JacquesCousteau

I'm working on making paper sails for my Lancha Chilota build, and was wondering if anyone had any advice on how to iron them. The sails are made of coffee filter paper, colored and stiffened with a watered-down mix of acrylic paint and white glue, and the panels are glued on with Aleene's Fabric Fusion glue. While it isn't horribly wrinkled, it would be nice to get it a little flatter, but I'm not sure what the best way to iron it would be--low or high heat? Underneath a cloth to avoid direct contact with the iron? Damp or dry? If anyone has any experience with ironing paper sails, I'd love to hear it. Thanks in advance!

Welcome to the forum! I haven't built this model, but if you search for build logs of the Syren 1:24‐scale Medway Longboat, I think you'll find a lot of helpful information. Syren's kit is a larger-scale and more detailed model of a very similar vessel, and it was designed by the same person, Chuck Passaro. He's active on this forum, and has a very detailed Medway Longboat build log that might be helpful. Syren also has its instructions free for download, and it probably would tell you what you need. The only thing to keep in mind is that, with your model in a smaller scale, it will be more difficult to strop the blocks and make other parts of the rigging. There are also plenty of build logs for this exact kit, some of which may show in detail what you're after. Best of luck! PS: Syren's guide for stropping blocks (available for download on its website) is also extremely helpful--it doesn't quite replicate how actual blocks were stropped, but it shows a way that's pretty easy and looks good.

Nice start! Looking forward to following along with your build, I'm planning on building this kit myself one day.

It looks great as it is. If you're not in the mood to rig it but think you might change your mind in the future, I think you could leave it as-is and add the masts later. Another interesting option might be to add stub masts or just the lower masts, which wouldn't add too much to the space requirements but might give it more of a "finished" look.

Nice work, that looks great!

Thanks, Keith! The box won't be used for this model (photos show that non-firewood cargo was more often carried in sacks), but one benefit of trying to make most of my models in 1:32 scale is that a lot of accoutrements are interchangeable, so it will probably be used for some other build. Remaking the box was straightforward. It's just a little smaller in each dimension, but it looks like a much better fit. I also started work on the sails, which I'll be making by joining together panels cut from a big coffee filter. I first tried stretching plastic wrap over a flat surface (a side table), but the wrap bunched up a lot and was impossible to keep flat, which I realized would lead to a wrinkled, unevenly-colored sail. So, I instead stretched some plastic wrap over the back of my NRG Half-Hull frame. The ability to stretch the plastic over an empty space made it much easier to get a flat surface. Unfortunately the sudden change meant I had to haphazardly cut the still-wet coffee filter to size, leaving a jagged edge. While I advance on the sail, I also made another deck accoutrement. Photos like the one in my last post often show a glass bottle wrapped in wicker. According to Clinton R. Edwards's article "Commercial Sail and Small Fishing Craft of Western South America" (The Mariner's Mirror Vol. 53, No. 4, Nov. 1967: 357-369)*, it was common in Colombia and Peru for fishermen to carry their drinking water in glass or ceramic bottles protected from breakage by a wicker or net wrap, and based on photos it seems Chilote sailors did the same. I began by carving a bottle from the end of a 1/4‐inch square basswood strip. After rounding it and somewhat tapering with a mini block plane, I used a sanding drum on a rotary tool to get more of a bottle shape, holding the tool steady and spinning the strip in my hand. I nearly took off too much material right at the start, but it worked out in the end. I then drilled out the top and used a razor saw to cut the bottle from the strip. It didn't look too oversize, considering that it's a pretty big bottle (about 8 inches diameter), but I was wary of scale issues after having had to redo the box, so I trimmed the bottom and neck a bit. I then placed a toothpick in the opening to better handle the bottle and to serve as a cork once cut off later, and painted the bottle a dark green, which seemed like a reasonable glass color. I then began to weave around the bottle using .2mm nylon thread, as I did for one of the baskets on the Canoa build. Around the sides, I went with a much looser weave than I had used on the basket, to better show that this was a bottle wrapped in a protective coating. The neck was a bit of a challenge, as pulling the thread tight tended to make it slide down off the bottle neck. I finished it off by wrapping the excess a few times around the neck and tying off a simple handle, cutting off the excess toothpick to create a cork stopper, and giving the whole thing a coat of matte varnish to hold everything in place. Overall I'm happy with how it turned out, although maybe it would have looked better with a thinner material and more stakes (although adding more stakes would have produced a bulkier bottom). *I should note that the Edwards article is invaluable for understanding "traditional" workboats on the Pacific coast of South America, although it would be significantly more useful for modeling if it had included any hull lines or at least more photos. A few particularly interesting tidbits: - Pre-hispanic vessel types (although often modified with European influence) seem to have predominated through the colonial period, with generally limited impact from European-style designs until the early 1800s or so. This comports well with Maino Prado's observations about Chile discussed in an earlier post. - Sloops and schooners remained in frequent use for coastal trade in Colombia and Ecuador by the mid-20th century, focusing on small towns and trade routes that were ignored by more expensive motor vessels. - There were a number of distinct vessel types, including double-ended rowing vessels clearly influenced by whaleboats, and the Peruvian "bote de pescador"‐‐a beamy, partially-decked, single-masted lugger. As happened in San Francisco, immigration by Italian fishermen led to the introduction of Mediterranean-style lateeners, called "faluchos" in Peru (but quite different from the Chilean "falucho maulino" mentioned in an early post in this topic). - In arid parts of the Peruvian coast, the preferred boatbuilding lumber by the mid-20th century was pine imported from the Pacific Northwest of the United States, which local boatbuilders considered superior to Chilean lumber.

