wefalck

These chop-saws seem to be copies of the PROXXON KG50, which they offered for many years and is currently priced at 110€ here in Europe. More recently they also offered a heavier version the KGS80, which kost 270€. On the actual topic of this thread: I would rather use a circular saw than a guillotine on materials thicker than a couple of millimeters, particular hardwoods. This ensures square ends.

There are many different ways in which the waterways and covering boards were composed/constructed, depending on the period and the size of the ship. Sometimes, waterways and covering board were one piece of timber and in other cases there were two (as in the above drawing) or even three pieces. I have seen drawings/paintings of warship decks, where the waterways/covering boards were painted. In the case of the above drawing, it would be likely, that the covering board is painted, but the waterways are not - would be also easier to realise in a model.

The confusion between 'right rudder' and 'right tiller' led to the collission and sinking of a historic ship and a container ship on the Elbe river a fews year ago - she was crewed by a partly untrained 'amateur' crew ...

There is another interesting arrangement that seems to have been quite common on somewhat larger ships, such as schooners or small brigs, in the earlier decades of the 19th century, where a steering-wheel was put onto the tiller and the endless rope wound around the drum. This made the helmsman to walk with the wheel while the tiller swung around. The above example is from the model of an 1839 brig from Altona/Hamburg, but it seems to have been a quite common arrangement on Dutch ships of that age. I think the arrangement with an endless rope is more conducive to be operated by a single helmsman on merchant vessels with very small crews.

Same for me, I need to work out how things work, before confidently being able to model them. Some people just take things at 'face value', but I am not very comfortable with such approach.

Perhaps you should have brought in the mother-in-law to clean out the dust ...🙃

Perhaps you can find a 'pissoir' instead - somehow the whole French scene reminds of 'Clochemerle' (novel by Gabriel Chevallier), that has been cast into a British TV series - the cast-iron pissoir was blewn up eventually.

I agree, seemingly to scale, it still seems out of proportion. Also, they are more likely to be found in larger towns or cities. These columns were invented by a Berlin printer named Ernst Litfaß and the first one was installed in that city in 1854. From there the concept spread all over the world. They often had dual uses, e.g. as transformer stations or covering access staircases to the sewer system. There is a famous scene in the film The Third Man, when Harry Lime slips into one in Vienna - the grand sewer-sytem was notoriously used by criminals to hide or gain access to houses. The Vienna police used to have a specially trained and equipped 'Kanalbrigade' to combat this (they appear also in the film).

It seems to have been a very common arrangement until the end of the 19th century on smaller vessels, before steering-wheels were also introduced into them (often only together with motorisation and cutting down the rigs). @Dr PR is right with his interpretation. It's a kind of dampening device and allows a single man to control the tiller on relatively large vessels. There is enough slack in the rope to take a turn or two around a pin (which only protrudes on the top) or knob at the end of the tiller to effectively stop it. Slackening the turn allows one to adjust the rudder. Casting it loose allows faster movements. Two blocks at the end of the tiller seems to have been more common than the sheaves. Many more or less contemporary models show the pin/knob, but the control rope is not always rigged. Sometimes, it seems, only simple ropes, without tackle were used, to simply steady the tiller.

This metal-work looks so convincing 👍🏻 Indeed, welded construction is not so easy to reproduce. Perhaps, I would have soldered this over a mock-up of the bow to give the flanges the right angles and distances. There are solders of different melting points, which requires a temperature-controlled soldering iron. The railway modellers who build locomotives from PE brass parts are masters of this art.

Zu Mondfeld or not is a question of what you are looking for, information to a specific period or a general introduction? In his later years he tried to stylise himself as the guru of shipmodelling, but a single person can hardly cover all the periods in sufficient depth. So, one has to take what is written in the books with a pinch of salt and corroborate the information against period books for instance.

There have been several threads quite recently discussing the various, closer-to-scale materials and methods for making sails. Silkspan and modelspan can mean different things in different parts of the world: it can be long-fibre paper originating in Japan (going down to 9 g/m2 weigh) and it can be a relative loose-woven light-weight fabric (as low as 14 g/m2). The original use of the latter probably was for serigraphy or silk-screen printing. There was a time, when both material were readily available from model shops, but have been replaced by various plastic films, I think. I first had the idea of using the fabric some 45+ years ago, when working in 1:60 scale. I saturated it with casein-paint (in those pre-acrylic days) and cut the sails from this. Later, I did the same with fast-drying varnish, cut individual panels from them and mounted them to give the sails. Douplings were also glued on using varnish. The assembly was then spray-painted with acrylics. Putting the sail together from individual panels just gives a hint of the seams due to the light shadow along the edge. The sails are not translucent though, In smaller scales (say 1:100) the fabric is too coarse and still too thick, so I used the same method, but with the paper. Although the varnish makes for a relatively strong bond, this method is more suitable for set sails, rather then brailed or furled ones. In all the cases the bolt-ropes were glued on after the sails had been painted. In my new project at 1:160 I will try @druxey's method with seams drawn-on using a bow-pen, as the sails are to be displayed hanging loose and being draped over stays etc. for drying. Sails made from individual panels would be too stiff for that purpose. I think the general consensus these days is that, unless you are building a working model, sewn fabric sails are just out of scale in most cases and modellers should abandon this age-old idea.

