkers for resaw and thickness planning help.

What is your country/state of residence? What full size tools do you have? If you are not building something that flies, Balsa is a very poor choice. In a built up ship/boat model, the weight of the wood is of little or no consequence. To get it to float and not roll over, ballast will be required. Although any species of Oak is an inappropriate choice, a TV show re: Mary Deare (?) showed that a characteristic of Red Oak makes it a specially poor choice: it is very porous. Air can be blown thru it.

I made 3 layer ply using thin cherry and Titebond II. It worked well. With PVA, the strength of the bond increases as clamping force increases. Use two totally covering dead flat surfaces with as much pressure as you can get up to fiber crush and leave it to dry for 48 hrs. Contact cement is not long term stable. I would not trust 3M 77 long term either. The marine adhesives advantage is in its ability to hold while experiencing long term immersion. Unless you are building a pond craft that will store afloat, I don't see the need for these adhesives, Higgins Boats and PT Boats full size sure.

The color of the pine tar looks to me like Walnut. In another thread here, EdT recommended: Liberon VDC250G 250g Van Dyck Crystals http://modelshipworld.com/index.php?/topic/12532-rigging-stain/#comment-382312 The darkness of the dye is a concentration dependent result. The pine tar effect should be obtained by a high concentration of the dye. The result should be a quick drying and wax accepting line. Using actual tar looks like it involves unnecessary problems. Never drying and sticky makes it a dust magnet and a bear to clean up. The graphic above re-enforces the suitability of Walnut as a simulation of the tar used on standing rigging and a very dilute version as a dye for running rigging.

Just setting up at beginning? Is a lot to spend on a machine with limited application in POF. The up/down action wants to move my work. Instead, consider: a 14" bandsaw with an 1/8" blade and a Carter Stablizer - tight cuts can be scrolled It is true that the blades have more set, so there is more work for a drum/spindle sander to do ( tilting table here is mostly useless) to finish to the line. as well as a good quality disc sander. If you get a bandsaw with a 2 HP motor, you have saw mill / resaw resources that can save wood costs You will need a thickness sander though. It is probably more work than it is worth to try to adapt a spindle sander to replicate a thickness sander = a fence problem. A first rate like Victory will require a model scale forest at 1:64 / 1:48

For Pear: I found some short split pieces at a local supplier of wood to those who smoke meat. Another possible source - local tree removal companies. Any species of Pear works well, what is sold as Swiss Pear is actually Pyrus communis that has been steamed to produce a uniform pink color. It is European Common Pear and is often used as root stock for fruit bearing varieties. What you will likely find here is Bradford or a similar ornamental or a fruit bearing variety.

I am not sure when it became the practice but rock salt was used as a frame preservative. There were salt stops above the air gaps in the ceiling in the spaces. Pitch or tar would have an adverse effect in frames. By not peretrating deeply into the wood, the net effect would be to seal water inside the timber and support fungus growth. I think the RN used stock that had been held in brine pools when they could. The salt would have time to penetrate and preserve. The wood was said to be really hard and difficult to adz or drive a spike into. When we get into the weeds in discussing actual framing practice as opposed yo how contemporary model were presented, air gaps between paired frames and at butt joints - how much and how wide are questioned. The trick was to use well seasoned timber stock. With a rule of thumb of one year per inch if thickness, is it any wonder that a first rate with 11" x 11" up to 15" x 15" inch timber bulks had rot problems because unseasoned stock was used? Takes planning and a crystal ball to have timber seasoning 15 years before you need it. Raw wood exposed to sun and rain does not fair all that well. My guess is that a hulk held in frame on the ways probably had a shed like structure protecting it.

Adding 91% Iso rubbing alcohol from a pipette kills the adhesive on the tape and does not raise the grain. Doug, while it may seem cost effective to use the leftover wood, a visit to a local woodworker supply store may supply you with veneer from a species of wood with finer grain. The strength of Hard Maple allows it to survive manipulation that weaker species do not. With the use of a wood dye, a light species can be made darker.

