Der Alte Rentner

I may indeed go that route. I've seen that post here at MSW and will look it up. Thanks for the reminder.

I'm nowhere near my shipyard and won't be for a few weeks. Please ask again at the end of the month. For what it's worth, I eyeballed everything at the time. I'd have to put a ruler to the base to provide dimensions. Thanks

Very little in life is "straight forward". Seeing what I am here, I may well skip this detail. Could you please take a picture from a distance so I can see how things look from a typical viewer's perspective, instead of the electron microscope closeup? I admire your tenacity!

I was thinking the same thing this morning. Had I thought of it before I packed my bags, I would have done that using my drill press and a jig in the shipyard. Before I assemble the second carriage, I'll figure out an efficient path forward with the tools I have available here (Gulf Coast of Florida). In the meantime, I'll busy myself with shaping the scrollwork. Thanks you

I'm packing up my stuff for my hiatus. I've fabricated the quoins, cut 20 of the kit's belaying pins, built a jig to position the quoins on the carriages and invested in a supply of diamond coated jewelers files. While gone, I will construct the carronade carriages and fine tune the scrollwork. I also invested in a small tackle box to contain everything I might need while gone, cleaned up the shop, set the alarms and turned off the lights. The proxon mill comes in handy again to perfectly position the holes for the quoins. The straight chisel exacto knife does a fantastic job of cleaving those blocks into wedges. It helps that I used boxwood. The fixture or jig to affix the quoins to the carriage is pictured to the right of the carriage, and the quoin to its left. Fixture in place, quoin positioned. Finito. The shafts that came with the carronades from Czechoslovakia are too short. By the time I get home from the shipyard, a small supply of 1/16" brass rod will have arrived, which I'll pack up to take along with the rest, and cut to fit on vacation. I'll have to enlarge the holes with a 1/16" drill. And yes, Jon, I know these are not the correct carronades (at least according to the photos in the Hunt practicum). I'll bring the cast pieces along as well, but doubt seriously I'll try to salvage them.

Scrollwork cut out. Some fine tuning done, but more to go.

Revisiting the Shield artwork project, I shrunk the size of the shield and increased slightly the size of the hairline black border to give me some wiggle room with the scissors when cutting them out of the printed page. The black perimeter should be nothing more than a cutting guide. I won't know how well this turned out until I've cut the shields out and positioned them onto the wooden ovals. If you copy the .jpg image below, it is to the correct scale. Just paste it into image processing software like Photoshop or Paint to print it. I have no idea if the cdr or svg files will be of use to anyone, but they are included below. Bow Scrollwork - Shield plus 105.cdr Bow Scrollwork - Shield plus 105.svg

Ooops, I thought I was done until I paid closer attention to the white perimeter. Back to the drawing board.. Fortunately, all I'll have to do is scale down the components of the shield and change the color of the background oval, which is completely covered right now, from black to white. Shouldn't take more than a half hour. Not today however. Thanks Jon. P.S. Sorry, I couldn't help myself. 😁 I checked your build log to see how you did it. I think you mounted at least one shield on the wrong side. If you caught the asymmetry, then both sides are reversed. But, as has often been mentioned here at MSW, from a foot away, no one will ever notice. Still, an amazing job on the scrollwork!

This morning was spent advancing my skills with Corel Draw. Having closely studied the photos that Jon provided a couple of posts back, and checking other sources, I came to the conclusion that the shield on the bow decor is not symmetrical. But first, the graphics that led to the results: Closeup of the shield as provided by Jon and my cdr version superimposed onto that. Isolating just the shield. Then adding the mirrored image for the opposite side of the trailboard. I removed files posted here because of a subsequent conversation with Jon. See later post for details..Good luck..

That was always an option, but requires spending some time with Photoshop or Corel Draw. I had hoped that someone had already gone through this exercise. But if not, that'll be my next home office art project. Now that I think of it, it would be fairly easy to do in Corel, especially since I already have the scanned ellipses. I'll just create my own Stars and Stripes to fit. It helps to be a jack of all trades.

Thanks to all you historians for your contributions to the discussion. Hopefully you'll forgive me for going my own - less than perfect - way.. Which brings me to today's contribution.. I built a little jig for assembling the carronade carriages, and since the idea behind working on these at this stage of my bill is to keep myself busy while on vacation, I only assembled one unit as a proof of concept. To give myself plenty of work time before the glue set, I used Titebond II and a very fine brush to carefully and strategically apply glue to the block in the center before inserting the base Into the fixture, and then dropping the carriage sides down into those little grooves.

