wefalck

Being so cheap, you can buy more and file the slots wider for bigger parts ...

I may have posted these pictures before. Below a selection of the various work-holding tools I have collected or made over the years: 1 - Archimedes drill for watchmakers. 2 - Slender modern pin-vice with hollow fluted brass body. 3 - Slender antique pin-vice with hollow fluted brass body. 4 - Shop-made pin-vice with walnut body and head made from an insert drill-chuck; these drill-chucks are unfit for their intended purpose as they usually do not run true. 5 - Eclipse toolmaker's pin-vice with knurled steel body; these come in different sizes. 6 - French-style pin-vice; these are closed with the sliding ring and have usually brass inserts in the two jaws that can be adapted to special needs; 7 - Dito, here the jaws are replaced in hard-wood for delicate parts. 8 - Antique laboratory pin-vice with fluted wooden handle. 9 - Modern pin-vice with fluted wooden handle; these come in different sizes and capacities. 10 - Antique toolmaker's pin-vice for very delicate work in confined spaces. 1 - Toolmaker's hand-held vice that is closed with a sliding ring. 2 - Hand-vice with parallel serrated jaws moved by a screw. 3 - Antique american style hand-vice; the jaws are closed by screwing in the conical body; the handle and body have been replaced. 4 - Hand-held collet-holder; this uses horological lathe collets; the advantage is that work can be transferred between the holder and the lathe when it has the nominal collet diameter. 5 - Castrovejo surgical non-locking needle-holder; they come in various sizes, this one is for eye-surgery. 6 - Antique surgical locking needle-holder; these come in a wide variety of sizes and shapes. I tend to go around flea-markets and ebay to look for antique pieces or 'seconds' from the production of professional medical tools and the likes (regular prices are just not affordable), because the quality is usually so much better than what hobby shops try to flog to us hobbyists. The problem with many pin-vices is that their jaws are serrated - not good for use on wood. Finding one with smooth jaws is not so easy. We also had a thread here some time ago on 'third hands', where people showed their home-grown ones. OK, this is something for those with the right machinery, but the ones you can buy for a few € / £ / US$ today tend to be too flimsy and imprecise. Below is the one I made myself on the basis of an inherited cast-iron lab stand. It can also double as a little vice with a function similar to those fly-tying vices. I made clamps from different materials, such as steel, brass and Novotex and the ubiquituous electrical 'crocodile' clamps can also be used. In addition, I bought some ceramic jaws as used in soldering tweezers, but did not get around to make the clamps for them yet. I also made two types of hooks to hold blocks and ropes respectly. Another useful attachment are little collect chucks that clamp from near zero up to about 3.2 mm - 1/4". These chucks with collets can be found on ebay at around 2€ or so. They are useless for their intended purpose, but good for holding wires and other round objects - even thin flat objects, as they are slotted cross-wise.

David, you made me doubt for a moment and I went to the workshop, put a marker-pen dot on one side of mine and started counting: there are definitely five sides. Broaches always have an unequal number of cutting edges to avoid chatter. This applies to machine broaches even more.

Good move, but pay attention, there are actually two kinds, the five-sided cutting broaches and the round smoothing broaches. They also come in different size categories, the smalles for watch work and the largest (up to about 6 mm) for clock work. Watchmakers supply houses have them, but these days they can also found on ebay etc.

You may also want to make yourself a clamp with a depression at the front for holding the block, while working on it. Think of a wooden clothes peg cut flat at the front so that closing part is really right at the front. The pegs are cheap, so can make yourself several to accomodate different sizes of blocks and in different orientation. You may need to increase the holding force by winding a rubber band around the front.

Hier is an example of a rivetting wheel as used by jewellers and dental technicians, randomly taken from the internet (Busch is a well-known brand that is internationally available): Cutting the grooves into pulley sheaves is easy, you just need to grind youself a pointed lathe tool with a rounded nose.

I have three of them in different sizes, but mainly use them on my milling machines. Fixing them to the base of the PROXXON-drill could be somewhat inconvenient, but the original vice could not be screwed down either. Not sure about the current arrangements. The 1" vices have four holes on the sides tapped M4 and two at the bottom. I cut two pieces of small angle iron or aluminium the length of the vice and drilled holes to match the four tapped holes. The angles were screwed to the sides and had a number of holes in the horizontal part with which it can be screwed to machine tables. The larger vice have horizontol through holes (I think 6 mm) for a round rod that goes through the lug with which the moveable jaw is screwed down. I made a 6 mm rod and cross-drilled it with 3 mm to take some long M3 screws with which to tie down the vice onto machine tables. The vices also have to round notches at the end for simple hold-down clamps. If you think of getting one of the 1" vices, make sure you get one with the shallow recess on top of the jaw - this comes very handy for small pieces. The others don't seem to come with this feature. BTW the vices may also run under the name of EDM (Electrical Discharge Machining) vices, where they are used to hold the electrodes. I didn't check, whether RDG Tools do have these vices, but thought that I bought one of mine from them. But I may be wrong, as this must have been some 15 years ago.