Congratulations, nice job!

A slight setback. In the photo below, you can see what looks like a small box of firewood on the deck of the lancha. I thought this could be a fun detail to add, to have some small split pieces of firewood alongside the longer pieces I already made. Source: https://www.bibliotecanacionaldigital.gob.cl/bnd/629/w3-article-644834.html The box was pretty straightforward to make, and the firewood was made by the same process as earlier. Unfortunately, when I put it on the hull, I found that the box looked disproportionately large. I had tried to judge the size from the photo, but I guess I had said "just a hair larger will be fine" a few times too many. It's still not a particularly large box, but a big bigger than I would like. The firewood, at least, can still be used, and it won't be too hard to make a smaller box. It's a good reminder to stick to scale dimensions rather than to change things up on the fly. I've also been working on the sails. I've got basic paper templates made, and hope to start on the actual sail soon. I plan on making the sails from strips of coffee filter paper glued together, and as I've had trouble in the past getting things to stick with watered-down white glue (which also has a tendency to swell and distort the material), I decided to test another glue. I used Aleene's Fabric Fusion glue to good effect for some touch-ups on the Canoa sail, so I gave it a try for the seams on some scrap. Unfortunately, I found that any excess left a shiny residue. I then tried a matte varnish to cover it, but the varnish I have left its own residue. Finally, I tried some leftover transparent matte acrylic spray that I've been using in my carpentry workshop. It seems to have worked pretty well. The one issue is that my scrap material was a bit wrinkled to begin with, and didn't exactly improve with all these tests, so I'll be testing to see if I can flatten it out with an iron (carefully and with some material covering the paper to avoid burning) or if it will work if I spray it at an earlier stage.

Congratulations, it looks great!

Excellent work on the seats, they look great!

Very precise work, the deckhouse looks incredible!

Very interesting! So, while coppering was certainly expensive, it significantly cut down on the need for expensive full refits every few years of ships sent into warmer waters. So some portion of the funding for coppering could have just come out of the maintenance budget (in theory, although in practice I have no idea if the Royal Navy handled its finances in that way).

Nice job! Adding all those tiny supports looks incredibly tedious but it really elevates the build.

Excellent work and great catch on the errant bulkhead! The model’s really coming along well. Very interesting statistic about how quickly the royal navy coppered its ships. That's a lot of copper, and as I was under the impression (possibly incorrectly) that coppering was expensive, I wonder how they financed it.

Nice work! Will the model be fully decked, or will there be a way to see into the cabins?