For the narrow: ( I would/do use a piece of thick safety glass as a working surface- dead flat and easy to clean.) Double stick tape will hold the wood to the surface - Scotch yellow releases with isopropyl OH if pealing damages the wood. A piece of scrap outboard will keep the ruler level. Tape under the ruler may keep it from moving and finger print oil may make it just sticky enough to not move shearwise yet easily release ortho.

To be precise, a sail would not be attached to a halyard. The sail would be attached to the jackstay that is mounted on top of the yard and the halyard is attached to the yard. Halyard = haul yard - the line used to raise and lower this spar. Doing a quick search online - my guess is that a continuous line was run around the jackstay and down thru the grommets along the top of the sail - sort of a weave. That way - only one knot would need be reversed to unbend the sail.

From a strictly theoretical OP and no background reading: When using water based solvent - you need air flow to pull the over spray to the back - but not so much that the actual spray is affected? Would one or more DC computer cooling fans produce enough negative air flow? How about using used corrugated cardboard boxes as raw material for the structure? Three layers glued up with PVA is fairly strong and 1/4" - 1/2" sticks can re-enforce the corners. LED lights do not weigh much, so a strong structure is not needed to hold them up. The joins could be duct tape so that it could be stored flat and not take up much room.

You can probably minimize this problem: Treat the surface with an application of 5-10% PVA wood glue in water and let it dry. Sand/scrape the surface and then use the aniline dye. The swelling fibers would be much less with the second . Aniline wood dyes also come as Iso/ethyl alcohol soluble to avoid swelling wood fibers. The cost is that the dye does not penetrate as deeply as water base dye.

You ask about scale. The gold standard is 1:48. This is museum scale for sailing ships. The original plans were usually drawn using this scale. It allows for being able to include a lot of detail on a model. The problem is that the model tends to be large. If you live in Downton Abbey this is not so much a problem. But, not many of us do. The Constitution is a very large frigate. It could easily support the additional decks to turn it into a 74 gun ship - a 3rd rate. The Constitution at 1:48 has a hull that is close to 4 feet long without spars. Kits for most any ship tend to be designed around a standard length of hull, so, the larger the ship the smaller the scale. When you get to models at 1:96 or smaller, you are getting into the miniature range. This gets from a skill and craft talent into an artist talent area. It gets into an scale where wood does not work or fit so easily. The Constellation is a problem because of the controversy about which vessel it is. There were two. One was a frigate built at the end of the 18th C.. It was not a giant like the Constitution, but was about 20 feet shorter. The other was a Sloop-of-War - the last purely sailing warship at least of its class and was built in the middle of the 19th C. To trick Congress, the original was broken up as the 2nd was being built beside it and this was called a rebuild. The city of Baltimore owns the 2nd vessel, but deluded itself into thinking that it was the first that had been repaired instead of being the total replacement that it was and they built 18th C detail onto a 19th C ship. The result was an anachronistic hodge podge. Depending on the kit, you could get vessel 1, vessel 2, or the Baltimore version.

I am not sure if it is a anti counterfeiting requirement but there is a good chance that a direct copy using the common 3in1 scanner/printers will not be identical to the original. I must scale up 102.5% for identity..

If you are willing to pay for imported wood, then a domestic alternative may be to see if there is a shop near you that sells milled hardwood to cabinet makers and wood workers. Your domestic equivalent of Acer sp. (Maple) Pyrus sp. (Pear) Malus (Apple) Prunus (Cherry) would be ideal. It is just that most of these are trees that are not large enough to interest full size wood workers. You want something with a grain that most would consider boring - no contrast. The species in the US named Ash and Gum are probably not what we want but the domestic OZ species using these names look promising. If you find something with closed pore, tight and straight grain - it may be less expensive to have them rip and plane 30 - 40 bdf than import something. A 9 inch or 10 inch bench top bandsaw with 1/8" blade may substitute well for a scroll saw. You can also use it for little league resawing with a wider blade.

Mac, Yes, it is 'C". A parallelogram is a closed structure with two pairs of parallel lines. The sides are parallel and the top/bottom are parallel. They meet at something other than 90 degrees. If they meet at 90 degrees, they have a special name: square/rectangle.