I bought my vice in the early 1980s and from the beginning was never really happy with it, because of the rather poor guide for the moving jaw. At that time I didn't know of better alternatives. However, I don't know, whether the vice has been improved since. Personally, I now would get myself a (or several of different size) so-called toolmaker insert vice. These close very precisely and are ground on all faces, so can be mounted horizontally, vertically and sideways, which offers multiple ways of work-holding. The 1-inch size costs around 40€ on the Continent. They are typically made in India or China and most tool suppliers have them, e.g. https://www.rdgtools.co.uk/ (I hasten to add that I have no other connection to this company than as satisfied customer - in those old pre-Brexit days). Below an example picture randomly picked from the Internet:

David, why do you think, a two piece-strake will be easier ? I would have thought that fitting a continuous piece would be simpler in the sense, that one does not need to deal with lifting up or off-set butts.

Have you tried rivetting ? Jewellers have so-called rivetting wheels, this are kind of hardened steel wheels with a wavy rim that fit into your hand-held drill. You make the hole slightly conical from the outside with a conical reamer and let the stanchion protrude a bit. With the wheel you hammer flat the protrusion without stressing too much the rail. You would probably need a sort of jig to hold the rail in.

Looking excellent - as expected ! Did you make some sort of jig for soldering the rails on the staircase ?

I didn't check against my photographs, but were the planks really butted ? I would have throught that in the USA at that time it would have been easy to obtain full-length planks.

In about 1977 I bought what by modern standards would be a primitve hand-held drill. At that time I hadn't heard of Dremel and, I think, PROXXON was not on the market yet. This drill consist of a motor in an aluminium tube, brass tube screwed to the motor shaft with a set-screw that acts as a seat for the collets. A set of good steel collets for bit up to 1/8" (or 3.2 mm) belongs to it. I am still using it almost daily. In around 1983 I bought the PROXXON bench drill, when it first came onto the market and with it all the extras then available, namely a kit to convert it into a light wood-lathe or disk-sander. I have abused it for all these purposes and light routing too. It was worth every 'Pfenning' I spent on it. I gather the ball-bearings could do with replacing by now, but originally, it was capable to do more than what was advertised, namely drilling 0.5 mm holes, I frequently drilled holes down to 0.3 mm diameter with it. Or course, it could not compete with the small Swiss precision benchdrills I knew from my university's workshops. I added to the abuse by buying a larger 3/8" drill-chuck for non-modelling work, but otherwise preferred the collets, which would take up to 1/8" shafts. The PROXXON drill is belt driven (I still use the first belt), but I rarely used anything else but the highest reduction (the motor is a standard 90 W sewing machine-type motor with presumably 3500 rpm. In order to reduce speed further, I am using a plug-dimmer. This in turn is plugged into a socket that is wire to a foot switch, allowing hands-free operation.

I have done it the same way as Roger, gravity keeps everything together. In fact the four stiles are somewhat shorter than the glass panes so that the glass fits into notches in the lid. The lid can be either solid (makes the glass case dark) or a frame with glass in it. This frame can be constructed in (at least) two ways: - the window-carpenter's way, that is like a picture frame into which you drop the glass and then secure with four narrow battens nailed to the inside of the frame - I used metal corner pieces to keep the frame together and I cut a groove into the four parts of the frame. The fairly big (80 cm long, 60 cm high, 20 cm deep) glass case has survived several house moves, I just taped down the lid for extra security.

The rabbet is there to keep the garboard plank close to the keel, even if the ship is flexing and twisting in a sea. So most larger seagoing vessels are constructed with rabbets in the keel and the stem. When the garboard sits more less vertical on the keel, theoretically, you have two options for the rabbet, you can cut a square groove (or square notch, if there is a keelson sitting directly on the keel) or you can cut a triangular groove, as usual, but then have to sharpen the edge of the plank to fit. The square groove/notch arrangement would be difficult to get water-tight, as the slightest variation of thickness of the plank in the groove can cause it work loose and the caulking to fall out. If you have a triangular groove, you will be wedging the garboard plank into that groove and it cannot move in any direction. However, whether it is worth to replicate this on a model is another question. One cannot see this, once the planking is finished and you can arrange the rabbet in the way that is easiest to make - that is when you only care about appearance and don't want to reproduce actual building techniques.

Depends on the Gütermann thread you ordered. Synthetics mostly cannot be dyed.