Does anyone (Jon?) have a jpg file of the US flag decoration for the Oval decoration on the trailboard that you would be willing to share? The one bmp file provided with the Hunt practicum (Conny Chapter 8 Flag.bmp) is too small, not to mention too pixilated.

In my previous comment to you, Mustafa, there was a typo. I was trying to show you how an ogee bit could have made shaping the curve on the carriage sides easier for you by using a router table, instead of the numerous passes you must have endured on the Proxxon mill.

Assuming you were addressing me with the question, Unegawahya, I'm going for what Bob Hunt showed in the photo (not his build). Though I haven't decided on going with this color scheme, that of the Constructo kit (stained wood and brass), or a hybrid - red carriage with brass carronade? black carriage with brass carronade? I kind of like this color combo, but I hate to blacken the brass carronades.

I stand corrected. There will be some pictures today. I did in fact return to the shipyard, where I started putting together the parts I needed for the Carronades. I chose a slightly different and perhaps more practical route than Mr Hunt. You will have to zoom in quite closely to see The edge on the left side of the board. (Mustafa, as long as I was setting up the router table, I was hoping I had an Ogee bit so I could demonstrate how you could have saved time on your carronade sides. Alas, I had nothing that small, but I think you can see the concept.) Carefully set up the table saw to knock off the opposite edge of the board. After making sure I had the distance set correctly, I flipped the board over for proper saw safety technique. Next step, cut one half inch lengths. Here's the concept..

No pix today. That tweaking is slow going, with the double-sided tape turning out to be quite the bear to remove. Also, starting to formulate a spardeck carronade construction plan for my short stint as snowbird in Feb.

Thank you Unegawahya. ( I see that Gregg got here before me.. 😁)

No, you're not wrong. Sone of the pieces are a smidge oversized - as they stand right now, but I plan to whittle these to fit. I couldn't cut to the inside of the lines because, as you may have noticed, I took the filled-in images as my guide. It was hard enough to get close to the edge. I can't imagine actually trying to eliminate the line with the scroll saw. So I will be tackling the overages here and there with files and sandpaper. If worse comes to absolute worst, I'll make a slightly wider trailboard. Depending on my luck with shaping those trim lines, I may skip them all together, rendering the point moot.

It will most likely be a year or more before I get to this point , but going by the principal of, better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, I will gratefully accept your offer! ( I'm pretty sure that Gregg will also be chiming in shortly..) BTW, Beautiful workmanship. thanks.

I found a way to make this process quicker and more precise. In a dream last night I fixed the Jewelers saw blade to my scroll saw. This morning it took a look at my scroll saw and saw that it not only would accept my Jewelers saw blades, but that the machine has a speed control. By dialing the speed down to the slowest possible, and tightening the blade vertically, I was able to get very accurate cuts, unlike what I was managing with the handheld Jewelers saw. I drilled a couple of pilot holes in the assembly and fed the blade through the hole and bolted it tight to the scroll saw. To cut the work in half, I taped two pieces of the boxwood together, taped the pair to a back plate of Basswood, and taped the template on top of the top piece of boxwood. Once again I applied a thin layer of white glue so that the template didn't disintegrate as I was cutting around it. I'm now cutting two shapes in one pass. At the end it's just a matter of carefully separating the three pieces of wood. Getting the tape residue off of the parts turned out to be fairly simple. The scroll work piece stuck to my finger easily as I passed it over 320 sandpaper. A little fine-tuning with files and sandpaper, Presto! two more pieces finished.. No I'm not giving everyone the middle finger. The tip of my index finger is missing, hence the use of the next one in line. Looking at the pictures of the remaining scroll work to fabricate, I think I may have to cut the longer piece in two or possibly even three. We shall see..

You have no idea..😁 But thank you.

As you can see, I don't need them for the bow. But as brutal as these two stars were to carve, I'm happy to take a break on the stern, and will be ordering from the site you provided the link for above. I will, however, be skipping that third little star in front of the billethead.

I don't want to say how many hours I spent in the shop today on this, but I'm hopeful that the worst part of this scroll work is over.

I might yet be in the market for some of those uniform ribbon Stars. Can you tell me where you purchased them? Having said that, my second pass delivered better results than expected. In case anybody is wondering, I had to disconnect the blade from the Jewelers saw, feed it through the hole, then carefully reattach it. Slow going, to be sure.. I won't mind making one more for the scroll work at the bow, but I would sure love to save the labor for those I still need to make for the transom. I managed to do without ring clamps by taping the 1/32" material to a larger backing plate. When done cutting, I simply separated the star from the backing plate. The only tools I needed to get the better shape after that, were these.

Not so fast? Stars will be the biggest challenge. Round 1. Fail. I have some ideas that hopefully will prove successful for round 2.