I am pretty sure that the gun ports are parallelograms. The frames define the sides and the deck decides the sill and lentil. If you look at framing diagrams of English warships of the 18th c and 19th c you will see that they used some fairly elaborate positioning to shift their frames so that whole timbers made up the sides. From my observations, the French and Americans rolled the dice and cut into the timbers to get the gun ports where they wanted them. Or let the frames define the gun port location.

I used what Davis called hutchocks. Pre-drill for a pin and have a piece of scrap wood between the head of the pin and the plank. After pulling the pin, a bamboo trunnel is used to fill the hole. Brass pins. Sometimes they do not want to come out and have to be nipped and filed flush. I see a lot of French models that use brass trunnels and am starting to like the look, so nipping and filing all the brass seems like a good way to go. On an old Maple planked Kate Cory, the bamboo is standing proud after 20-30 years. Not sure if the Maple srunk or the bamboo swelled, but if it was the bamboo,, brass will not do that. Not sure what I would do if I worked at 1:72 or smaller.

If a structure is to last- pre-bending and pre- shaping is necessary. If the wood "wants" to spring out to reach equilibrium and glue is the only restraining force, over time equilibrium is likely to prevail. There is a fairly common misconception that with wood and wood glue is is possible to "stave" a joint with too much clamping pressure. It would take pressures that destroy the wood to do this. Highly polished metal to highly polished metal - I can see this happening. Wood to wood - the higher the clamping pressure the stronger the bond - with PVA glue. Probably the same with CA - don't use it myself. With POB construction and plywood moulds, I can see a starved bond problem with the first layer of planking - if the open edge is not pre-treated with glue to fill the cavernous pores of the end grain. I think with planking the goal should be to use as much pressure as possible right up to the level that dents the surface of the plank. That also means that the surface of the clamp that bares on the plank should be a large as possible.

When you neutralized the nitric acid with sodium bicarbonate, the reaction would have been essentially instantaneous. The result would have been sodium nitrate ( CO2 and H2O). If the continued darkening was due to what you are guessing, it would just mean that you did not use enough bicarb. The probability is that you used a surplus of bicarb and if anything, you stain was slightly basic. My guess would be that oxygen is involved with the change. If the iron was a large piece, There would be none of it in the wood even if what you used was acidic. Wood is a complex combination of organic compounds, some of which will oxidize to darker compounds over time.

The wood that you are cutting looks a lot like Lauan. It is one of many species used to substitute for Mahogany, although it is no where near the quality of genuine (Cuban) Mahogany - which was loved too much for it to be available to any degree now. The Cherry would be excellent choice for your model. The surface of the piece that you are cutting is not smooth. The dark lines are openings into the wood. What I was trying to say is that if you were shrunk in size to the scale of the model, you could probably fit your forearm into one of the openings. There is no species of wood that look like Oak or Fir scaled down 50-100 times. But some species make the trip better than others. I did not realize that you had significantly progressed with your build. " Never mind " as regards the wood substitution. If you get a similar kit in the future, you might consider replacing the provided wood if it is similar to your present kit.. Your problems would have been a lot less if the kit manufacturer had used a different, but probably more expensive species of wood. Obviously, there are many models that are made using the same or similar wood to what you have.

From your photos - the wood that you have is open pore and would probably be brittle from when it is seasoned. Scaled down the opening would probably swallow a forearm. It is not a type of wood that is appropriate for scale modeling. Tom is right on. You have to cut it out anyway, use a closed grain , tight grained species. Poplar is good, and you are in Maple country, I would think that there should be shops for wood craftsmen in your area.

You could try gluing a backing piece of wood using rubber cement. Coat both surfaces. It rubs off using just your thumb when done. There are "tables" for jewelers saws that are easy to make yourself. A 2-3" wide piece of 1/2" plywood that sticks out from a table like a gangplank. the distant end has a "V" cut out with a hole at the apex or a keyhole like cutout. A hole at the table end to add the C-clamp that holds it on the table. You can use the clamps to hold the work on the table. Check the jewelers saw display at MicroMark to see what I mean.