"... as using seal skin would land me in federal prison." ... and I suppose it would be difficult to rope-in female family members to 'tan' the skins be chewing them 😁 I didn't realise you were that H. Golden 👍🏻 I haven't updated the literature list for quite a while, basically since I left that institute, I think. They have a master-course on artic studies (pretty broad) on which I used to teach and as a sort of extra I also gave a lecture on arctic boats. The director of the institute also is the director of the Malaurie Institute of Artic Research in Monaco (https://miarctic.org) that takes care of Jean Malaurie's legacy.

Yes, after reading through it diagonally, it appears that Miller deals with making scale drawings of ships, which are indeed 2D-'models', but not models in our sense. So the call is open again, for early books on building(!) shipmodels.

Happy New Year to all !

Two hours and forty minutes to go for us

Wasn‘t it particularly used to obtain weather reports and when getting close to home to get orders to which port to go?

Yep, I knew these aftermarket offers. I made myself a ring-light for my mill many years ago on the basis of so-called 'angel's eyes' that are used in cars: https://www.maritima-et-mechanika.org/tools/attachments/attachments.html#Ring-light. The problem I have with these angel's eyes is that they cold-white, which does not go well with my prefered warm-white workshop lighting (it's a hobby-setting, not an industrial one, and should be comfortable and relaxing). A yellowish tinted acrylic glass cover instead of the clear one would have solved that problem ...

I am actually zapon-varnish for this, which is what is traditionally used to protect silverware (not cutlery, but other objects and tableware that does not need 'washing up' on a regular basis), but also decorative brass items. Objects can be either dipped into it or it can be brushed on. It forms a nearly invisible very fast-drying surface film. I am not sure, whether it would be (still) available in the USA, as it contains various organic solvents.

Very pleasing run of the planking and nicely executed!

Brass tends to have a sligthly 'waxy' surface, an oxidation film that forms very fast and can really only be removed mechanically. Therefore, brush-painting it with water-based paints, such as acrylics can be a pain. One basically pushes the paint around the surface and it doesn't want to form a continuous film. However, when applied by airbrush, this is not normally a problem. There are also special primers for brass or you may try a very dilute solution of shellac as primer.

In another thread we got a bit side-tracked and started talking about when books on shipmodelling came onto the market. The oldest I am currently aware of is this one: Chapman, C. (1869): All About Ships and the Way to Make Models of Them.- 2 Vols.: 68+68 p., 3 pl., London (Wilson). Vol. 1: https://books.googleusercontent.com/books/content?req=AKW5QafQYVIVxto10ATpCWcm3H87dEieZEqj9nbUmRVHXSIBrfcXvQx4GNaH5t1_3hHMYOMl3_XWvJWCfpEMzmdEwJLOSZjgpNKg_FbtZHlnd_hfxXRZGD8ybJ23859QgUQQBchREPQMkk39UUPsXVIYWMr-iM0wdmke3v0yXJe__ltCYBs7e8aOdRw4UpotZw5n5WHQzuNwY-S3aMxJRO8I0FrdjwL7_AreC8CTCjNIcTb3EkVIZNKf2KMm0yb-qa4-bgFwAQxwOqfQ82OkFpWRX8wutnEn0g Vol. 2: https://books.googleusercontent.com/books/content?req=AKW5Qafw6gLcfJm9KhfH4itZesC_Yl6tANR0m_E8ZFGspk9DGOUe68Ck2tCvV7OyYRh9T_YnfPxTkrX045kW_l1EO7pbqd3onk5cC6XMB38zN4bfW8mHPfcg8EkePtBEOB_4uLJZs0Poa3nO9_EPnsdDhRGuw9xY3PkgdA7WRsXrw9r-zIf2zah_0aHFMj8XxOcLIGUTfen6SRH6gpXlR1Z2t8iaC0t2Vw9a2A9UACZjTpG6njr0dKHPG-Y2uGgitCpP7IvRzooXDFbOUQ7nKvxKwTt-Zkm8GxFg7FVqtpl6qKGk_pKUHrY The scan of the 2nd volume contains the properly scanned plates! Who can beat me ?

These kayaks look very realistic 👍🏻 I don't remember, did you already describe how they were made? Since I worked for some years in one of the French arctic research instutes (long story how this came about), I got interested a bit in traditional skin-boats and began to collect literature on them: https://www.maritima-et-mechanika.org/maritime/maritimebibliographies/skin-boat-bibliography.pdf. I had a Greenland kayak lying in the corridor in front of my office.

Your tin-plated parts look very good and simulate stainless steel very well. Just the right shine for a model. Personally, I would glaze the windows e.g. with some acrylic glass or microscopy cover glasses.

Well, hand-cranking is what moves any manual milling machine or lathe. For some milling machines you can buy electric drives for the x-axis (or make one yourself), but this is for long, end-to-end surface cuts only. The other option is CNC, which requires a lot of programming and typically is not worth it for one-of parts (you end up making several trial parts before all parameters are set righ). I never worked with a MF70, only played around on it in shops, but have the feeling that the hand-wheels are too small for the pitch of the lead-screws. Personally, I would replace them with slightly larger ball-handle cranks, which give you a better feel when doing precision work. In that way you also get rid of the sloppy, turning handles that are detrimental to a good feel of what is going on at the milling cutter.