I don't want to be a heretic and it may not be the right place to discuss this, but why are people so crazy about tung-oil ? I can understand that it is used for say furniture or certain musical instruments, where apparently it is mixed with line-seed oil to reduce its brittleness. Somehow, applying an oily substance to a delicate item, such as a model, even an oxidating, i.e. drying, oil, does make me somewhat uncomfortable. Shellac or nitrocellulose-based varnishes seem to be 'cleaner' options. There are no many light-fast dyes around, so dying wood should not be such a problem. In think in many cases dyes can be mixed to change the hue and diluted, if needed. This seems to be give more reproducible results.

I didn't do many of such builds, but the frames getting stuck in the grooves was one of my worries. I indeed edited the lines so that I only had grooves in the garbord area, which fixes the frames at three points, namely in these grooves and locating holes as per Allen's example. If the prototype construction allows it, one could also have grooved keelson. Or, again prototype construction permitting, one could have the grooves in the keel-piece.

Let's see what he responds, but if there was a tumble-home (which makes it actually rather elegant), then one could not remove the boat-shell from the plug - unless the last plank is fitted without the plug. Edit: oops wrote the above, while he was responding ...

The people of the time definitely were much less dogmatic, which today in historic research can cause a lot of confusion, as one and the same ship may be listed under different categories in different ships lists for instance (another reason, of course, is that it may have been re-rigged). I have he feeling that this dogmatism comes from yacht-clubs that in turn were often influenced by navy traditions. A dogmatism that persists in yachtsmen until today. The professionals in the merchant navies didn't seem to care too much about such things.

Thanks, David, I thought so. Yes, the acrylic one certainly needs to be waxed or sprayed with Teflon-spray. The 'real' gesso would sand off easily and may not need waxing, but I never worked with it.

Phil, I am aware of Marquardt etymologie of the term 'schooner' as he had published it (in German) also in an article in our association's journal LOGBUCH. As to the terminology, the term 'schooner sail' is probably borrowed from German, where it describes a sail exactly the way you did. I find attempts to trace lineages of sail-plans and insisting on specific names for certain sail-plans sometimes futile and the people of the time often did not make the distinctions we tend to make today or were so particular about them. I think one observation one can make is that over the years ships gradually began to loose their square yards (probably as the result of socio-economic pressured due to rising seamen's wages, which let to a reduction in crews). In this way brigs lost the square sails on the main mast to become hermaphrodite brigs (in German Schonerbrigg). At the same time at least some acquired gaffs on the fore-mast on which a fore-and-aft sail could be set in suitable conditions. Due to the hardware in the way, such as boats or deck-houses they initially did not have booms. These were the Schonersegel (in German) to indicate that the rig now was a schooner, rather than a brig. Eventually, of course the foremast lost its topgallant mast and the topmast carried just one or two square sails, to turn it into a top-sail schooner. It appears, that in Europe 'schooner sails' only acquired a boom, when schooners became purely fore-and-aft rigged in the last days of sail, but it varied from country to country. Roach and gore do not appear to me unusual terms. I understand that roach is the extra cut of sail cloth that makes the belly of a sail, noticeable when flattened out as convex foot of the sail. Gore, I understand is the arched part of a square sail that allows it to clear stays. By the description of Marquardt's book it seems that I should get hold of a copy one day. Not sure I ever looked at it in nature. 'Banyan' here on the forum was a personal friend of his, I never met him unfortunately in person, as he had left Germany for good before I seriously got into this 'scene', but when I prepared the obituary for him for the LOGBUCH, I got myself somewhat acquainted with his background and personal history. I don't that he had been very familiar with Mediterranean craft in the widest sense and studied the interrelations between the Arabs, the European Mediterranean and the Northern European maritime cultures and how they influenced each other. I tried to pull together his bibliography, but there seems to be no publication that addresses this question. Also, I don't think he spoke any of the Latin languages, so literature in those languages he did not evaluate for his books I believe.

The idea with the gesso is a good one that I have to remember (in the not too distant future I want to attempt to make a clinker-built boat in 1/160 scale, just over 20 mm long). One sees the lines well and I suppose the frames/planks will not stick too well on it either. What kind of gesso did you use, 'real' one or the modern acrylic based one ?

Unfortunately, no one has ever written a comparable book that covers the second and third quarter of the 19th century with modern hindsight. There are quite a few english, french, dutch and german textbooks from that period around. Their shortcoming from a modellers perspective is, that they do not give a lot of details on the seaman's handiwork that goes into rigging a ship. They are mostly written from the quarter-deck perspective, not from the forecastle's.

Still, there are few people, who have done both - but then they are/were either professionals or retired. I can confirm, that writing/producing a reasonably good book is a major effort. I have done a few over the past 30 years or so (not on ship-related matters though).